Electric miracles before 1917

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Disassembling a bookcase, I came across an old book about electricity. I was curious, maybe it will be pleasant for you to smell the progress!

The book explains to ordinary citizens not the science of electrical engineering, but what the people need - sho tse take and what they eat it with! A knowledge popularizer by engineer Aleksandrov from simple courses for workers. Like our vocational school. And the engineer is very proud that already 18,000 books have been published! And a good book! Only the most important thing in the book could not find - the year of publication! I think that the 10s, before the revolution, is understandable. More precisely, the First World War is already underway - it says that military tariffs have appeared.

So, do we have any progress? No! When did we change the meters to dual-mode, day and night rates? Ten years ago? And our ancestors bast shoes already at the beginning of the century paid at two rates!

And their wives washed on electric washing machines! So in the eighties I myself washed my daughter's diapers in the bathroom! With your hands. Then he saved up and bought a washing machine for the first time … Almost a century of Soviet power has passed. That's what we lost! And the crunch of a French roll)))

The book has many sections and pages. I scanned some of them. About bulbs and counters, about washers and floor polishers. I didn't talk about electric samovars and electric irons. And about electric combers and horse clippers. And about spotlights in theaters. And about passenger and freight elevators. Especially for raising food)))

Types of lamps. I didn't scan everything, only the thing that surprised me was a tubular lamp. Or cigar-shaped. In my village called Leningrad, I could see tubular lamps only when fluorescent lamps appeared. At school and shops. In the 70s. But I never saw such cigar-shaped incandescent lamps. Never. I don't even remember ordinary but long incandescent bulbs …

Washing machine. Slightly wooden, obviously made from an oak tub … But my family bought a floor polisher only in 1966 for the parquet floor of a new apartment.

We knew what a curling iron and a hair dryer were. By the way, yesterday I saw a post where it is written that the hair dryer invented amirikos in 1925, look - it was lying on the table of a Russian woman at the beginning of the century! Christmas tree garland. But I don’t know what kind of an apparatus for eliminating wrinkles even now!

And here - brilliant! They talk about the types of lamps, and that coal is worse, because burned-out metal can be shaken - without removing it from the cartridge and under current! - and the threads are soldered. I'll go try on the current ones. But what if!))

And the power of the bulbs is 1, 0 and 1.5 watts. Cool!

The one-watt ones were the dimmest at 12 candles, the brightest at 800 candles. One and a half watt - from 2 to 1500 candles. And they honestly wrote that the old coal ones are up to 3100 candles.

And then the tariff was 4 kopecks per hectowatt hour. Or 40 kopecks per kilowatt hour. How much are you paying per kilowatt-hour today?

But the receipt for payment has changed little!

And don't forget the comma!The engineer teaches us correctly.

Interestingly, even then the population and industry paid at different rates.

And the advertisement was already covered in bulbs! And there was even a creeping line!

Progress, say, brought communism … About a century passed, and everything returned to the life of the people … And advertising with a creeping line.

And the price of the book is also not clear, not only the year of publication.

Copyright was already fierce then!

So I'll finish, I won't bore you anymore.

Since people again poured into my magazine to read Electro's post, I will give one photo from the archive.

I was simply surprised that many commentators seriously believe that Ilyich gave us the light bulb, he also came up with the GOELRO plan. Which "… plus electrification of the whole country!" See how the tsarist government did not spare electricity. There was a lot of that kind of electricity even then …

This is the day of the coronation of Nicholas II

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Addition:

Electric taxi in New York over a hundred years ago

Detail from a Shorpy photograph taken on Broadway in Times Square. In addition to horse-drawn vehicles and cable trams, there are two cars in the photo. On the left is a tourist bus. On the right is a taxi. Both are powered by electricity. It's 1905 outside.

The first motorized taxi in the United States was the Electrobat, an electric car manufactured by the company of Henry Morris and Pedro Salom of Philadelphia. They organize a small batch production and begin to enter the passenger transportation market.

In 1896, they form the first taxi company, the Electric Vehicle Co. in New York City. Yes Yes. The first taxis in New York were also electric cars. Seeing great potential in a new form of transport, the company is bought by tram tycoon William Whitney, and is investing heavily in its development.

Electric taxi cars 1897.

In 1897, 12 electric vehicles were already operating in New York, and by 1899 more than 60 such cars were running along the city streets. The Electrobat traveled about 40 kilometers on a single charge at 20 miles per hour. It took 8 hours to charge the battery.

Electrobat in front of the Old Metropolitan Opera in New York, 1898.

Surprisingly, in 1900, most cars on the streets of New York were electric cars. A total of 4,192 cars were sold in the US that year, of which 1,575 were electric vehicles and 1,681 were steam powered. The main advantage of the new transport over horses, for the city authorities, was not speed or convenience, but the absence of manure, which at that time was a huge problem for New York. The streets were just littered with it.

Electric Vehicle Co.'s New York garage. on Broadway.

Whitney figured out how to solve the problem of limiting the range of electric vehicles. The batteries were made removable and all the driver had to do was drive into the garage every few hours to replace it. Thus, the machines could be operated almost around the clock. It seemed that this was a success, and nothing would prevent the conquest of the passenger transportation market in New York, and then throughout the country.

Battery replacement stand in the company's garage. The battery in the back of the car is numbered 63.

Battery charging room.

At the very beginning of the 20th century, Electric Vehicle Co. owned a fleet of 2,000 electric vehicles, electric trucks and electric buses, and their Connecticut factory was the largest electric car manufacturer in the world.

But the main problem with electric cars was not batteries, but Whitney's overly ambitious plans, technological planning problems and insufficient investment in infrastructure. When the number of working machines reached 200, and 1,600 more were ordered for production, a battery crisis broke out. The number of batteries and places for charging and storing them was not enough. There were so many of them that the batteries began to be charged in violation of the technology. The batteries began to fail and run out prematurely. As a result, instead of development, the company was forced to maintain the existing fleet of vehicles in working order. Battery maintenance and replacement were quite expensive. All the money had already been spent by that time, and there was no money left to buy new batteries and arrange additional places for charging them. By 1907, the company was unable to cover its own costs, went bankrupt and was sold. The new owners renamed it and replaced all electric taxis with internal combustion engines. But then, do not make Whitney's mistake, everything in the history of the automotive industry could have turned out differently.

A few more photos from New York.

Seeing New York Electric Touring Bus, 1904.

Green Car Sight Seeing Service Electric Tourist Bus, 1905.

GMC electric truck, 1914.