rom the very beginning of electric boating, yards had the choice of timber or metal. Gustave Trouvé’s first electric boat trialled on the Seine in Paris in 1881 was a wooden punt and indeed by 1884, the mahogany e-boat was the first to be seen in the British Empire. The aesthetic idea of building traditional-looking wooden boats and installing modern electric motors and batteries was conceived in 1988 on both sides of the Atlantic. On the Upper Thames, Colin Henwood, an experienced boatbuilder, replicated a traditional 25ft (7.62m) mahogany and teak Edwardian-style punt, powered it by an 800-watt Aquamot motor and called it Voltaire. Across the Pond, Tom Hesselink at Budsin Wood Craft was asked to build an electric boat for a resident at nearby Roaring Gap Lake in North Carolina. Improving the design of the 15ft (4.57m) e-boats which used to use that lake back in the 1930s, Hesselink installed a 3/4HP, 24VDC motor made by Pacific Scientific (now Kollmorgen) with energy from standard deep-cycle, lead acid batteries. In 1989, Erio Matteri shipyard at Lezzeno on Lake Como, Italy built a 33ft (10.06m) electric wooden runabout named , a European first. Further upstream on the Thames, Peter Freebody of Hurley, known for his fine restorations of river launches and cabin cruisers, built his first traditional-looking wooden electric boat, the 27ft (8.3m) Tadpole, based on an 1884 design and powered by an, and . Since then, many electric boatbuilders, aiming at series-production, have chosen glass fibre. Others have built in aluminium and composites for the light weight, and others have restored and retrofitted old hulls. The boats that follow have stayed with traditional-looking timber boat construction. I have presented them as a chronology of the vessels that inspired them.
