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You probably don’t think about it much unless you’ve had a challenge with your car starting, but this little motor is vital to getting you where you need to go. It is small electric motor with a framework that ends in a gear. Your engine's flywheel has a ring gear that the starter gear, called the drive gear, engages. When the starter motor runs, it spins the drive gear, which turns the ring gear and the flywheel. That cranks the engine and starts the combustion cycle. 

In the early days of automobile history, cars were cranked by hand to get them started. This was both a problematic and sometimes perilous process. The crank had a mechanism that prohibited them from continuing to turn once the engine started. The concern—sometimes the crank engines would kick and rotate the reverse direction. A runaway crank could fracture a thumb or brake a wrist. The car manufacturer suggested car owners hold the crank palm up with a cupped hand so that an unruly crank could just slide from the driver's hand. This felt so unnatural to most drivers so most opted to use the overhand, closed fist grip.

Other mechanical starting techniques in the early years included pull-cords. Kickback in these systems could pull the driver in toward the engine or whip a loose cord around wildly. There were even engines that started with a small gunpowder explosion.
 

Cadillac engineers develop the first electric starter motor in 1912. Henry Leland, President at Cadillac lost a friend to a fatal car-start mishap. The development made it safer for drivers but it didn’t catch on with car manufacturers right away.

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