The Infernal Combustion Engine!

My son came round the other day and he was telling us about this programme or podcast that he had seen. It was a thought experiment regarding vehicles. Basically, the speaker was imagining a world where the electric vehicle was the only option and someone was proposing a petrol or diesel driven vehicle. It would become very clear very quickly what an appalling invention was being proposed.

The Internal Combustion Engine would be associated with pollution, destruction of the environment in countless areas through the requirement to drill into the ground and sea and, as a side issue, be the cause of wars and territorial disputes in countries like Venezuela, Iran and Greenland, to take three random examples, where spurious reasons for taking over a territory might be given by a greedy super power intent on profiting from a huge amount of oil lying in the ground.

The first attempts to produce commercial electric vehicles were patented in the late 19th century and Andreas Flocken is credited with building the first proper road going electric vehicle in 1888. Many other areas of life happily relied on electricity to run things. Electricity was used in trains both underground and overground from the same time and are still in use today. Why didn’t it work? Well, the original batteries were fine for the shorter trips favoured at the start of the 20th century and were in fact more reliable than the fuel in petrol driven cars. Unfortunately, people started to want to drive longer distances and neither electric nor petrol vehicles had the infrastructure needed to support them. So a choice had to be made, and to the extreme detriment of the environment petrol stations rather than charging points were chosen.

Money talks as they say, and the oil based motor industry paid off more politicians than the electric equivalent. If the reverse had been the case we would be living in a much better, cleaner and more peaceful world. The Infernal Combustion Engine (the typo is deliberate by the way!) has been nothing but a disaster for our world and it should never have been invented.