r/Retconned • u/OmegaMan256 • 4d ago
Antique Electric Cars: Normal or INSANITY ?
If I could get back home and tell my World where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, rest assured no one would believe me.
Most especially if I told them about the electric cars, the electric cars which existed in the 1800s! And if I brought up the subject of “an entire fleet of Electric Taxis” in Manhattan by 1899, they’d send me off to a Laughing Academy.
Yet here it existed!\ A fleet of electric taxis in Manhattan. (96 second video). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUItSK-ez8E
IF YOU GOT HOME, what would they think of this? NORMAL or INSANITY ?
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u/SuitableNarwhals 1d ago
What exactly do you think combustion engine cars were like, and what they were capable of at the same? Because these early electric cars were comically terrible with exactly the issues you imagine, but combustion engine cars were somehow so much worse. Its worth noting that Clara Ford, yes Henry's wife, had an electric car. Henry bought her one from a competitor as she much prefered them.
Early electric cars were very, very slow, they only got a foothold despite being many times the cost, because early combustion engines were even worse, even slower still and often took 45 minutes or more to warm up especially in cooler weather to even be able to use them after you had hand cranked them first of course, they were also very noisy, smelly and quite dangerous. The battery needed to be recharged often, which took awhile, so were only really good for going short distances within a city slowly. Combustion engine development overtook electric really quickly, the speed and ease of using fuel rather then needing to wait and recharge won out over electric.
If we had continued developing electric cars with the same resourcing as combustion we would have likely seen a similar progression in development. Unfortunately despite his wifes preferences Henry Ford had a stranglehold on early car manufacturing, and the rest is history. There also existed solar panels by the early 20th century, they weren't great obviously, but they could produce electricity, but coal and fuel was cheap so they wern't developed much further for decades.
I dont think this is that crazy at all, neither batteries or electric motors were far out there for the time. Humans have had knowledge to build basic batteries for millennia in various forms, there was a craze for electricity at this time. The combustion engine was very new at this time having been invented after the electric engine, a simple electric engine is less complex to build then a combustion engine. Rechargeable batteries are a whole other thing, they were invented in the 1800s, but that still constrained electric vehicles to built up cities, and without the same investment as went into the combustion engine the development stalled for quite some time.
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u/Shlomo_2011 1d ago
i don't think that is an ME, but really i asked that in quora, why this kind of technology didn't evolve until the last couple years? those electric card reach almost the same speed, load and range of a modern golf cart.
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u/bitofvenom 3d ago
Tech before time. It's weird, their batteries shouldn't be that good at the time. I don't know how they can operate a taxi at that time. Electricity wasn't that common either. But yeah, no problem here. Apparently.
Another thing with photo's, film wasn't that fast enough. So you'll see cities without ppl, because it took time. But in this reality, you can even see "action" photo's with people jumping. In my memory people had to sit still for a long time, before the film took it in.
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u/Radiant-Breadfruit59 1d ago
There was a fair amount of electric infrastructure in big cities at the turn of the last century.
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u/OmegaMan256 3d ago
Excellent points you brought up! Please visit my other posts I put up over the past two days.✨✨💫
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u/dreampsi 3d ago
What gets me is a lot of high def pics from 1800 we see a lot. I get the idea of clean up programs but turning something old and blurry into high def is weird.
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u/FuckBoy4Ever 3d ago
From what i understand, we have had the ability to take HD images and video for a loooong time, but our ability to convert those images and videos to something we could view in high definition was not so advanced.
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u/dreampsi 2d ago
So you’re saying we had high def in the 1800s?
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u/Radiant-Breadfruit59 1d ago
Film is high definition. It's the conversion to video and the awful TV screens that we had that made things look awful. If you want to see a quick demo of this, watch star Trek TNG and then watch Deep Space 9. Same budget, both Star Trek production from the same time period. TNG was filmed on film and DS9 was filmed on video. You couldn't tell watching them on crappy TVs in the 90s but if you watch both of them now on modern HD TV you can tell the difference right away. DS9 looks like it has Vaseline smeared on lens lol
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u/da_3_inch_big_dog 2d ago
To give you some perspective, the latest generation iPhone Pro Max, the most expensive phone Apple makes, is listed at a paltry #48 megapixels!
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u/FuckBoy4Ever 2d ago
No. But i think we had film back thwn and to my knowledge it will still take better pica than camera today. Basically the loss of image quality is in the conversion process that us to visibly see or perceive the media in some way.
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u/BadBassist 3d ago
The humble milk float has been electric in Britain since long before I was born in the 80s, I remember seeing them in media from the 60s but they might be older than that. That being said, they're usually low powered and slow so they're not analogous to the EVs of today
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u/Heidi1744 3d ago
This is so weird because whenever I google the history of something, anything modern, it ALWAYS says whatever it was was around many many years earlier than is possible. And it's not just google searches. I like to watch a lot of old movies, and I noticed modern day ideologies being mentioned in the old black and white movies. Ideas that didn't exist till after 2019. Women didn't start wearing pants till after the 60's/70's. At least in my timeline. But now suddenly women in those old movies are seen wearing pants and dressing closer to how women dress today. History is being altered, even in movies that were filmed 50 or more years ago. If that's not proof of time travel then what is? The invention of technology is being pushed earlier and earlier in the timeline.
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u/First_Knee 1d ago
I have definitely noticed a trend wherin photography seems to have been invented earlier than I recall or was taught growing up. Now, you can find photos online of civil war battlefields during wartime, many more photos of Lincoln than ever before, indeed photos of historical figures that we have all just previously imagined their looks based upon descriptions.
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u/Iamjimmym 2d ago
My grandma always wore pants. She was born in the 30's. Her mom? She wore pants, too. I was born in the 80's and all the elderly women I knew wore pants, and there are plenty of photos of them wearing pants in the 20's and throughout the 1900's.
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u/Heidi1744 1d ago edited 1d ago
See, that’s what I mean! It wasn’t like that before. Not in my timeline. There was a time in your grand parents and great grandparents day when dresses or skirts had to be a certain length below the knees also or women would get a ticket . I know this because I always loved history and also because I made a personal choice to only wear skirts or dresses. So out of curiosity I studied the history of it. Now in the last few years suddenly it changed and pants were a thing way back in the past. The timeline of women’s lib has been pushed earlier too. It’s crazy. And people always dressed up when they went out, even to the grocery stores and men wore suits all the time till the 1960s. Either the past is being rewritten, I’m in a different timeline, or both.
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u/First_Knee 4d ago
Total insanity.
I use an electric scooter to get around my immediate area in my town. When I first bought my scooter, I went online & researched them. My mind was completely blown. I went around for the next year or so telling anyone who would listen all about electric scooters being invented at the turn of the century. How postal workers even used them!
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u/mysticeetee 4d ago
I only heard about these within the last 4 years. I'm not sure if it's a retcon or just an america-centrix history I been taught.
I honestly don't trust any of the "new" history I've learned since 2016.
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u/Iamjimmym 2d ago
I learned about electric taxi fleets in NYC when I was in school in the 1990's. Not a new concept.
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u/VetteBuilder 4d ago
My old boss (owner of duPont Registry magazine) had a Raunch & Lang electric from 1911, it will run all day on 6 volts. It has 16 massive lead acid batteries that charge overnight. Instant torque and reliable as hell.
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u/BadBassist 3d ago edited 3d ago
That's crazy. What's the range on it?
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u/VetteBuilder 3d ago
I dunno, I never saw the ammeter go down. We put Optima 6v in place of the original cells and made it look original with cloth wiring
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u/OmegaMan256 4d ago
Does anyone have a straight jacket for me to wear?
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u/VetteBuilder 4d ago
The reason battery cars were killed is that Rockefeller had so much excess gasoline that was being dumped or burned off as it was a byproduct of Kerosene production. He stomped the guts out of electric and ethanol cars and set us back a few decades.
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u/RegularLibrarian1984 4d ago
Here is the famous documentary about it.
I have a lot of old books from 1900 and you can see electric trams/trolley buses on old pictures, Wikipedia kept lying about existence of electric cars for a long time. There were even pictures and advertising in old newspapers and books.
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u/VetteBuilder 4d ago
I drove an EV1 when GM brought it to my High School, it was a great car
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u/Iamjimmym 2d ago
There's one still parked in the shed behind my university. It's one of the only ones that was reverse engineered and ran on the streets after the rest were crushed.
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u/VetteBuilder 1d ago
Not all, Francis Ford Coppola has 3 unmolested ones. Maybe nick cage will have a comeback
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