In 1881, in Paris, Gustave Trouvé fastened a lead-acid battery and a motor to a British tricycle, et voilà, he puttered his contraption along the Rue de Valois. Fourteen years later, on the last day of 1895, Ogden Bolton, Jr., received United States patent No. 552,271 for a battery-powered electric bicycle with a “6-pole brush-and-commutator direct current (DC) hub motor mounted in the rear wheel.”