r/BeAmazed Mar 05 '25

History Are we truly living in the future?

6.6k Upvotes

268 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/FlobiusHole Mar 06 '25

I was at a museum in my city while they were having an historical car show a couple years ago. They had electric cars in like 1890. They were just carriages with little electric motors on them but just think how that could’ve evolved from then if it wasn’t for oil and gasoline engines. Maybe there was never any practical capacity for electric motors at that time, I really don’t enough about it, but it was interesting to think about.

2

u/perringaiden Mar 07 '25

Not the motors. The problem with the old electric cars is they went 5 miles then the batteries ran out. We've really only reached mobility charge storage since John Goodenough (building on Whittingham) made the Lithium Ion battery energy-dense enough.

He made the batteries 'good enough' for mobility.

2

u/SuckenOnemToes Mar 06 '25

You are right. The capacity to maintain those vehicles just wasn't there. That was also incredibly early on in the devolvement of the automobile and also when they were still crafted by hand.