Electric outboards were at sea fifty years before Tesla

Electric motors for boating are not a recent invention. As early as 1886 Werner von Siemens built Elektra, the world’s first ship with a propeller driven by an electric motor. Germany’s ability to play with electricity also manifests itself in more boating applications, and in the first half of the last century Siemens-Schuckert came up with the PG 28-a 120 W electric outboard motor. And this historic piece, as well as three other Tesla marine precursors, are on display in the museum in Nils Häggblom, a 75-year-old Finnish young man in love with old outboards and windsurfing even as he collects, restores and exhibits only the former in the Outboard Museum (Perämoottorimuseo, in Finnish) in Tirmo, some 30 kilometers east of Helsinki. For climatic reasons, the museum is only open during the summer season.

Looking at the four examples exhibited at the Helsinki boat show, one can see how in fact the electric motor was very close to its current form from the beginning. Suggesting that the problem with the lack of widespread adoption of electric propulsion is only in battery capacity. Interesting to see how different manufacturers have interpreted the user interface over time. A specimen of which neither brand name, year of construction, nor power is disclosed, but it may be a model dating back to the 1970s: it carries only a switch with three positions: 0, 1 and 2. Essential, but clear enough.

Dating back to 1969 is American Shakespeare’s WonderTroll, a company still active today, but now only as an antenna manufacturer after abandoning the production of radio transceiver equipment. Here we can see that the aesthetics are not that far removed from a radio transmitter of those years. Controls include on and off on the throttle, forward and reverse via lever switch, selector switch for 6- or 12-volt use, and power regulator: high, medium, and low. In addition, an additional switch turned on the light (but it is no longer known which one). A sign reminded people to operate the engine only when in the water. Also from the U.S., but dating back to 1955, and still bearing the same safety inscription is the Silvertrol, at the time still awaiting patent registration, a trademark that the Silver Creek Precision Corporation, had been using since 1946. Here the controls are all push-button with five options: off, low, 2nd, 3rd and maximum.

Given the success that these electric outboard motors are having today (on fishermen’s boats they are becoming more and more common) one wonders whether in addition to aesthetics the demand for more efficient thrusters will lead us to see totally different motors, or whether it will just be a matter of design that will change the outboards of the future.