The all-electric car coming in 2010

Harry Truman is credited with saying the only really new ideas can be found in the history we are unaware of. His sentiment came to mind the other day as I read about the Chevrolet Volt, an all-electric car scheduled to go on sale in the fall of 2010.

This exciting new idea, the Volt, will hit the streets just 120 years after William Morrison began cruising downtown Des Moines in an all-electric car he didn’t bother to name. The Morrison machine was basically an open carriage with rack and pinion steering. A number of batteries, stored under the seats, propelled the car at speeds up to 20 mph. Accounts vary as to how long a charge was good for, but Morrison often buzzed around town for two or three hours or more, then recharged overnight.

Morrison’s creation is credited with being the first successful electric car. While the electric version wasn’t considered practical, a good many people liked the idea.

Our Montgomery County Agriculture Society was not impressed. In an ironic twist it was in 1890, the year Morrison put his automobile on the streets, that the society attracted Morris J. Jones and his string of harness horses. The society, envisioning Montgomery County as the hub of a burgeoning harness horse business that would meet transportation demands of the future, apparently didn’t think this automobile scheme was going anywhere.

Jones brought some nice horses to Montgomery County, including a two-year-old that was soon to electrify the sporting world and change the geography of Red Oak. Alix was, in the opinion of many sportswriters of her era, the finest trotter in the “Golden Age” of harness racing. During her glory days she heard the cheers of thousands, set records that will never be broken, then was misused in a manner that caused true horsemen to turn away in disgust.

The Montgomery County History Center will be hosting a program on Alix at 2 p.m. July 19th, and the public is invited. No charge, and I plan to be there.