Traveling<\/a> down a gravelly road in West Orange, New Jersey, an electric car sped by pedestrians, some clearly surprised by the vehicle’s roomy interior. It travelled<\/a> at twice the speed of the more conventional vehicles it overtook, stirring up dust that perhaps tickled the noses of the horses pulling carriages steadily along the street.<\/span><\/p>\n It was the early 1900s, and the driver of this particular car was Thomas Edison<\/strong>. While electric<\/a> cars weren’t a novelty in the neighborhood, most of them relied on heavy and cumbersome lead-acid batteries. Edison had outfitted his car with a new type of battery that he hoped would soon be powering vehicles throughout the country: a nickel-iron battery. Building on the work of the Swedish inventor Ernst Waldemar Jungner<\/strong>, who first patented a nickel-iron battery<\/strong> in 1899, Edison sought to refine the battery for use in automobiles.<\/span><\/p>\n