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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. 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. It appeared in a city parade in 1888, according to the Des Moines Register. By 1890, a Scotland-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. Around 1884, inventor Thomas Parker helped deploy electric-powered trams and built prototype electric cars in England. 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.īatteries that could be recharged came along in 1859, making the electric-car idea more viable. A bigger, better version, demonstrated in 1841, could go 1.5 miles at 4 mph towing six tons. Another Scot, Robert Davidson of Aberdeen, built a prototype electric locomotive in 1837. 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.
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Start in the 1830s, with Scotland’s Robert Anderson, whose motorized carriage was built sometime between 1832 and ’39. 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. 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. Electric cars have been around a lot longer than today’s Tesla Motors or even the General Motors EV1 of the late 1990s.