31 August

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction and discovering electro-magnetism, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago, and half a century before the internal combustion engine was invented. A thing of sublime beauty, with next to no moving parts or friction, and almost infinitely scalable power. With a Faraday engine, an ordinary family electric car can go from 0-100 in under 2 seconds. That’s better than a Formula 1 car. They have so much torque, engineers have to scale it back to prevent discomfort. There’s still an assumption in the community that petrol and diesel vehicles have more grunt, and electrics are like granny cars. It’s completely backwards, combustion engines are puny, inefficient, filthy and noisy. With thousands of moving parts that need regular servicing. Some electric trains have been running with the same unchanged electric motors for 80 years. It’s extraordinary that something so much better existed for 50 years before the combustion clunkers were even thought of, and only now are we making the shift back to them. It shows the power of the fossil fuel industry that it’s taken this long.