>>715090529
Electricity is simply free electrons moving through a conductive material (most metal is very conductive). One of the important things about electricity is a current passing through a wire creates a magnetic field.
It's normally very weak, but the general idea for an electric motor is coiling a shit ton of wires carrying current around a magnetic rod to force that rod to spin with the magnetic field generated by the wires.
A generator is the exact same actually, because the fundamentals work in reverse. Move a magnetic field across a wire and you can force a bit of a current through it. Spin a magnetic rod inside a big coil of wires and you can generate power in actual quantities.
That's why an alternator (electric motor) is used to start a car and get it running, but when the combustion engine in the car is running the alternator is used in reverse to refill the battery. A gas generator does the same where you pull start a gas engine that turns an electric motor to generate the power.