r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Electrical-Aspect-13 • 2d ago
From the 19 of August 1897 to August of 1899, Bersey Electric Cab company offered electric cabs for the streets of London, England. Photos of them at the time and one restored.
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u/-Sanj- 2d ago
Horseless carriages
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u/Real_Independence877 2d ago
electric horseless carriage. "Horseless Carriage" usually refers to combustable/steam engines.
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u/Mysterious-Tackle-58 2d ago
And to think, we could have electric cars with more than a hundred years in fast paced battery science behind it.
Imagine the improvements and the airquality, we could have.
And all that only because the filthy and immorally rich and powerful wanted to get even richer, filthier and even more inhuman and inhumane!
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u/Diocletion-Jones 2d ago
The Bersey Electric Cab Company went out of business because its electric cabs were simply ahead of the supporting technology and infrastructure. Each cab weighed around 2 metric tonnes with the battery pack accounting for a large portion of that weight. London's streets were still commonly surfaced with granite setts and other rough road materials, creating severe vibration that damaged the fragile batteries and accelerated tyre and wheel wear. The result was high maintenance costs and poor reliability. Early electric vehicles required not only advances in batteries, tyres and suspension systems, but also smoother road infrastructure to be economically viable. Compared with the cheaper and well established horse drawn cabs of the day, the Bersey cabs proved too expensive to operate and were withdrawn after only two years of service.
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u/Maninwhatever 2d ago
I believe I read somewhere that evidence was recently unearthed of the ancient Greeks or Romans discovering steam power. They didn’t make the connection to steam = power & it was just a tabletop toy type of thing.
Lots of things have to come together at the same time to make something viable I guess.21
u/Maninwhatever 2d ago
And to reply to my own post, bloody unbelievable they didn’t explore that concept more. They had cogs, they had a concept of pressure (brazen bull had to be pressure proof), it’s a short jump to a piston & a flywheel.
Took another 2000 years give or take. Quite incredible.14
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u/lawnmower303 1d ago
Well as far as I know there quite a few other inventions that needed to happen first. For example, we needed to get our heads around steel properly. The greeks had mostly bronze and related alloys but nothing that had the capacity to handle higher steam pressures.
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u/WheresMyBrakes 2d ago
How long to charge and how long did the batteries last?
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u/Diocletion-Jones 2d ago
Google says 3 hours to charge, but they just used to swap the batteries out for fresh ones, so that wasn't an issue. The range before needing to be swapped was 3 to 4 hours of use.
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u/HeavyDutyForks 2d ago
We take it for granted now, but remember there were communities that didn't get electricity until the 1960s. The rural US didn't get widespread electricity until the '50s
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u/Mysterious-Tackle-58 2d ago
But it did have wide spread gas stations...
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u/HeavyDutyForks 2d ago
Gasoline was looked at as a waste product of kerosene production. Hell these old ICE cars were the original "flex fuel" vehicles. You could run them off just about any flammable liquid, ethanol, benzene, kerosene, etc.. Karl Benz's original motorcar ran off a cleaning solvent at the time
All of which were a lot more easily accessible and easier to transport than electricity
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u/comradejiang 1d ago
Engines outpaced batteries with more power and speed very quickly. You need computers to efficiently run batteries, not to mention advanced battery chemistry so they actually last a decent amount of time. Blame oil execs for stifling production in the 80s and 90s through today, absolutely.
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u/flipflopcuntflaps 1d ago
I only clicked on this post to find your comment so I could argue with you. WE COULD NOT HAVE HAD IT ANY SOONER. The transistor wasn't even invented until the 40s, we had just done two world wars, nobody had enough food, you still took your bike or walked 5 miles to swap your accumulator batteries to the newsagent to swap for charged ones so you could power your radio. Nobody knew how to trick sand into thinking, silicon needed DECADES to mature as a field. New York and London were places you read about in the paper your entire life, not visited.
Oil was what made the world smaller to the point where we could even conceive of ways to go ultra high tech and bootstrap into a position where we could make electric cars that even came close to helping the environment. Take your head out of your ass and try using it
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u/mantenner 2d ago
Yeah but we got the RB26 from going down the petrol route so I think it was worth it.
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u/GW_Beach 2d ago
probably could have had something even better in an electric if there had been 50 or 60 years of development
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u/Real_Independence877 2d ago
would've, could've, should've! Americans still use coal to heat homes and their manufactering plants and data centers are still killing the panet. Don't get me started on India burning toxic garbage and poluting. Everything we do to save the planet....India cancels out our efforts.
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u/Un13roken 1d ago
India supports a much larger population though. Pollution per capita is far lesser than the US.
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u/Real_Independence877 1d ago
says you/// source of your guestimation
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u/CapstanLlama 1d ago
Here you go, USA 16th in the world, India at 124th. USA pollutes far more per capita than India.
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u/GW_Beach 1d ago
that’s a very interesting comparison, thanks for sharing that. However, it is only looking at carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. It doesn’t take into account the amount of waste being produced, introduction of other toxins to the environment, etc.
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u/Real_Independence877 2d ago
Yeah, no! They still heated their homes with coal and gas. Humans always find a way to distroy their planet.
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u/Media_Browser 2d ago
Yeah , but all that captured carbon they will create I just hope they are around long enough to write it all off .
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u/ImissTBBT 1d ago
People think EVs are a new thing. But we had them all the way back when. But then the big corporations pushed for the use of internal combustion engines so you would use their oil products.
Basically, we met a fork in the road, left continued the electric trend, right went towards oil dependency. We chose to go right.
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u/NEWSmodsareTwats 1d ago
big corporations didn't push for internal combustion.
it's the fact that ICE engines where simpler to mass produce on a production line and because ICE engines also offered superior range.
When cars were first becoming popular, oil was mainly used to produce kerosene and industrial lubricants. The gasoline market was basically an afterthought for them. When the first cars were being sold, gas stations didn't even exist. You'd have to buy gasoline at the the drugstore or hardware store. Ford had already been making ICE cars for about 15 years by the time gasoline sales topped kerosene sales.
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u/VideoHeadSet 1d ago
Henry Ford even tried an electric vehicle. It was designed for woman of the time.
Then ford tried again in the late 90's with an electric ranger.
Remember the hydrogen civics of the late 90's?
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u/Real_Independence877 2d ago
downside: they only were able to travel 4 city blocks before having to be recharged. Highly impractical. That is why they never caught on.
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u/HeavyDutyForks 2d ago edited 2d ago
No brakes, no accelerator. You just selected one of three speeds via a lever and off it went
Only way to stop was to disconnect the power and coast. Of course, it only reached a scorching top speed of 9mph (14km/h), but still