In the early part of the century, innovators in Hungary, the Netherlands and the United States—including a blacksmith from Vermont—began toying with the concept of a battery-powered vehicle and created some of the first small-scale electric cars. And while Robert Anderson, a British inventor, developed the first crude electric carriage around this same time, it wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century that French and English inventors built some of the first practical electric cars. Which answer most effectively states the author’s main point in the excerpt?