59 years ago, our carriage house in Newark Ohio had wiring for an electric car of an earlier era
https://x.com/RichardKCollin2/status/1841626591853441064
93 Year Old Battery Charger, Will It Work? Let’s See!
My Comment: 59 years ago, our carriage house in Newark Ohio had wiring for an electric car of an earlier era (1920s? 1930s? earlier?). Was it an Ohio Baker Electric car? We moved to Ohio from Florida where my Dad worked at Cape Canaveral and my chemistry teacher (I was a freshman) worked at Rocketdyne and I learned Schrodinger’s equation and field methods before we learned wet chemistry. I never traced which car it was, but I still have a memory of the wires on the wall of that carriage house. Electric cars often preceded gasoline cars, because motors were easy if you were willing to put 100s of pounds (50s of kg) of batteries.
Writing “carriage house” I almost wrote “car barn”. When I was working at Georgetown University Center for Population Research and studying magnetic and atomic and nuclear chemistry (KeV and MeV chemical reactions), I worked in the car barn building next to the Exorcist stairs. And that had been an electric street car terminal. In the early 2000s I was a contract manager at FTA (Federal Transit Administration) and one project was maglev trains and systems.
Is your life filled with coincidences? Or do we gravitate to places because they attract us? I learned about gravitational detectors because I met Joe Weber and I kept going back to magnetism because his name was Weber. It was fun and light hearted, it was not serious, because gravity is littered with dead bodies and things like his dead career.
So when Tesla tried again with slightly better batteries, I was curious but not expecting much. My vision of the future came from hating belching chemical rockets in those struggles just to get to the Moon. Kennedy’s assassination was announced in my algebra class and all I could think was s**t there goes any long term space plans. I was too young to say s**t in those days. The picture of Back to the Future “Mr Fusion” seems about right. And those guys loading fuel cells into the ship for the Fifth Element. Casual every day stuff, as it ought to be. Not too serious because you cannot get too locked to anything with only only one lifetime.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
