America's First Police Car was Electric.

BUILT IN OHIO. STOLEN BY A MOB. DUMPED IN A CANAL.

Long before the hype cycles, the TED Talks, and the smug glow of Silicon Valley, there was Akron. A tough, grimy town that smelled like burning rubber and cheap whiskey. In 1899, this place—of all places—became the birthplace of something no one saw coming: the first electric police car in the United States.

Yeah. Electric. In the nineteenth century.

Built by the Collins Buggy Company for a wallet-scorching $2,400—roughly the price of a midlife crisis today—the car was a hulking, 5,000-pound Frankenstein. Two electric motors, 4 horsepower each, with a max speed of 18 miles per hour if you were lucky and the wind was right. Range? 30 miles. Enough to chase a drunk through downtown but not enough to outrun the kind of change barreling toward the 20th century.

It had electric headlights. A prisoner cell. A gong instead of a siren—because why the hell not. Officer Louis Mueller Sr., a poor soul with a badge and probably a handlebar mustache, was handed the keys to this beast. His job? Patrol the streets in what was essentially a motorized shoebox with a cage welded to the back.

FIRST CALL: DRUNK GUY.

Its first action wasn’t a high-speed chase. It was some guy hammered off his ass, stumbling around downtown Akron. Disorderly conduct. That’s how this miracle of engineering earned its stripes. Not exactly Hollywood.

And then, because history always writes its best punchlines in blood and fire…

THE MOB TOOK IT.

During the 1900 Akron Riot—one of those angry, molten moments that small-town America tries to forget—a furious crowd swarmed the streets, seized the electric patrol car, smashed it up like a piñata full of progress, and rolled it into the Ohio & Erie Canal.

That was it. The end of the future. Or so it seemed.

The cops, stubborn as hell, dragged it out, patched it together, and put it back on duty. It limped along for a few more years until 1905, when they sold it for scrap. Twenty-five bucks. One last insult before it disappeared.

Akron never ordered another one. The world got faster, dirtier, and more dangerous. Electric motors were no match for Tommy guns and getaway cars. Gasoline won. Progress, once again, came wrapped in noise and fire.

But for one strange, flickering moment—before Teslas, before Twitter, before Elon Musk became a household name—America’s first electric police car prowled the streets. And it came from Akron.

History doesn’t always happen in neon lights. Sometimes it hums quietly, then sinks into a canal.