History in Circles

Doomed to Repeat History?

An electric vehicle was the bestselling car in the United States, 125 years ago (Standage, 2021). In 1897 the Pope Manufacturing Company’s most popular model, the Columbia Motor Carriage, was outselling all other options for powered transportation. Electric automobiles had been in development since as early as 1832, when Robert Anderson built his first working electrified car (Department of Energy, n.d.). Can you imagine how the world might have been different if the electric car, which at one point Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were working together to improve, had never been surpassed by the internal combustion engine?

The companies producing electrified vehicles were ultimately undone by technological, economic, and cultural forces. First, the battery chemistry of the early 1900s was limited by the short range of travel that it allowed, with none other than Thomas Edison remarking that the “problem so far has been to build a storage battery of light weight which would operate for long distances without recharging” (Standage, 2021). Sound familiar? We have the same problem more than 100 years later as lithium-ion battery chemistry has reached the point of diminishing returns and improvements. Second, economic issues related to the battery limitations doomed attempts to use electrified vehicles en masse. William Whitney was briefly successful using the Electrobat as a taxi service in New York and other large cities, relying on a system to quickly replace discharged batteries with fresh ones at a central dispatch location. Unfortunately for Whitney and the technology, his reach exceeded his grasp and the company ultimately failed when it could not maintain its scale and reliability. Finally, as electrified vehicles began being supplanted by petroleum-fed cars, the remaining electric car manufacturers oriented their sales to women, making the case for electric cars as simpler, cleaner, and quieter solutions for short trips from home (Standage, 2021). While this was an effective pitch, with even Henry Ford buying a Babcock Electric car for his wife, it severely limited the potential customer base and ultimately contributed to the demise of the technology for nearly 100 years.

Energy Storage Writ Small

Unbound from current science, I propose an innovation sorely needed for cars, for the broader world, and ultimately for humanity’s expansion into the solar system – revolutionary energy storage. I believe that the storage of energy is one of the next necessary technological leaps, in part because we are already discovering abundant sources of non-polluting energy. Generating energy won’t be the barrier of tomorrow, considering solar, wind, geothermal, atomic, and other sources. Rather, finding ways to store and move energy will become the new limiting factor for developing technology. Abundant clean energy only goes so far when it requires a 2000-pound battery that lasts for just a few hours of use. The innovation that I will write about is related to the development of a new energy storage technology, capable of fast charge, unlimited charge cycles, and with exceptional power density.

This technology will be impacted by a number of forces, including those discussed above. Technological development leads to disruption, and improved power storage will disrupt entire industries that generate and move energy today, ranging from pipeline and powerline operators to retail services like the gas stations on every corner. The economics of power storage lead to groups of people with the ability to harness stored power, and people without that are dependent on place-shifting power in the moment it is used.

 

 

References

Department of Energy. (n.d.). Timeline: History of the Electric Car. Energy.Gov. Retrieved October 20, 2023, from https://www.energy.gov/timeline-history-electric-car

Standage, T. (2021). The lost history of the electric car, and what it tells us about the future of transport. The Guardian, 3.