It appeared in a city parade in 1888, according to the Des Moines Register. 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.

Around 1884, inventor Thomas Parker helped deploy electric-powered trams and built prototype electric cars in England. 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.īatteries that could be recharged came along in 1859, making the electric-car idea more viable. A bigger, better version, demonstrated in 1841, could go 1.5 miles at 4 mph towing six tons.

Another Scot, Robert Davidson of Aberdeen, built a prototype electric locomotive in 1837.

Batteries (galvanic cells) were not yet rechargeable, so it was more parlor trick (“Look! No horse nor ox, yet it moves!”) than a transportation device. We start in the 1830s, with Scotland’s Robert Anderson, whose motorized carriage was built sometime between 1832 and ’39.

Surface book 1832