STACK #190 Aug 2020

LIFE TECH FEATURE

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COME GLIDE WITH ME Leave the car keys on the hall room table. The e-transport revolution is here!

“H ey, little girl! I need to borrow your… hoverboard?” shouts Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II as he detaches a skateboard deck from the little girl’s hover scooter and shoots away, levitating above the ground. It was a scene that sent imaginations spiralling into the possibilities of powered scooters and skateboards. Designers and Kickstarter campaigns have developed prototypes in recent times, but the dream of owning – and

Gliding along the street at 20kph on an e-scooter is a nostalgic wonderland for any rider, irrespective of age. Far from being the latest fad, rideables are here to stay. If you live in Brisbane – or have travelled overseas in recent years – you’ll be aware of the rideshare schemes where hiring an electric scooter is as easy as downloading an app. There are a myriad of reasons to join the rideables revolution, and it’s time to get involved.

using – an actual Marty McFly hoverboard currently remains elusive; the preserve of the inventor’s workshop. Forget the hip-breaking two-wheeled hoverboards that were all over the news when they launched five years ago (often for the wrong reasons), the humble electric scooter, in our opinion, is as close as you can currently get to the hoverboard experience. Step on, push two or three times with your foot, press a button and bingo, you’re off.

A Brief History Of… Way back in 1895, the first electric bike patent was filed by American inventor Ogden Bolton Jr. It didn’t go very far. A succession of electric-powered inventions followed – with batteries the size of armchairs – before the zippy Autoped made its debut in 1915. Strictly not an electric kick scooter, the Autoped – a machine that bears a striking resemblance to a contemporary e-scooter – was petrol-powered and found use with New York traffic police. It kickstarted (pun intended) a fad that would last up until the Second World War. Fast-forward to 1967 and Karl Kordesch, a gentleman jointly responsible for the invention of the alkaline battery for Eveready, built a bike that ran on alkaline fuel cells and could move at 25mph for 200 miles. Design and invention in the field of electric bikes and scooters continued to evolve and in 2001, Californian company Go-Ped introduced the first mass-produced electric scooter. However, it wasn’t until improvements to lithium ion batteries – delivering greater propulsion – that the electric kick scooter came into its own.

50 AUGUST 2020

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