Thomas Edison’s counsel to Henry Ford proved right in the end, and electric cars ultimately couldn’t beat out their fuel-guzzling competitors in the early 1900s for the same reasons they still haven’t entirely caught on today—they’re more expensive and they can’t go as far on a single charge as gas-powered cars can travel on a full tank. Their failure a century ago partly accounts for why Morrison himself has been forgotten. Not that he’d have cared. “I wouldn’t give ten cents for an automobile for my own use,” Morrison told a reporter from the Des Moines Register and Leader in 1907. Despite
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