You might think that electric vehicles are only a relatively recent invention, starting more or less with the General Motors EV1 but only really taking off after Tesla entered the game and launched the Model S. But you'd be wrong. Would you believe that the first self-propelled electric vehicle is nearly two centuries old—and still works to this day?
(Welcome to The History of Electric Vehicles, where we'll cover the many ways that EVs have been a part of more than 150 years of automotive history. In this installment, we'll look at EVs' role in the earliest days of the horseless carriage.)
Gottlieb Daimler’s 1886 engine-powered three-wheeler isn’t the world’s first automobile, though the modern successor of the company he founded—Mercedes-Benz—likes to act like it was.
The fact is that machines designed to move people and cargo under their own power date back to the 18th century and they used steam. The concept of using electricity to drive that movement is almost as old. In fact, the world's first full-scale electric car actually beat Daimler's invention to the punch by a few years.
The first true electric car is credited to a German inventor called Andreas Flocken whose 1888 EV called the Flocken Electrowagen had a top speed of 9 mph. However, the first crude electric-powered carriage capable of moving people was built almost half a century earlier.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Many bits of EV history are spread across the internet, and it all seems quite fragmented. My aim with this series of articles about the history of EVs is to gather all the key points into one place and give it context, decade by decade.
To start, let's go back to the very beginning.
The 1800s
The origin of the first electric car can be traced back to a Hungarian inventor by the name of Ányos Jedlik. His main contribution to technology is the discovery of the principle of dynamo self-excitation, which replaced permanent magnets in a dynamo's construction with coils.
Jedlik also created one of the earliest electric motor designs, the lightning-magnetic self-rotor, which he made in 1827. It used direct current and had the same basic components that are still in use today: a stator, a rotor and a commutator. Jedlik put his electric motor on a small wheeled board in 1828, thus creating what is believed to be the world’s first self-propelled electric vehicle.
You can still see his early motor prototype, as well as the electric vehicle model on display at the University of Technology and Economics in Budapest.
Over the next few decades, more small-scale electric vehicles were built in several places around the world as the early automobile slowly continued to gestate. However, it is believed that the first to create an electric carriage capable of carrying people was Scottish inventor Robert Anderson, whose vehicle was built sometime between 1832 and 1839 used non-rechargeable batteries and could achieve 2 mph.
In 1838, Robert Davidson, another Scotsman, built an electric locomotive that achieved a documented speed of 4 mph. However, even though it worked, it was still impractical because, to charge its batteries, it needed the liquid chemicals to be replaced every time, and this was expensive and impractical—the more easily rechargeable lead-acid batteries wouldn’t be invented until the end of the 1850s.
It would take another few decades before an EV big enough to move passengers on a road was created. This is credited to British inventor Thomas Parker, who built an electric vehicle in 1884, which he used to commute to work at a leisurely maximum speed of 2 mph. Parker’s creation paved the way for the first commercially viable EVs, which appeared in the 1890s.
Dawn Of The 20th Century
The idea gained steam—pardon the pun—on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Around 1890, Iowan inventor William Morrison developed a six-passenger electric prototype vehicle that could blitz Parker's car at up to 14 mph. While Morrison's creation didn't exactly spark the auto industry overnight, by the end of the 1890s, other EVs were definitely starting to catch on.
As the 20th century dawned, there were hundreds of electric vehicles (as well as charging stations and even battery-swapping stations) in several big cities in Europe and the United States. In New York by 1899, there were 100 electric taxis in service, and one of these early EV cabs received one of the first speeding tickets ever issued in the country—the electric cab was traveling at 12 mph when the speed limit in New York was 8 mph and the driver was taken into custody.
One such taxi in New York was the pioneering Electrobat, which National Geographic described as "a 2,500-pound car was propelled by a lead-acid battery, achieving top speeds of 15 miles per hour and covering distances of up to 25 miles on a single charge."
And there are aspects of the Electrobat like battery-swapping and mobility as a subscription service that almost feel like they'd make headlines today here at InsideEVs, according to that story:
Furthermore, the pair devised an ingenious battery-swapping system inside a former Broadway roller skating rink to keep its cabs in continuous operation. Working with the efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew, employees maneuvered vehicles with elevators and hydraulics as an overhead crane, plucked out the depleted 1,000-pound batteries, and inserted fresh ones.
The process took only three minutes. “It was much faster than changing a horse team and probably as fast as what we would today associate with filling a tank of gas,” Kirsch says.
The duo’s Manhattan cab service rapidly gained popularity, especially among the upper echelons of society. Rather than selling their cars, Morris and Salom opted to lease their vehicles on a monthly or per-ride basis through their venture, the Electric Wagon & Carriage Company.
The Electric Vehicle Company swiftly expanded its taxi operations to major cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston, eventually becoming the nation’s largest automobile manufacturer. However, its rapid expansion proved unsustainable. Operations outside New York were poorly run, and investors felt swindled when a New York Herald investigation in late 1899 revealed the Electric Vehicle Company had fraudulently secured a loan. The company’s stock plummeted, and the enterprise was virtually bankrupt by 1902.
Truly, what's old is new again so looking at very early EVs might reveal what's in store in current times. For instance, wireless EV charging is coming back onto the radar these days, but it was actually first proposed as a method of charging electric vehicles back in 1894.
As we know, by the middle of the 20th century, piston-engined vehicles ultimately won out against EVs. However, there were still many attempts to introduce fleets of EVs in subsequent decades, mostly in Europe and the United States.
Some were more serious than others; many more still have been nearly lost to the annals of history. But we'll be diving into many of them in the coming days.
Coming next: we'll look at the rise of EVs in the early 20th century and the brief few moments when it really did feel like electric power would be the future of the automobile.
Did You Know?
The first police car in the United States was electric. This electric paddy wagon entered service with the police department in Akron, Ohio, in 1899. It had a top speed of 16 mph and a range of about 30 miles on one charge. Its first mission was to transport a drunk man back to the station.
Gallery: EV History: The Beginning
Top illustration: Sam Woolley for InsideEVs
