Electric Cars - from the 1800s
Regular readers will know I've been delving in to scientific history recently due to my involvement in the Brilliant Void Podcast. I promise to move on soon, but in the meantime I want to share one more interesting thing I learned there, which is that electric cars were really common the streets of London in the 1800s!
The story Lady Clanbevan's Baby begins with an encounter on Rotten Row in London, which - despite its name - is a very pretty road running through Hyde Park. Our narrator meets an old acquaintance there who offers her a lift in his small, yellow car. He duly climbs aboard
'and the Baby-Bunting, trembling with excitement at being in the company of so many highly varnished electric Victorias and forty horse-power auto-cars, joined the steadily flowing stream going west.'
I read this several times before I noticed the reference to electric cars. This was written in 1915. So I searched if electric cars were common in London in 1915, and found they were. Though they were apparently already on their way out.
The photo above is what the writer (Clotilde Graves) probably meant by an 'electric victoria.'
Cars at the time were often described in terms of the horse-drawn coaches they resembled, and a Victoria was an open coach with a folding canopy for passengers. Apparently, the City and Suburban Electric Carriage Company in Piccadilly sold and maintained electric victorias in the early 1900s. Their vehicles could reportedly travel about 40 miles on a charge and reach 20 mph - which was quite good in comparison to petrol-driven cars at that time.
And they weren't new. Bersey electric cabs, designed by electrical engineer Walter Bersey, had appeared on London's streets in 1897. They had a top speed of about 12 mph and range of 30 miles on a single charge. And they operated with exchangeable batteries, so a cab could pull in to its home base, swap batteries and be back on the road in a few minutes.
So why did they die out? It appears the cars were very heavy - presumably due to the batteries - and that meant a very rough ride over London's rough roads. Not only was that a problem for passengers, but also for the cars themselves and it was the maintenance costs that ultimately drove them off the roads.
The reference to electric cars in the story is very much by-the-way. The actual science in this science ficiton relates to radioactivity The scientist invovled speculates about the use of radioactivity (as opposed to muclear fusion) as a fuel for cars. I don't see that could ever be possible: the heat from a radioactive source might power the voyager spacecraft, but could it ever generate enough heat to power a car. I doubt it. And certainly not without creating insurmountable problems with respect to shielding.
But I did learn that the Ford company created a concept car in 1958, the nucleon, that would have run on nuclear fusion.
Unsurprisingly, it never went into production!
To hear more: A Brilliant Void podcast is available here: A Brilliant Void
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