Essays in Idleness

Canada has travelled considerably downhill during the last century or two. Did you know, for instance, that in 1893 we were already making electric cars? I first learnt this as a stamp collector, for the electric van of the Still Motor Co is depicted on a pretty lithographic postal stamp — one of a set with dozens of other early national voitures, though not all of them électrique. Made here in Toronto at the Dixon Carriage Works (“a nice little two-seater open runabout”), and first commissioned by the prominent lawyer, Frederick Bernard Fetherstonhaugh (pronounced FAN-shaw).

“Still,” too, is a delightful name to stick upon a car manufacturer. William Still was the Musk-ic engineer who got it rolling.

As an old-fashioned person, often accused of Ludditism, I especially favour electric autocars, and the patient recharging of batteries off the railway system. They last and last; Fetherstonhaugh kept his model well into the second-last century. With pneumatic tires, mud flaps, and a civilized maximum speed of fifteen miles per hour, it was exceedingly comfortable and polite. Electric engines are quiet and smooth, not noisy and smelly like one of these horrible combustion things.