Electric cars and hybrids are over 100 years old

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

The first usable internal combustion engine was constructed by the Belgian-born French inventor Etienne Lenoir in 1860. The power of this engine was 12 horsepower, it worked on a mixture of air and lamp gas with electric spark ignition. The electric motor appeared earlier: in 1841, a cart was equipped with it. Earlier, in 1828, Hungarian Anjos Jedlik used an electric motor to power a tiny skateboard-like car.

In 1888, a three-wheeled vehicle was introduced to the United States. Ten lead-acid batteries manufactured by the Electrical Accumulator Company weighed about forty kilograms. The maximum speed of the structure was eight miles per hour. Engine power - 0.5 horsepower. It was, rather, a three-wheeled electric bicycle.

The lead accumulator was invented in 1859-1860 by Gaston Plante, in 1878 its design was improved by Camille Faure. Today these batteries are used in automobile or motor vehicles as starter batteries.

Thomas Perker was responsible for the electrification of the London Underground. And he also designed and built this electric car in 1884. He also designed the battery for his vehicle himself.

The first Russian two-seater electric car appeared in 1889. It was created by the engineer Ippolit Romanov. In this front-wheel drive vehicle, the passengers were seated in front, and the driver was in the back on the seat above them. The batteries located in the compartment behind the passenger compartment were lighter than their counterparts, which made it possible to reduce the weight of the car to 720 kg. The French "Zhanto", popular at that time, weighed 1440 kg. The maximum speed was 35 km / h, and the power reserve was just over 1 kilometer. At 1800 rpm, each of the engines produced 4.4 kW, which is equivalent to 5.84 horsepower.

The first electric car in Germany was built by engineer Andreas Flocken in 1888. This photo shows one of the German electric cars in 1904.

The first record for the speed of an electric car was set in France on December 18, 1898 in a Jentaud car "charged" with alkaline batteries. The speed was 62.792 km / h. 4 months later, the record was broken by the electric car Le Jamais Contende - this time the speed exceeded a hundred and amounted to 105.264 km / h.

The power reserve and speed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were about the same for electric vehicles and cars with an internal combustion engine, but recharging the batteries was a little more difficult - you couldn't just plug the electric car into an outlet and wait a few hours, you needed an AC-to-DC converter. For this, an electric motor powered by an alternating current was used - it rotated the generator shaft, to which the batteries were connected.

This photograph, taken in 1905, shows two electric vehicles: on the left - a bus; on the right - a taxi. Photo taken on Broadway in Times Square.

The history of electric taxi cabs in the United States began with the Electrobat from Electric Vehicle Co.

Taxi in 1897.

These taxis were charged in a special room.

In Russia, the dawn of electric vehicles was late, despite the efforts of individual engineers.

At the beginning of the century, such an omnibus from the Dux company for ten people already traveled around Moscow. And Ippolit Romanov, the inventor of the two-seater electric car, asked the St. Petersburg Duma for permission to open ten routes - for eighty omnibuses. Such a turn of events did not suit the owners of the horse-drawn tram and the transport workers - they did everything possible to prevent Romanov's project from taking place. Unfortunately, Romanov lost in this fight.

In 1914, there were 8 electric carriages in Russia: 4 trucks, 1 three-wheeled van and 3 private cars.

The Dux company tried to produce such a bus for traveling on rails.

Since there were a lot of electric cars and steam-powered cars in the United States at the beginning of the century, charging stations were encountered there as often as gas stations. Electric car charging by some shed.

Rhode Island U. S. Senator George Whitmore in an electric car, 1906.

Since 1907, Detroit began producing cars under the Detroit Electric brand. These electric vehicles were assembled until 1939. Initially, the cars were equipped with lead-acid batteries, but from 1911 to 1916 it was possible to choose the version with Edison's iron-nickel battery. The maximum speed was 32 km / h, and the car could drive 130 kilometers.

During the First World War, gasoline prices were high, so in the 1910s, electric cars were in great demand - the company sold up to two thousand units a year. In the 1920s, sales declined due to declining prices for internal combustion engine cars.

In this photo - Thomas Edison at the car of this brand. The company was owned by Thomas Edison, John Rockefeller and Henry Ford's wife, Clara Ford.

EV-Opera-Car Model 68/17 B.

Model 1915.

Detroit Electric print ads from 1920s.

Hybrid cars were not invented yesterday or the day before yesterday. In 1916, Clinton Edgar Woods began production of the Woods Dual Power Model 44 Coupe with an electric motor and an internal combustion engine - two at once.

In the USSR, in 1935, an electric car was built on the basis of GAZ-A.

In the same year, MPEI built a battery-powered garbage truck, remaking the ZIS-5 into it. The car was equipped with forty batteries with a total capacity of 168 ampere-hours, their weight was 1400 kg. Such an electric car was capable of transporting 1800 kg garbage at a speed of 24 km / h for forty kilometers. Engine power - 13 kW.

Nissan TAMA has been produced in passenger and cargo versions since 1947. It was Nissan's first electric car.

Four NAMI-LAZ electric vehicles with a carrying capacity of 0.5 and 1.5 tons have been used by the Moscow post since 1948. Ten more prototypes carried mail in Leningrad until 1958.

Electric vehicle production peaked in the 1910s. There was no burning and soot from electric vehicles, women chose them, since they did not need to have extraordinary physical strength to start them - unlike internal combustion engines.

What were the disadvantages of electric vehicles? The roads became too good, people wanted to travel far - and at the beginning of the century it was more difficult to place charging stations every hundred kilometers. Without recharging, electric cars could travel one hundred to one hundred and thirty kilometers, like some cars now.

Thanks to Henry Ford, car prices fell, and the rise in oil production drove the cost of fuel down. The electric starter - developed in 1912 - made cars with an internal combustion engine more comfortable. Since the thirties, the production of electric vehicles has ceased to be massive, despite attempts to use them for official purposes.

In the 1960s-1970s, people thought about ecology and again remembered about electric motors. But that is another story…