In 1838, Moritz von Jacobi demonstrated the first electrically powered boat on the Neva River in St. Petersburg, Russia. The boat, powered by an electric motor driven by large battery cells, carried passengers along the Neva at a speed of about three miles per hour, making it the first known application of electric propulsion to a vehicle. This demonstration on the Neva, witnessed by Tsar Nicholas I, proved that electric motors could provide practical propulsion, though the limited capacity of contemporary batteries prevented widespread adoption for another century.

The image of an electric boat gliding silently along the Neva captured the literary imagination as a symbol of a new, cleaner, and more graceful relationship between technology and nature. St. Petersburg, already one of the most important settings in world literature through the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, gained a new layer of technological significance through Jacobi's demonstration. The silent, electrically powered vessel on the Neva prefigured the literary modernist fascination with technologies that could transform urban experience without the noise and smoke of industrial machinery.