The Elektron was an electrically powered ship from the company Escher Wyss & Co. in Zurich . It was shown for the first time under the name of Zurich at the Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt in 1891 . It was made of sheet steel , had a continuous canopy made of white canvas and a fixed cabin structure in the rear area .
The length was 16 meters and around 15 meters in the waterline , the width was around 3 meters and the draft 1.1 meters. The electric motor had a nominal output of 8 HP (5.9 kW ) at a speed of 350 revolutions per minute. The accumulator battery made up of gel cells had a capacity of 450 ampere hours , the discharge current was around 80 amperes . The ship ran at a speed of 10 kilometers per hour. The accumulator from the Accumulatoren-Fabrik Oerlikon consisted of 56 elements in glass vessels, which were arranged in the lower part of the ship. For applications with heavy loads on the batteries (trams, ships), Oerlikon recommended gel filling, while batteries with acid filling for low loads. Disadvantages of gel batteries were the drying out of the cells and the loss of capacity. Therefore, a little water should be poured onto the gel mass from time to time.
modification
After the exhibition, the ship was bought by the Allgemeine-Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft , renamed electron and then used on the Berlin Wannsee . The previous sensitive glass cells of the gel accumulator were replaced by more robust cells of the lead accumulators according to the Tudor principle of the accumulator factory . Henri Tudor had this patented as his invention in Luxembourg in 1886 and in France in 1887. The accumulator thus had a capacity of 350 ampere-hours, the discharge current was also 80 amps.
Kurt Groggert: Passenger shipping on the Havel and Spree. Berlin contributions to the history of technology and industrial culture, volume 10, Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung Berlin, 1988, ISBN 3-7759-0153-1 .
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