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In 1895, Ogden Bolton Jr. was issued US patent number 552,271 for a new and useful improvement in "electrical bicycles" in which the entire motor assembly was tidily built into the rear wheel. With a battery pack secured in the triangle frame and throttle wires going up to the handlebar, the patent diagrams bear uncanny resemblance to the modern hub motor electric bike. Another patent from 1899 shows a friction roller drive on a pedal bicycle that looks just like the ZAP kits from the 1990s. USPTO 656,323 from 1897 shows an electric bicycle where the motor drives the pedal cranks, what we call a 'mid-drive' today. For active members of the current e-bike community, it's a bit surprising to find out that what feels like such a recent idea could have a history so old.

At the end of the 1800s, the heyday of bicycle inventions in the West gave way to a century-long love affair with the automobile and all the effects of that infatuation. In an era when progress meant freeways, when petroleum supplies were unlimited, and bicycles were mostly seen as weekend recreation, it would have been hard to pitch an electric bike as some kind of ground breaking idea. That is the problem that Felicio Sadalla, an industrial engineer and garage inventor from Sao Paulo faced three decades ago. In 1975 he cobbled together a DC motor from a truck radiator, a pile of nickel cadmium batteries salvaged from an airplane scrap yard and an old red two-wheeler to build what may have been Brazil's first e-bike.

Felicio felt that bicycles were a much more sensible a means of transportation than the prevailing automobile and that the electric assist could maintain that efficiency with a more widespread appeal. But the timing wasn't right in 1975 for his idea to have any traction. Two years later the parts for his first e-bike were back in the scrapyard. Though Felicio went on to work with electric and then early hybrid cars, the appeal of a simple electric bicycle lingered in the back of his head as concept whose time may one day come.

It was in Japan that electric bicycles first reached any kind of mainstream acceptance. In the mid 1990s some 10-20 percent of the bicycle market was electric assist. But the numbers plateaued, as Japanese e-bikes were said to be designed for and used almost entirely by "old people and housewives,” and had limited appeal to commuters as a whole. A few years later China showed the world just what significant reach electric bicycles can have. The numbers there exploded exponentially, from several hundred thousand at the start of this century to 100-120 million today.

E-bikes in China outsell cars four to one. Their sudden popularity has confounded and stumped planners and traffic engineers trying to pave the way for China to follow in America's tracks and become the next automobile powerhouse. For the Chinese, the e-bike ("Battery Bike" would be the more literal translation) is really an electric scooter. It's a step above the bicycle when you can't afford a car, and in a large nation rapidly rising from a peasant country to a superpower, this describes a lot of people.