James Motchman

Did you know the first vehicle in history to break 100 kilometers per hour was an electric car? It was called La Jamais Contente, French for "The Never Satisfied." It was a Belgian electric car shaped like a torpedo, built from a lightweight aluminum alloy, running on two electric motors and a heavy bank of batteries that made up nearly half its weight. On the 29th of April 1899, on a track at Achères near Paris, its driver Camille Jenatzy pushed it to 105.88 kilometres per hour, becoming the first person ever to break the 100 km/h barrier on land. The fastest vehicle in the world, at the dawn of the automobile, was electric. And it wasn't a one-off. We tend to think of the electric car as the ultimate symbol of the modern age, a twenty-first-century answer to a twenty-first-century problem. So it comes as a genuine shock to learn that in the year 1900, roughly a third of all the cars on American roads were electric... By 1899, around ninety percent of New York City's taxis ran on batteries, a silent fleet humming through streets where horses still pulled most of the traffic. London had its own electric cabs, nicknamed "Hummingbirds" for the sound they made. Drivers loved them for exactly the reasons we love them now. They were quiet, they were clean, they produced no smoke or fumes, and they did not require the violent, wrist-breaking hand-crank that gasoline cars of the era demanded just to start. Some models could travel a hundred miles on a single charge, a range many affordable electric cars only matched again quite recently. There were even battery-swap stations, where a depleted battery could be exchanged for a fresh one in minutes. Then gasoline won... Cheap oil was discovered. Henry Ford's assembly line made the gasoline Model T affordable to everyone. And the invention of the electric starter motor killed the hand-crank, erasing gasoline's single biggest weakness. The electric car fell into a sleep that would last nearly a hundred years. So the next time someone calls the electric car the vehicle of the future, remember that it is also one of the oldest vehicles there is... I started my newsletter because our past is truly extraordinary, and fewer and fewer people are talking about it in a way that makes it feel real. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.