Forward into past

You hail a taxi. A stylish cab called ‘Electrobat’ comes along. It is an electric vehicle.

A distance ahead, the driver stops, begs your forgiveness, for he needs just a jiffy to swap batteries. Three minutes later you are on your way, in a clean, green, electric vehicle — that has just avoided a huge pile of waste, the disposal of which has been a headache for the authorities.

Did I just take you to the future? Not at all. Quite the opposite — I took you to the past, to the year 1897, to New York’s infamous Manhattan, when electric vehicles, which we so covet these days, was the norm. Three years earlier, two engineers named Henry Morris and Pedro Salom, made an electric car and called it Electrobat. Rather than sell the vehicles, they got into running a taxi service. They called it — Electric Wagon & Carriage Company. The venture drove off with a dozen vehicles, but in just two years, was operating a hundred.

The battery it used was the old familiar lead-acid battery. It weighed a thousand pounds (454 kg, or about half as heavy as a Maruti Alto). With that weight, you would think that the vehicle can’t travel fast, but ‘fast’ is a relative term, conveying a different sense in every different context. In the context of 1899, it was an atrociously high speed of 25 km per hour. Guess what was the ‘waste’ that the vehicles avoided? Horse manure.

Electric Wagon & Carriage Co ran successfully until it lost its way due to a fraud, notes an article in National Geographic. In due course, internal combustion engines came and steamrolled the EVs out of business. But now, the EVs are having their sweet revenge.

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