Welcome to the Kotkeye Ride Home for Monday, August 30th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird. Today, electric cars were being made as far back as the late 19th century, with entire fleets of electric cabs roaming the streets of several major cities.

So what happened? Why didn't they become the go-to vehicle from the beginning?

Plus, the history of the very delicious and confusingly named Boston Cooler, and the middle

schoolers trying to clear the name of a woman accused of being a witch back in 1693.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

The electric car revolution is finally, hopefully, beginning to go mainstream, but it turns out it's taken even longer than I realized. The debate

over electric versus gas cars goes back pretty much to the beginning of cars themselves. And the

reason gas cars won out? Here's a hint. It was misogyny. Well, at least in part. So Slate

recently ran an excerpt from Tom Standage's new book,

A Brief History of Motion, from the wheel to the car to what comes next, and he dives into

the development of electric cars all the way back in the 19th century. So way back in 1897,

the best-selling car in the U.S., he says, was the Columbia from Pope Manufacturing Company,

an electric model.

Now, its lead wouldn't last long as steam vehicles became pretty popular for a hot minute there,

and then by 1903, the Oldsmobile curved dash came out, a gas-powered automobile, and it took

the lead in popularity.

And even though many in Europe had already become gasoline converts, in the U.S., the debate was still ongoing through the

first decade of the 1900s. And what exactly were the main points of the debate? Well, as

Standage points out, cars were supposed to fix a lot of the problems that people had with horse-drawn vehicles.

You know, issues like noise, traffic, accidents, and the pollution and stench caused by horse manure.

Now, Standage is well aware of the irony that the gas-powered cars that won out failed on exactly all of those points,

well, except the manure.

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