History of the electric vehicle Colten in the United States in 1847. Rechargeable batteries that provided a viable means for storing electricity on board a vehicle did not come into being until 1859, with the invention of the lead–acid battery by French physicist Gaston Planté. Camille Alphonse Faure, another French scientist, significantly improved the design of the battery in 1881; his improvements greatly increased the capacity of such batteries and led directly to their manufacture on an industrial scale. An early electric-powered two-wheel cycle was put on display at the 1867 World Exposition in Paris by the Austrian inventor Franz Kravogl, but it was regarded
John Read (inventor) after his death. John Read (inventor) John Read was a British physicist and inventor. He developed a rotating doubler electrostatic generator, used to produce static electricity, which he called a 'spectacle doubler' because it involved discs of glass. His work was based on William Nicholson's doubler. Reid lived in Knightsbridge, London and taught at the Knightsbridge Charity School. He made observations of the atmospheric electric field, which he observed behaved differently in different air quality conditions, in 1791 and 1792. This phenomenon is now understood as originating from the global electric circuit. Richard Lovett was the first British academic to