Is it reasonable for electric generators to come before steam engines?
Let us develop an industrial electric motor from first principles.
Alessandro Volta developed a battery whose ingredients were copper, zinc, seawater, and imagination. These ingredients have been available since prehistory; his voltaic pile was made in 1800. Hans Christian Orsted developed the principles of electromagnetism in 1820 when he noticed that a compass was deflected by the current drawn from a battery. A year later, Michael Faraday, who knew Orsted, was able to make a wire rotate around a magnet. It took him until 1831 to explain what magnetic induction. With this explanation in hand, the amazingly named Hippolyte Pixii built an AC electrical generator. By 1844, the first industrial application of an AC motor was made in a Birmingham factory.
Is there any reason that this process could not have been carried out starting in 1600, had Volta made his discovery then. Perhaps it would not have gone so fast, but is it realistic that the first non-waterpowered factories of the late 1700s would be powered by electric motors. Or, put another way, could electric generators have been available for factory work before steam engines?
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1 answer
Of course!
Accumulators
Accumulators are easier to produce. Volta's battery design could be complemented by a manual worker hot-swapping batteries to the electric engine, just in the same way in which a manual worker need to shovel coal inside the furnace for a steam engine to run.
Alternators
These are harder. Mostly because the transfer of mechanical energy to electric energy is a "recent" discovery. However, note that such discovery does not depend on the invention of a steam engine.
The answer is water turbines.
Mills, be it watermills or windmills or horsemills, have existed for a very long time. Some claim that Egyptians and Babylonians have been using them too.
Gears too have existed for quite some time, with obvious implications that one could couple a watermill with a gearbox to increase the rotational speed derived from simply splashing water on the turbine.
Finally, plug that to an alternator, and enjoy some good wattage. Fun fact: magnet-based alternators work both as electricity generating devices, as well as electric engines. If large amounts of power are not a must, any SE user could build that in their kitchen sink.
--- EDIT for science-fiction aficionados, and not for long-lasting factory work.
Could some form of electric engine be invented with the knowledge from the XVII and XVIII centuries?
Galvani and the Frankenstein's propulsion
Galvani's experiments on dead frogs showed that it is possible to activate muscles using electrostatic potentials. Previous studies on anatomy had made it clear that limbs move thanks to the action of pairs of antagonist muscles.
The Frankenstein's propulsion works by using parts of large dead animals. For instance, the shark-propulsion uses dead sharks attached to the back, or the bottom, of a boat. Electrodes are inserted in the dead body, with the terminals in the desired muscle groups, and sealed with gum and wax. A simple hand operated mechanism, such as a wheel with a rotating lever, rhythmically discharges a Volta's pile via the electrodes, causing the antagonist muscles to contract asynchronously, hence generating movement. For instance, this could be used to make the dead shark flap its tail.
The Frankenstein's engine lasts as long as the battery lasts and as long as the muscle groups don't start rotting. Injecting the veins of the animals with adequate preserving fluids may lengthen the life of your Frankenstein's engine.
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