First commercial electric car

An electric car, at its most basic, is rather simple: batteries, motor, a means of controlling the latter, and a wheeled platform for all of the above.

Yet it’s surprisingly difficult to say for sure who first combined all of these elements into an automobile capable of transport, partly due to the game of semantics, partly due to the technological factors that led to the electric car’s development.

In the United States, at least, full credit typically goes to William Morrison, a Scottish chemist and inventor who emigrated to Des Moines, Iowa, and took up his experiments with electricity.

Morrison’s interest lay primarily in building, improving, and profiting from storage batteries, but as Keith McClellan wrote in the Annals of Iowa in 1963, Morrison knew he had to create some sort of spectacle to get others interested in his improved batteries.

Thus it was in the summer of 1890, “