Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Imagining it doesn't mean building it
The Sinclair C5
Clive Sinclair launched his aerodynamic bathtub, the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle, in 1985, and it flopped so badly it became a national joke in the UK. Some of that was bad choices in design and marketing. Electric cars also need affordable, high-capacity batteries, and those did not exist yet.
The Pocket Crystal Gap
The Pocket Crystal faced a version of the same gap. By the time Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, the price of memory had fallen a thousandfold since 1994, and a typical microprocessor had 500 times the processing power. There was Wi-Fi and there were 3G phone networks, and the web had Google, Amazon, and news websites on it.
The Pocket Crystal was imagined in 1989 and reached the market in 1994, into a world with none of that, where the web was just a curiosity.
Why did batteries hold back early electric cars?
The Sinclair C5 had a 250-watt motor and a top speed of 15 miles per hour, the UK limit for a vehicle that needed no licence. Its rechargeable lead-acid battery stored little energy for its weight. Lead-acid batteries hold roughly 30 to 40 watt-hours per kilogram, while modern lithium-ion cells hold several times that.
How did lithium-ion batteries change electric cars?
Sony commercialized the lithium-ion cell in 1991. Cells of this type carry several times more energy per kilogram than lead-acid ones. Over the following decades, demand from phones and laptops drove manufacturing volume up and prices down. Tesla's first car, the Roadster, went on sale in 2008 powered by thousands of laptop-style lithium-ion cells.
How did Wi-Fi spread so quickly?
The IEEE approved the 802.11b standard in 1999, which allowed products from different makers to work together. Apple's AirPort base station, released that year, was among the first mass-market Wi-Fi products and sold for $299. Laptops and cafes adopted it through the early 2000s. The Wi-Fi Alliance formed in 1999 to certify that products interoperate.