The first U.S. electric automobile, designed by Philip W. Pratt, was demonstrated in Boston, a tricycle powered by six Electrical Accumulator Company cells, weighing 90 pounds. Pratt held a number of patents as an inventor, the most significant being the first practical automatic fire sprinkler system (1872). His other inventions included furniture pads for chair leg tips (1878), a spring toy gun (1892), glazed target for vacuum-tipped toy arrows (1890), crutch (1901) and a bath mitten (1889). Some years earlier than Pratt's tricycle, in 1874, a three-wheeled electric vehicle had been built earlier by Sir David Salomons in Tunbridge Wells, England. It was a 1 h.p. device powered by Bunsen cells. By 1895, the first British manufacturer of electric cars was Acme & Immisch Electrical Works at Chalk Farm, London.

Cyrus W. Field finally succeeded, after two failures, in laying the first underwater telegraph cable 1,686 miles long across the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Europe. Massachusetts merchant and financier Cyrus W. Field first proposed laying a 2,000-mile copper cable along the ocean bottom from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1854, but the first three attempts ended in broken cables and failure. Field's persistence finally paid off in July 1866, when the Great Eastern, the largest ship then afloat, successfully laid the cable along the level, sandy bottom of the North Atlantic.