Electric cars have been around a lot longer than today’s Tesla Motors or even the General Motors EV1 of 20 years ago. In fact, electric cars appeared long before the internal-combustion sort, and dreamers have never stopped trying to make them work both on the road and as a business proposition. A lack of historical perspective sometimes leads to misunderstandings of how things came to be as they are now, so let’s take the long view of the road that got us here.
Start in the 1830s, with Scotland’s Robert Anderson, whose motorized carriage was built sometime between 1832 and ’39. Batteries (galvanic cells) were not yet rechargeable, so it was more parlor trick (“Look! No horse nor ox, yet it moves!”) than a transportation device. Another Scot, Robert Davidson of Aberdeen, built a prototype electric locomotive in 1837. A bigger, better version, demonstrated in 1841, could go 1.5 miles at 4 mph towing six tons. Then it needed new batteries. This impressive performance so alarmed railway workers (who saw it as a threat to their jobs tending steam engines) that they destroyed Davidson’s devil machine, which he’d named "Galvani."
Batteries that could be recharged came along in 1859, making the electric-car idea more viable. By 1890, a Scottish-born chemist living in Des Moines, Iowa, William Morrison, applied for a patent on the electric carriage he’d built perhaps as early as 1887. It appeared in a city parade in 1888, according to the Des Moines Register. With front-wheel drive, 4 horsepower, and a reported top speed of 20 mph, it had 24 battery cells that needed recharging every 50 miles. Morrison’s self-propelled carriage was a sensation at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which was also known as the famed “World’s Columbian Exhibition.” Morrison himself was more interested in the batteries than in mobility, but he’d sparked the imagination of other inventors.
By Kevin A.
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