4 articles on history.
From J.P. Morgan funding Edison’s first power station to a driver financing a battery on EMI — 140 years of the same problem, which is who bears the risk of building something that only pays back over decades.
Edison’s first power station could not send electricity further than about a mile. The story of how that limit was broken — through the transformer, the 1891 Frankfurt demonstration, HVDC, and India’s synchronisation into a single grid in 2013.
The motor in your e-rickshaw works on a principle patented in 1888. Here is how it got there — and why almost everything that has actually changed about electric vehicles happened somewhere other than the motor.
Two centuries of storage, from a stack of zinc and copper discs in 1800 to the LFP pack under an e-rickshaw — and why the battery, not the motor, has been the thing holding electrification back the entire time.