The electric vehicle, a journey through almost 200 years of history
If there is one thing, we can all agree on, it is that electric vehicles exude an image of being both modern and futuristic. But is this completely true? The fact is that the electric vehicle is not a 21st-century invention, but rather a 19th century one. Moreover, it came only 30 years after the main invention of that century: the steam locomotive.
To discover the beginnings of the electric vehicle we must, despite the difficulty in establishing an exact date, travel back to the British Empire.
We are in Scotland, between 1832 and 1839. Thanks to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh were at the time a cultural and scientific hotbed in Europe. And the Scots were unaware that ten years later they would suffer the so-called Scottish potato famine.
It is this breeding ground that led Robert Anderson, a Scottish businessman, to invent what historians consider the first ever electric vehicle.
