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Chapter 3: Electric Vehicle History 35Fi g u r e 3-2 Growth of the three vehicle types in the United States from 1900 to 2000.knows (or cares) that the wheels of your vehicle turn because the electricity wasgenerated from water turning a turbine wheel linked to a generator? We take electricityfor granted today and are continually developing new uses for it, primarily because ofits advantages—it’s clean, simple, available, and reliable. But our modern electricalheritage owes a great debt to many pioneers.Alessandro Volta, building on the experiments of Luigi Galvani in 1782, inventedthe electric battery—his “Voltaic pile”—in 1800. Joseph Henry, building on theexperiments of Han Christian Oersted in 1819 and Andre Ampere in 1820, created thefirst primitive direct current (DC) electric motor in 1830. Michael Faraday demonstratedthe induction principle and the first electric DC generator in 1831. Battery-poweredelectric technology was applied to the first land vehicle by Thomas Davenport in 1834,to a small boat by M. H. Jacobi in 1834, and to the first battery-powered locomotive—the five-ton “Galvani”—by Robert Davidson in 1838.Moses Fanner unveiled a two-passenger electric car in 1847, and Charles Pageshowed off a 20-mph electric car in 1851, but Gaston Plante’s lead-acid “rechargeable”battery breakthrough of 1859—improved upon by Camille Favre in 1881 and H. Tudorin 1890—paved the way for extended electric vehicle use. Nikola Tesla’s alternatingcurrent (AC) induction motor of 1882 and subsequent polyphase patents paved the wayfor the AC electrical power distribution infrastructure we use today. By the 1890s, DCpower distribution via dynamos had been in use for a decade. AC power distributionbegan with the 1896 Niagara Falls power plant contract award to George Westinghouse