WORTH THE WATT

Electric cars have been around a lot longer than we can imagine. 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 – here is a brief history of the pioneers in the EV sector and the future of the same

- Kruti Bharadva

We start in the 1830s, with Scotland’s Rob-ert Anderson, whose motorized carriage was built sometime between 1832 and ’39. 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.

Rechargeable batteries came along in 1859, making the electric-car idea more viable. Around 1884, inventor Thomas Parker helped deploy electric-powered trams and built prototype electric cars in England. 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. With frontwheel 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.