The Electric Car Is Older Than Gasoline: Robert Anderson's 1830s Invention

A Technology Born Before Its Time

Robert Anderson of Aberdeen, Scotland, built a crude electrically powered carriage sometime between 1832 and 1839. The vehicle used non-rechargeable galvanic cells — essentially early batteries based on the voltaic pile design — to power an electric motor that drove the wheels. It was not practical for everyday use by any contemporary measure: the cells could not be recharged and were expensive to replace, the vehicle was heavy and slow, and the power output was extremely limited. But it moved under electrical power without any horse, without any burning fuel, and without any direct human effort beyond controlling its direction.

Anderson was not alone in this pioneering period. In the 1830s and 1840s, inventors across Europe and the United States were experimenting with electrically powered vehicles. The Hungarian inventor Ányos Jedlik built a small electric model carriage in 1828, and the American blacksmith Thomas Davenport built an electric motor in 1834 and demonstrated it by running a small electrical locomotive on a circular track. The Scottish chemist Robert Davidson built a full-scale electric locomotive in 1837 that briefly traveled on the Edinburgh-Glasgow railway before being destroyed by hostile railroad workers who saw it as a threat to their jobs.

Why Electric Vehicles Dominated the Early Automobile Era

By the late nineteenth century, as battery technology improved and electrical infrastructure expanded, electric vehicles were genuinely competitive with — and in many ways superior to — early gasoline automobiles. The first electrically powered vehicle to exceed 100 km/h was an electric car called La Jamais Contente, driven by Belgian racing driver Camille Jenatzy in 1899. At the dawn of the twentieth century, electric vehicles outsold all other types of automobile in the United States. They were quieter, cleaner, more reliable, and easier to start than gasoline cars, which required a hand-cranked ignition that was physically demanding and occasionally broke wrists.

Electric taxis operated in New York City. Electric milk floats — the slow, quiet delivery vehicles that became iconic in Britain — were in use from the 1880s onward. Thomas Edison himself drove an electric car and believed electric vehicles were the future of personal transportation, working to develop improved batteries while his famous rival Henry Ford took a different path.

How Gasoline Won the Twentieth Century

The triumph of the internal combustion engine over electricity in the automobile market was not inevitable — it was the result of specific historical circumstances. The discovery and development of cheap petroleum, particularly the massive Texas oil strikes of the early 1900s, made gasoline inexpensive. Henry Ford's mass production system drove down the price of gasoline automobiles dramatically. The invention of the electric starter in 1912 eliminated the cranking problem that had made gasoline cars physically demanding to start. And the infrastructure for fueling gasoline cars — pumps at service stations — was easier to build in rural areas than the electrical grid needed to charge battery vehicles.

By the 1920s, gasoline had won, and the electric car retreated to specialized niches: milk floats, golf carts, industrial vehicles, and urban delivery. It remained there for most of the twentieth century, a quiet reminder that the dominant technology is not always the first technology, and that energy economics and infrastructure can overwhelm technical merit.

The modern renaissance of electric vehicles — driven by improved battery chemistry, falling manufacturing costs, and growing concern over carbon emissions — brings the technology full circle. The electric car that Robert Anderson built in an Aberdeen workshop in the 1830s was two centuries ahead of the infrastructure needed to make it practical. The infrastructure has now arrived, and with it the recognition that the road to the electric future actually began in the past.