The First Usable Electric Car Was Invented In Britain In 1884 (historycollection.co) 68
"Thomas Parker, sometimes described as the 'Edison of Britain', was a British engineer and electrical technologies inventor working in the 1800s who was also one of the world's first environmentalists," remembers Slashdot reader dryriver.
Parker had been troubled by the pollution in coal-burning cities around London -- and decided to do something about it: Parker was very adept both at inventing new things and at significantly improving technologies that others had invented before him. He improved everything from steam pumps, to electrical batteries, electric motors, alternators and dynamos, invented the award winning "Kyrle Grate," which was designed to allow anthracite coal to be burned inside of it, and was responsible for the electrification of London's "Underground" Subway system and tramways build in other British cities.
There has been attempts at electrical cars before Parker's going back as far as the 1830s, but his was revolutionary in many aspects. The Elwell-Parker car was fitted with Parker's high-capacity rechargeable batteries, and later vehicles had hydraulic brakes on all four wheels, as well as four-wheel steering. These features are even now being described as revolutionary.
While Parker's electrical cars were quite popular in America and Britain for a number of years (read more here), soon improved gas- and diesel-based vehicles caused public interest in electric cars to wane. Parker's company Elwell Parker, which survives to this day, then focused on making electrical speciality vehicles for factories and warehouses -- electric carts for moving equipment and crates around, and precursors of modern forklifts, for example.
While everybody knows electrical inventors like Edison and Tesla today, Thomas Parker is barely known and barely remembered...
Parker had been troubled by the pollution in coal-burning cities around London -- and decided to do something about it: Parker was very adept both at inventing new things and at significantly improving technologies that others had invented before him. He improved everything from steam pumps, to electrical batteries, electric motors, alternators and dynamos, invented the award winning "Kyrle Grate," which was designed to allow anthracite coal to be burned inside of it, and was responsible for the electrification of London's "Underground" Subway system and tramways build in other British cities.
There has been attempts at electrical cars before Parker's going back as far as the 1830s, but his was revolutionary in many aspects. The Elwell-Parker car was fitted with Parker's high-capacity rechargeable batteries, and later vehicles had hydraulic brakes on all four wheels, as well as four-wheel steering. These features are even now being described as revolutionary.
While Parker's electrical cars were quite popular in America and Britain for a number of years (read more here), soon improved gas- and diesel-based vehicles caused public interest in electric cars to wane. Parker's company Elwell Parker, which survives to this day, then focused on making electrical speciality vehicles for factories and warehouses -- electric carts for moving equipment and crates around, and precursors of modern forklifts, for example.
While everybody knows electrical inventors like Edison and Tesla today, Thomas Parker is barely known and barely remembered...
PR Firm (Score:1, Informative)
Thomas Parker is barely known and barely remembered...
He should have hired a PR firm to make him famous like Elon does. A firm that would make up a reputation and create this personae. Back in the day, PT Barnum did it. Edison did it.
No one gets noticed just for their merits while they're still alive. Fame makes one an alpha. That's just what we inherited from our shared ancestors with the apes.
Or, you could, ... not be an asshole. (Score:1, Insightful)
That "alpha"/"beta" theory is as badly outdated as race theories by the way. Wolves and other social animals do not actually behave like that.
So, sorry, that's a sociopathic mindset that has no place an a social human society. It is a sign of social cancer that needs to be cured.
You can keep it in that Goldman Sachs planning room or the like, where it came from.
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He should have hired a PR firm to make him famous like Elon does.
Why does it matter to him, he's dead either way. Why waste money on a PR firm when you can spend it on new inventions?
No one gets noticed just for their merits while they're still alive.
The Nobel committee would probably disagree with you. I haven't seen many dead tennis players receive awards for winning a Grand Slam either.
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I haven't seen many dead tennis players receive awards for winning a Grand Slam either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
News? (Score:5, Funny)
00101010101 was there in 1884 (Score:2, Funny)
Short-selling Thomas Parker's company. In a letter to the editor at Hardwicke's Scientific Gossipe, he had the following comment to make:
"That Elon Mu .... I mean, Thomas Parker, is a most vexatious fellowe. His lightening-powered carriage is verily a pain in the fundamente"
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I wouldn't short sell any genius like Thomas Parker. The difference between him and Musk is that Parker actually INVENTED STUFF. Elon Musk BOUGHT Tesla. BOUGHT IT with his ill gotten gains from getting lucky with PayPal. Musk has never invented anything. Ever. He just hires people who redo what other people have already done (electric cars, landing rockets, dig tunnels, hyperloop) and then he tries to grab as much public money as he can. He is PT Barnum, not Thomas Parker. In addition, Musk is an asshole wh
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Yeah, I do make the similar arguments for those assholes too. And no, Musk doesn't have an "engineering background" at all. I hate Musk much more because I know the type: has a big ego and calls random people "pedophiles" when they bruise it. And yes, SpaceX IS worthless. It is just another rocket company shooting satellites into orbit. Big deal . Every techbro with a small penis starts a rocket company.
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He's almost right.
Anybody with money and connections to the government that can net him billions in subsidies can start a rocket company.
It is very easy when you do it with other people's money.
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None of them invented anything, they took existing stuff and tweaked it, then sat back and hired clever people who created all the improvements you talk of.
Bezos is known now, not for inventing online shopping or the internet, but for exploiting it . Gates did the same with CP/M, Jobs did it with the work various engineers did for him.
As a German, it's shocking ... (Score:1, Interesting)
... how skewed our world iew was as children. Everybody here "knew" that Carl Benz "invented" the automobile.
It took me some classic car TV show episodes showing steam and electeic cars existing *way* before any Benz one, to go "Waiiit a minute!".
The same sillinesses exist with the telephone, light bulb, etc, depending on the country.
Goes to show how different our realities can be. Especially those that we never question.
Never attach your ego to a particular view.
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Philo Farnsworth invented TV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Who was the first to master controlled flight? (Score:2)
Americans believe it was the Wrights.
What do Germans believe?
(It was actually the german Otto Lilienthal, who inspired the Wrigths after his death.)
OK, so master may not be the correct term. The Wrights built a glider to Lilienthal's design and were very impressed by his skill in being able to fly it. And eventually Otto's luck ran out and he killed himself.
The Lilienthal gliders (there were several) were essentially weight shift hang gliders. However, he did not actually hang from them which resulted in
Re: Who was the first to master controlled flight? (Score:2)
A lot of the early pioneers of flight crashed and died before they could achieve powered flight. Wright brothers were lucky and also had a design with extra wings out front which kept the nose up in a stall.
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Certainly doesn't sound like Edison (Score:2)
From TFS description he sounds a lot more like a brilliant and innovative engineer than a shrewd businessman exploiting the same and taking credit for their work. So more like a British Tesla than Edison.
no electric cars in the 1830s -- before Maxwell (Score:1)
It's a typo that "There has been attempts at electrical cars before Parker's going back as far as the 1830s." No such thing was possible in the 1830s.
James Clerk Maxwell didn't publish his theory of Electromagnetism and equations until 1861. It was some years before the first electrical devices were invented. Not the 1830s.
Re: no electric cars in the 1830s -- before Maxwel (Score:2)
It's a typo that "There has been attempts at electrical cars before Parker's going back as far as the 1830s." Whoosh... and yet that "typo" isn't even a typo; sounds more like an inbreeding-induced grammatical error.
Re: no electric cars in the 1830s -- before Maxwel (Score:2, Informative)
You don't need Maxwell's theory to get a wheel turning by electricity, you need a battery (1820s or earlier) and Faraday's law (1830).
Re:no electric cars in the 1830s -- before Maxwell (Score:4, Informative)
The first electric motors that could do useful work were invented in the 1830s. What held them back from practical application was a suitable power source. The rechargeable lead-acid battery was invented in 1859, and the first electric power systems, making recharging them on a regular basis practical, appeared in the 1870s.
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Commercially important uses of electricity go back to the 1830's. The original electrical industry that was transformative for society as a whole was the use of electroplating for the printing industry, starting in the 1830's. It allowed a print forme (metal type with all the printer's accoutrements) to be "recorded", cast in plaster in order to make a mould from which a new print fome could be recast. Electrotyping allowed metal to be deposited on the casting, hardening it up to be durable and useful fo
Revolutionary? (Score:3)
The Elwell-Parker car was fitted with Parker's high-capacity rechargeable batteries, and later vehicles had hydraulic brakes on all four wheels, as well as four-wheel steering. These features are even now being described as revolutionary.
At the time, sure. The only way those things are close to anything revolutionary today is that the wheels revolve. Even four wheel steering is old news now, there were low-end sports cars with it as an option back in the eighties, and some high-end ones of today have got it as well. And uh, hydraulic brakes? Yeah, those are pretty normal.
4WS will probably never take off as a mainstream feature, though, because hub motors have become feasible recently. The brake rotor hat goes away, leaving only the rotor, connected to the inside of the wheel instead of to the wheel hub. The caliper shrinks, because its job is easier. The motor is built into the hub, and in the end the wheel assembly ends up weighing about what it would have without a motor in it. With a motor per wheel you can do instant torque vectoring.
Hydraulic brakes are here to stay, though.
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4WS is even easier with hub motors.
4WS is no easier or harder with hub motors.
With a properly-designed system, you can do cool things like drive sideways into a parallel parking space without "turning."
You would be hard-pressed to skid-steer your way sideways into a tight parking space without actual 4WS. Even with it, you would be hard-pressed to do better than a zigzag. But you really don't actually need it any more if you've got a hub motor at each wheel, and can do fully independent torque vectoring. In fact, you could also reduce the front wheel steering angle, and get part of the steering force from torque vectoring every time you made a sharp turn, since t
Re:Revolutionary? (Score:4, Interesting)
If your steering wheels are in the back, it's dynamically unstable. Try pushing the bike backwards. If the steering wheel tips to the left so the bike turns to the right, the inertia actually makes the steering wheel tip further to the left, making it turn even faster to the right.
You can see the same thing in your car. If you turn the steering wheel slightly and creep forward, it will gradually straighten out. But if you creep backwards, the steering wheel will turn more and the turn will get tighter. The tendency is worse the higher your speed.
To prevent this in 4WS, either the front wheels need to be easier to turn than the rear wheels (which makes the steering "looser" and is dangerous), or you need some sort of mechanical linkage or electronic lock which prevents the rear wheels from turning at higher speeds. The 4WS Honda Prelude you allude to had a linkage where the rear wheels turned in the same direction as the front for slight turns of the steering wheel, opposite direction for large turns. Thus it didn't turn unstable until you turned the steering wheel past a certain angle, and Honda figured you'd never turn the steering wheel that much at high speed.
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The 4WS Honda Prelude you allude to had a linkage where the rear wheels turned in the same direction as the front for slight turns of the steering wheel, opposite direction for large turns. Thus it didn't turn unstable until you turned the steering wheel past a certain angle, and Honda figured you'd never turn the steering wheel that much at high speed.
Nissan HiCAS rear steering had the same problem, they had somehow fixed it by the time they did Super HiCAS for the S13 in 1989. It's speed-sensitive.
Makes sense (Score:2)
Railroad Laws (Score:2)
Sad, even in 1884, the large corporations (this time, being railroad) went out of their way to limit the customer appeal of this vehicle by defining how it had to be manned and having to have a person walk in front of it with a red flag...Really????
Today, while we are more concerned about the 0-60 speed, the real usefulness of electric vehicles is on their range between recharging. Thankfully, more charging stations are being built. Still, when we hear of Tesla having problems, we have to wonder why. Thi
Electric? Electrical? (Score:2)
There is a difference, but the article writer sure is hedging their bets.
Electric means providing or powered by electricity. An electric engineer, for example, would probably be robot
Electrical means anything else concerning electricity.
Things other than ICE were common in the early day (Score:4, Insightful)
This is old news in more ways than one to anybody who knows anything about the history of autos.
Electrics were pitched in the USA around the turn of the 20th century as a "lady's car" because women didn't have to worry about crank-starting.
Steam cars were also popular in the early days, and held speed records for a while.
The electric cars of the late 19th and early 20th century used battery chemistry of the era. While they technically did invent electric cars, they didn't invent the kind of car that could compete with ICEs like the modern ones do.
That's why ICEs won the power competition in the early 20th century and dominated so long.
So who killed the Parker? (Score:2)
I'd like to see a conspiracy theory documentary along the lines of "Who killed the EV-1"?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I'd like to see a conspiracy theory documentary along the lines of "Who killed the EV-1"?
Nobody had to kill it. Fuel got cheap and ICEs got to be good enough for the masses when they got electric starters and a decent gearbox. They couldn't possibly take off until vulcanization, because before that we couldn't have pneumatic tires. Of course, now many of us are hoping for tweels to kill off the pneumatic tire...