28,49 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Crowood
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
One hundred years ago electric cars were the most popular automobiles in the world. In the late nineteenth century and at the start of the twentieth century, they outsold every other type of car. And yet, within a couple of decades of the start of the twentieth century, the electric car had vanished. Thousands of battery-powered cars disappeared from the streets, replaced by the internal combustion engine, and their place in the history of the automobile was quietly erased. A century later, electric cars are making a comeback. Fears over pollution and global warming have forced manufacturers to reconsider the electric concept. A History of Electric Cars presents for the first time the full story of electric cars and their hybrid cousins. It examines how and why electric cars failed the first time - and why today's car manufacterers must learn the lessons of the past if they are to avoid repeating previous mistakes all over again. The book examines in detail: Early vehicles such as the Lohner-Porsche petrol-electric hybrid of 1901; Key figures in the history of the electric car development such as Henry Ford; Sir Clive Sinclair's plans to build a number of electric vehicles, designed to sit alongside the Sinclair C5; The return of the electric technology to vehicles as diverse as the NASA Lunar Rover, commuting vehicles and supercars; Future developments in electric cars. For the first time the full story of electric cars and their hybrids are examined.The hidden past of the electric automobile is uncovered and its future developments are discussed. Superbly illustrated with 300 colour photographs, many of which are rare and original sketch designs. Nigel Burton has written and lectured on cars and automotive history for more than twenty years.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Ähnliche
A History of Electric Cars
Nigel Burton
Copyright
First published in 2013 by The Crowood Press Ltd Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
This e-book first published in 2013
© Nigel Burton 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84797 571 3
Dedication I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Jane, whose encouragement and patience helped enormously, and my two children, Jack and Mia, who will hopefully grow up in a world where electric cars are not just curiosities. I am also indebted to the people who gave their time for interviews and provided rare documents for me. Special mention should go to Tony Wood Rogers for his help with the Sinclair C5 chapter, Gary Witzenburg, who provided valuable input on the EV1, and Clarence Milburn, who provided many of the documents and photos for the early chapters. Although the history of the EV is sparse, there have been a few earlier books. Three in particular, The Electric Vehicle, by Gijis Mom, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History, by David Kirsch, and Electric andHybrid Cars, by Curtis and Judy Anderson, proved invaluable for cross-checking facts. Monopoly on Wheels by William Greenleaf, originally published in 1961, is the definitive account of Henry Ford’s battle with the American Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, as described in Chapter 2.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
BEGINNINGS
Frogs’ Legs and Batteries
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the car industry was in its nascent period. Cars were beginning to take over from the horse and carriage, but only the wealthy could afford to buy one. All over the world, hundreds of former carriage companies had diversified into building automobiles. Three propulsion technologies were competing for the emergent market, but only one appeared to have a winning hand: it offered pioneering motorists the quietest and smoothest drive; it powered cars to the land-speed record; it was easy to start and the cars that used it were so simple to drive almost anyone could get to grips with it in a few hours; what’s more, the fuel it used was both cheap and widely available throughout the developed world. Yet, despite these apparently crushing advantages, the electric car failed to capture the buying public’s imagination. Its failure left drivers with only one choice: the internal combustion engine. Indeed, so thoroughly was it routed, that the role electric vehicles played in the early development of the automobile has been largely expunged from history. Only a few grainy black-and-white photos remain of cars that, once upon a time, ruled the roads.
Fast-forward 100 years and the electric car is once again in the ascendency. Vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt are in the vanguard of a new generation of cars that use battery power. Some, like the Prius and the Volt, use electricity to reduce running costs; others, like the Leaf, to slash exhaust pollution, and a select few, like the Porsche 918, harness electric motors to boost their outright performance.
The Porsche 918: state-of-the-art application of petrol–electric hybrid technology promises supercar performance with the running costs of a large family saloon. But this isn’t the first highperformance Porsche hybrid.
Car manufacturers have turned to electricity over fears of a looming environmental disaster. As Carlos Ghosn, chairman and chief executive of the Renault Group, says:
The Renault-Nissan alliance is targeting sales of 1.5m zero emissions vehicles by 2016, delivering a 20 per cent reduction in our carbon footprint and a 35 per cent improvement in our overall fuel economy. Beyond pure sales volumes the LEAF symbolises our wide-angled view of society. The world already has seven billion people and one billion cars. The Nissan LEAF shows that the automobile industry can contribute to sustainability without giving up our role as a source of unmitigated excitement and mobility. The electric car will represent a very big percentage of our industry in the future.
Global warming has brought the electric car – and its close cousin, the hybrid – back from obscurity. However, the obstacles to sales success these new vehicles face are just the same as they have ever been. If the electric car is to accomplish in the twenty-first century what its predecessors so spectacularly failed to achieve a century ago, manufacturers must learn the lessons of the past.
Why did electric cars fail to catch on in the first years of the twentieth century, despite their early advantage? And how did the development of electric vehicles proceed so much faster than the competing technologies of internal combustion and steam power, only to come to a complete halt?
The early years of the electric car are filled with stories of snake oil salesmen, dubious speculators and patent trolls. Many of the outrageous claims made for horseless carriages were untrue. Motorists who found themselves stranded miles from anywhere with a flat battery had good reason to be angry when their car failed to achieve the range-to-empty figures they had been promised. Henry Ford, whose wife used an electric car, was so alarmed by the poor dependability of batteries that he even built a charging station just so he could be sure his wife would always be able to get home.
But, for all their drawbacks, electric cars did have many good points. Had the electric car industry found its own Henry Ford (and it almost persuaded Ford himself to be its advocate, see Chapter 3), history may have been very different.
And it all began with the battery – a ground-breaking discovery, which came about as a result of a friendly dispute over frogs’ legs.
Alessandro Volta: Italian physicist who invented the first battery capable of supplying a reliable electric charge.
Although some historians believe the electrochemical cell was invented in Mesopotamia shortly after the crucifixion of Christ, the man most widely credited with the discovery of the modern-day battery was the Italian chemist and inventor Alessandro Volta.
Volta was born in Como, Italy, and was a physics professor at the city’s Royal School. In 1775, he took an invention by a Swedish professor called Johan Carl Wilcke and refined it to create what he dubbed the electrophorus. The device consisted of a dielectric plate made from resinous material and a metal plate with an insulated handle. When the dielectric plate was charged, by rubbing it with fur or cloth, the resulting electrostatic induction process created a charge in the metal plate, which could be used for experiments.
Volta was fascinated by the potential of electricity. He did pioneering work on what is now known as electrical capacitance, developing a means to study both potential and charge, and experimented with very primitive ignition systems, burning methane via an electrically generated spark.
Around the same time as Volta was refining his electrophorus, one of his fellow countrymen, a physicist called Luigi Galvani who was Professor of Medicine at the University of Bologna, was making an even more important discovery. According to Galvani’s notes, while conducting static electricity on a skinned frog, his assistant accidentally touched the animal’s crural nerve with a steel scalpel, creating an electrical charge. The two saw the frog’s leg kick out as though the (very dead) amphibian were suddenly alive.1 Galvani was convinced that he was seeing the effects of what he dubbed ‘animal electricity’. His experiments led many people at the time to conclude that electricity could be used in some way to revive the dead. This theory of reanimation was the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s famous novel Frankenstein.
However, Volta was not convinced that animal tissue was necessary for the conduction of electricity. To prove this, he assembled plates of copper and zinc separated by pasteboard soaked in an electrolyte (a brine mixture of salt and water). When the top and bottom contacts were connected by wire he measured a continuous electric current. In doing so, Volta had invented the primary battery. In honour of his discovery, it was named the voltaic pile – because the primitive cells were literally ‘piled’ on top of one another.
The battery opened up infinite possibilities. For the first time, inventors could draw a continuous electric current for hours, instead of relying on the erratic sparks produced by the Leyden jar method, which ‘stored’ static electricity in a very primitive form of capacitor.
In 1821, English chemist Michael Faraday built two devices to demonstrate how a wire rod carrying a current from a voltaic pile would rotate around a fixed magnet if one end extended into a liquid conductor that completed the circuit. By reversing the elements, the magnet could be made to rotate around the wire. Faraday had invented the world’s first electric motor. One (possibly apocryphal) story says that during a demonstration for the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, Faraday was asked what possible use his discovery could be, to which he replied: ‘Why Prime Minister, someday you can tax it’.
Faraday’s peers were quick to seize on his breakthrough. A year later, English mathematician and physicist Peter Barlow produced an interesting variation on Faraday’s motor, using it to turn a wheel, thereby demonstrating a practical use for the new discovery.
In 1831, Faraday created the world’s first dynamo – called the Faraday disc – when he succeeded in moving a disc held perpendicular to a magnetic field, a technological breakthrough that led to renewed scientific interest in using mechanical means to create electrical energy. Faraday’s work was the cornerstone of understanding that underpins all electrical technology, including the motors and generators that power electric vehicles in the twenty-first century.
Four years later, a blacksmith from Vermont, New England, in the United States, built a small drifter operated by an electric motor – proving that electricity could be put to work. Then, in 1838, a Scots chemist named Robert Davidson unveiled an electric locomotive. Sadly, its practical value was limited. The top speed of just four miles per hour had been roundly trumped almost a decade earlier by Stephenson’s Rocket steam loco, which achieved 30mph (48km/h) during the Rainhill Trials. However, the principal of electric propulsion was sound and, in 1840, a patent was issued for the use of rails as conductors of electricity.
Davidson, who came from Aberdeen, set to work on a larger loco, which was the star exhibit at the Royal Society of Arts Exhibition in 1841. He named his creation the Galvani in honour of Lugi Galvani. The impressive 7-ton loco was hauled by two direct-drive motors, which used fixed electro-magnets acting on iron bars that were attached to a wooden drive cylinder mounted on each axle. The following September, Davidson demonstrated his invention on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, where it managed to haul a 6-ton load one-and-a-half miles before the batteries were exhausted.
Economically, however, the electric locomotive couldn’t hold a candle to the steam engine. The invention of the rechargeable battery was more than a decade away and disposable batteries were more expensive than coal. Davidson’s invention was viewed with suspicion, and outright hostility, by workers on the railway who though electricity might put them out of a job. Things came to a head when, in a fit of unprecedented industrial unrest, a group of angry railwaymen broke into the Galvani’s engine shed and destroyed it. Davidson’s hopes came to nothing.
The First Electric Horseless Carriage
As Davidson was beavering away on electric trains, another Scotsman was examining the possibilities of an electric horseless carriage. Little is known about Robert Anderson’s invention – sadly the details of his vehicle have been lost – but sometime between 1832 and 1839 he designed, built and tested a battery-powered horseless carriage. Unfortunately for him, Anderson had no alternative but to use non-rechargeable cells as the lead-acid rechargeable battery wasn’t invented until 1859, thus making his carriage nothing more than an interesting oddity and the smallest of footnotes in history, rather than a ground-breaking invention. Despite this, Anderson can still be said to be one of the pioneers of the electric car. The other was a Dutchman.
The first electric horseless carriage: Sibrandus Stratingh’s battery-powered carriage was a breakthrough in electric propulsion.
Sibrandus Stratingh was a Dutch chemistry professor and keen inventor with a yen for speed. He was convinced technology would make the horse-and-carriage redundant. Stratingh and his friend, German instrument maker Christopher Becker, were at the forefront of steam power development.
On 25 March 1834, The Provincial Groninger Courant, a newspaper published in the Dutch province of Groningen, reported:
In the early hours of this morning, 22 March, the first test journey was made by messrs Stratingh and Becker on their steam vehicle, which made a journey through the city’s undulating and curving streets with a positive result. The designers were so happy with the test that they feel that some small improvements will enable the vehicle to not only travel over new stone and rock roads, but also the bumpier cobbled streets, without problem…
On 8 September, the papers carried a report of a trip the friends made outside the town, passing through several villages and ‘moving with the speed of several running horses’ for more than four hours.
Although Stratingh’s invention attracted crowds wherever it went, the professor was unhappy with it. The carriage was uncomfortable, smoky and noisy. The solution, as Stratingh saw it, was to switch from steam power to electricity.
In 1835, Professor Stratingh gave a lecture to the Royal Physics Society, in Groningen, entitled: ‘Electromagnetic moving force and the use of this to an electromagnetic carriage…’. The idea for a small-scale electric cart came to him after reading reports of the work of Moritz von Jacobi, who had designed an electromagnetic motor at the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, Russia.
The precarious nature of Professor Stratingh’s vehicle is obvious. The porcelain jar was filled with dilute acid.
What they came up with was a very basic wooden platform to carry a galvanic battery, consisting of two plates, one zinc and one copper, rolled together and divided by wooden rods sitting in a porcelain jar filled with dilute acid. This cocktail was precariously mounted on the front to provide the current. Professor Stratingh described the vehicle as his ‘electric motor’.
The sole remaining Stratingh electric carriage is held at the Museum of the University of Groningen.
The carriage weighed about 6.6lb (3kg) and could drive for about fifteen minutes loaded with half its own weight before the current was exhausted. Professor Stratingh made several electric horseless carriages and a number still survive. Most of them are on display at the Museum Boerhaave, in Leiden, the Netherlands, and can be said to be the oldest electric vehicles still in existence.
The ultimate development of the professor’s ideas had eight magnets, instead of four, so that in its positive position there are twelve poles on twelve poles working on each other to give maximum power. In 1934, this vehicle was donated to the Museum of the University of Groningen. Today, it is one of the museum’s most important and valuable exhibits.
Professor Stratingh’s carriage could run for about 15min before the battery was exhausted.
Professor Stratingh was a leading advocate of electric power. At his urging Becker began building larger magnets and Stratingh stated confidently that an electric carriage would easily outrun a steam-powered rival. Electric vehicles were simpler, lighter, carried no heavy fuels and offered no danger of explosion or fire.
As well as his carriages, Professor Stratingh also built a model electric boat, which he sailed in the pond near his home. Sadly, his experiments in electric propulsion were curtailed by ill-health and he died in February 1841. Nevertheless, Professor Stratingh had demonstrated that electricity was a viable means of vehicle propulsion – an idea that was enthusiastically taken up by others.
Britain and the First Rechargeable Electric Horseless Carriages
However, it wasn’t until 1881 that the first electric vehicle to be powered by a rechargeable battery was unveiled. French inventor Gustave Trouve had developed an engine for marine applications – the first practical outboard motor. Trouve, who had taken to cruising the river Seine with friends aboard his electrically powered 17ft (5m) launch, adapted it to power a Coventry-Rotary pedal tricycle. In November 1881, he demonstrated a working three-wheeled automobile at the International Exhibition of Electricity, held in Paris. Trouve used the second cell design, invented by Gaston Plante, a Belgian, who had found a way to discharge and recharge batteries – thus overcoming the problem of what to do when a battery was exhausted.
A year later, Professors William Ayrton of London and John Perry from Garvagh, County Londonderry, in Ireland, combined their knowledge to create their version of the electric trike. It used ten lead/acid Plante-type rechargeable batteries in series, which supplied 20V to a half-a-horsepower electric motor mounted beneath the plank-like driver’s seat. The vehicle, which had two large spoked bicycle wheels at the front and a small wheel at the rear, was also the first to feature electric lights. These small bulbs were not, however, to allow anyone stupid enough attempting to drive after sundown to see where they were going, but to illuminate the trike’s instruments, a small ammeter and voltmeter. Its speed was governed by switching between the batteries in series. Ayrton and Perry claimed their rickety contraption was good for a maximum speed of 9mph (14km/h) and could cover a remarkable 25 miles (40km) – depending on the terrain – before the power was exhausted.
Responding to the growing demand for electric propulsion, financier Paul Bedford Elwell and engineer Thomas Parker, formed a company to manufacture rechargeable batteries in Wolverhampton, England, in October 1882. The Elwell–Parker company quickly expanded its range to include dynamos, motors and controllers.
All this was going on three years before Carl Benz unveiled the first automobile to be powered by a gasoline internal combustion engine – an event that ushered in the beginning of the motoring age.
But in Britain development of cars of all kinds had already been dealt a major blow by a piece of government legislation designed to curb ‘excessive speeds’ made possible by new methods of propulsion (mainly steam, although electric vehicles and the internal combustion engine would also fall foul of the notorious Red Flag Act).
The Locomotive (Roads) Act of 1865 famously stipulated that a locomotive should be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag as warning. The same person was expected to calm horse-drawn traffic ahead of the locomotive’s appearance.
The act (and its 1878 amendment) also laid down regulations for lights (two at the front, one on each side), a primitive highway code (locomotives to give way to horse-drawn traffic and give as much room as possible to other vehicles) and even created the world’s first official speed limits – 2mph in town and 4mph in open country – punishable by a hefty £10 fine. Large towns and cities were also given special powers to set their own rules on hours of operation and top speeds. This Draconian law would cripple development of new automobiles in Britain until politicians finally saw sense and repealed it in 1896.
Trikes aside, the first primitive electric vehicles were in every way just horseless carriages – just a wooden body riding on wood-spoke wheels and solid tyres. The ‘conversion’ consisted of a battery mounted on the chassis, an electric motor and a means of steering. This hybrid design was far from ideal. The crude suspension and solid tyres transmitted all the bumps and potholes from poorly surfaced roads directly to the chassis, with predictably dire consequences for the fragile battery plates sitting in containers filled with acid. Worse still, electric vehicles were considerably faster than their horse-drawn counterparts and a carriage chassis would become unstable at high speeds. The advantages of electric propulsion – smoothness and refinement – were entirely negated by the crudity of the design. As all the forces acting on a car do so through the contact patches of the tyres, the adoption of pneumatic tyres (perfected by Irish vet John Boyd Dunlop for his son’s bicycle in 1887) proved a breakthrough in making electric cars more comfortable to drive.
By the time the automobile industry really began to flourish in the 1890s, the electric vehicle appeared to have an unassailable lead. The DC motor and its ancillaries were well-developed thanks to trams, such as the Volk’s Electric Railway, which ran along the eastern seafront at Brighton. Lead-acid batteries, too, were rapidly reaching maturity after more than a decade of commercial development. Although the battery was still the weakest link in the electric car layout, commercial success would drive research into new materials and better designs. By the turn of the twentieth century, lead-acid batteries were durable enough to be used with confidence in automotive applications.
America
In America, the famous inventor Thomas Edison was working on a new type of battery – which used nickel-iron and promised even greater gains – specifically for electric vehicles.
According to an article in Electric World magazine, published in 1925, between 1910 and 1925 battery technology progressed in leaps and bounds. Storage capacity increased by 35 per cent, service life by an impressive 300 per cent and maintenance costs fell by 63 per cent.
A century before the Toyota Prius and the Nissan Leaf became the poster boys for supporters of a sustainable green method of transport, electric vehicles were advertised as the environmentally friendly alternative to traditional transportation. Horse-drawn carriages and wagons were sturdy and dependable but the accumulation of horse manure and urine in large towns and cities was a serious problem. The electric vehicle was clean technology with none of the smell and mess associated with horse-drawn carriages. Not only that, but the electric car produced far less noise than an internal combustion engine, started more easily and had no need of a complex crash gearbox. It was also more convenient than steam, which needed time to light up and build a head of steam.
At the Chicago World’s Fair, held in 1893, six electric vehicles vied for the public’s attention. Interestingly, the only American exhibit was a twelve-seater designed by William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, the rest being European in origin. The Morrison machine used twenty-four cells to power a 4bhp motor – enough for a top speed of 14mph (22km/h). The battery charging time was around ten hours.2
The American Battery Company of Chicago had bought the rights to the fringe-topped contraption in the hopes of manufacturing it. At the World’s Fair, company president George Burroughs gave his youngest son, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the job of ferrying potential customers around the grounds. Edgar, of course, would go on to become a famous novelist and the creator of Tarzan. The vehicle certainly wowed the crowds who gathered to watch its progress.
On 28 November 1895, company secretary Harold Sturges entered a modified electric in a race organised by the Chicago Times Herald. Unfortunately, the combination of a 54-mile route (87km), from Chicago to Evanston and back again, and terrible weather, conspired against him. Despite having extra batteries, his vehicle was ill-prepared for several inches of fresh snow and drifts. It came to a halt in the slush and ice having covered less than a quarter of the route.
Another electric car – the Electrobat made by Henry Morris and Pedro Salom from Philadelphia – fell victim to the same malady and the race was won by a petrol-powered Duryea. The first automobile race had laid down an ominous marker: for all their smoothness and refinement, only an internal combustion engine could be relied upon to battle through to the end.3
Europe
From the earliest days, the French were enthusiastic supporters of electric power. At the time, France was the world’s pre-eminent motor manufacturing nation, with literally dozens of car companies pandering to the whims of rich clients. One of the best known was Jeantaud, named after founder Charles Jeantaud, a coach-builder who made his first electric horseless carriage – fashioned from a Tilbury-style buggy – with the help of inventor Camille Faure. His first successful electric car was launched in 1894. La Nature magazine described it as a two-seat carriage and said the batteries, which weighed a not inconsiderable 450kg (992lb), were mounted beneath the seat. The 4hp motor was slowed by leather brake shoes acting on solid tyres. The driver steered via a tiller. Jeantaud's carriages used Fulmen accumulators that were protected by boxes. On a full charge the Jeantaud carriage was capable of an impressive 13mph (21km/h) top speed (about half that up a hill).
In 1895, Scientific American magazine quoted Jeantaud as saying: ‘The electric carriage has a future, and already in London there is a firm which displays a sign saying they are prepared to charge accumulators of all sizes at any hour of the day or night.’
By the turn of the century his business was thriving and a Jeantaud was highly prized among wealthy Parisians. Anyone who couldn’t afford their own Jeantaud could always experience one by hailing one of the company’s electric taxicabs, which plied for trade on the city’s streets and could carry two or three passengers. In a presentation to the prestigious Society of Civil Engineers of France, Jeantaud claimed the efficiency of electric cabs could solve the problem of travel in busy cities.
Jeantaud was keen to prove his vehicles in early competitions and a Jeantaud four-seater took part in the 1895 Paris–Bordeaux race, the only electric vehicle to enter. As the race involved a round trip of more than 700 miles (1,100km), the considerable problems of range had to be overcome. The company arranged for supplies of new batteries to be available at battery stations every 24 miles (15km), rather like a simple pit-stop.
Sadly, exhausted batteries proved to be the least of Charles Jeantaud’s problems. His car was ruled out of the race early on when it encountered axle trouble near Orleans.
The company’s competition cars were more successful in other speed and distance tests when Jeantaud showed them to be capable of covering 37 miles (60km) in less than four hours.
Jeantaud’s cabs sat the driver up front – exposed to all weathers – while his passengers enjoyed a luxurious carriage behind. His two-seater phateon moved the driver high to the rear. The Frenchman was an innovator who experimented with separate motors driving the rear wheels and front wheel drive. According to Scientific American (November 1899), the latter used a single motor fixed in the centre of the chassis with a differential driving the two front wheels via bevel gearing. He was also an early pioneer of aerodynamics.
By the turn of the century, however, the internal combustion engine had developed to the point where it was a serious rival to the electric car. Determined not to see his vehicles eclipsed, Charles Jeantaud linked up with a dashing French racing driver and together they made history.
The Fastest Man on Earth
In 1898, magazine publisher M. Paul Meyan, who was also a founding member of the Automobile Club de France, persuaded the editor of La France Automobile to sponsor a timed hill climb competition at Chanteloup, 20 miles (32km) north of Paris. The event was held on 27 November 1898, over a tortuous course – more than a mile up a winding gradient as steep as one-in-twelve at certain points. Fifty-four cars turned up for the inaugural event.
Having seen what lay before them, seven pulled out on the spot leaving forty-seven drivers to fight for overall honours. The winning vehicle was driven by a Belgian named Camille Jenatzy, who had entered on impulse. His average speed was 17mph (27km/h) and the car was electric. In second place was a Bollee petrol-powered car.
Meyan was delighted by the time trial and the following week La France Automobile announced an international speed competition ‘at the request of one of our distinguished friends’. The distinguished friend was, in fact, the swashbuckling Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat, the younger brother of the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, who had founded the Automobile Club de France with his friend the Count de Dion to indulge his passion for motor racing.
The date was set for 18 December but the course would be very different. The contest would be no hill climb. Instead, the contestants would fling their cars around a 1.2-mile (2,000m) stretch of the smoothest road in France in Acheres Park, between the towns of St Germain and Constans. Thanks to Napoleon, France was well blessed with long, straight roads, perfect for top-speed runs. The crowds that gathered that chilly morning would bear witness to history: the world’s first land-speed record attempt.
Count Gaston Chasseloup-Laubat was confident of victory. His chain driven rear-wheel drive Jentaud electric racer made 40bhp – an enormous amount of power for 1898 – and, with its aerodynamic torpedo-shaped body, nothing was expected to touch it. To record his glorious triumph, the organizers laid on six timekeepers, each holding a carefully synchronized stopwatch, and a meticulously measured and marked stretch of road. The strip was divided into two. The first kilometre was for setting a standing start record, while the second was for a flying start figure. To ensure absolute accuracy, the organizers doubled up with two timekeepers at the start, two after the first kilometre and two at the end.
Four cars arrived to take up the challenge. They included a de Dion tricycle and two Bollees, but all eyes were on the menacing electric car. Although the bodywork was shaped like a boat, Chasseloup-Laubat didn’t sit inside it. He actually perched on top of it, exposed to all manner of danger, with only his legs actually inside the tub. As the contenders prepared themselves the organizers explained the rules: all four would be timed over one standing kilometre and then, provided they were all still running, over the flying kilometre.
The Count was the last up and Paul Meyan himself gave the signal for the record attempt to begin. Hunched low over the horizontal steering wheel, Chasseloup-Laubat unleashed the full power of his car’s Fulmen batteries and it whistled up the track, bouncing precariously on its quarter and half-elliptic springs front/rear and terribly thin tyres on coach-type wheels. The wait had been worth it. Chasseloup-Laubat cracked the kilometre in 57sec at an average speed of 39.34mph (63.13km/h) – shattering the record set just minutes earlier by a 3-litre Bollee by 6mph (9.6km/h). An electric car had shown itself to be superior to a noisy and smelly gasoline rival. The French were ecstatic and so was Charles Jeantaud. They had claimed an official record and Chasseloup-Laubat was hailed as the fastest man on earth.
Not everyone was so happy. News of the record enraged the winner of the Chanteloup hill-climb event, the Belgian inventor and electric car pioneer Camille Jenatzy.
Known to his friends as the Le Diable Rouge, or ‘Red Devil’, in honour of his formidable-looking ginger beard, Jenatzy came from a wealthy family. His father, Constant Jenatzy, was a successful manufacturer of rubber products and he had studied engineering. Jenatzy was a strong proponent of electric vehicles and had opened a manufacturing plant to build electric carriages and trucks for the fast emerging market in Paris. Following his success in the Chanteloup hill climb he was smitten by the thrill of motor racing.
When news of the French record reached him, Jenatzy responded with a challenge. In an open letter to La France Automobile he expressed dissatisfaction at not being at Acheres Park when Chasseloup-Laubat set his record time. Going further, he expressed certainty that had he been competing then a Belgian would hold the world record, not a French dandy. He was sure his car would have the legs on Chasseloup-Laubat's Jentaud. Jenatzy asked if the count would be prepared to pit his electric racer against one of his own creation? Naturally, the count accepted.
The stage was set for an epic duel between the pre-eminent electric cars of the day with a new world record as the prize. What followed was a series of high profile face-offs between the two drivers. Their record-breaking runs also helped publicize the cars manufactured by Jeantaud and Jenatzy. The first took place on 17 January, 1899.
As the challenger, Jenatzy went first. His confidence appeared well place when his car broke the standing kilometre at a stunning speed of 41.42mph (66.65km/h), comfortably faster than the count's car had managed a month earlier. Witnesses said the batteries in the Red Devil’s car were exhausted as it crossed the line – in the best tradition of great racing cars they only lasted as long as was necessary to finish. Nevertheless, the world record had been broken for the first time and Jenatzy was the man to have done it. His celebrations were short-lived, however.
Within minutes, the Frenchman saddled up and sent his car bowling down the road recording an elapsed time of 43.69mph (70.31km/h). Many in the crowd feared Chasseloup-Laubat would die in his pursuit of the record, the human body having never travelled so fast. The count survived but the motor in his Jeantaud didn’t – it was destroyed in the attempt.
La Jamais Contente (Never Satisfied): daredveil racer Camille Jenatzy built a streamlined record-breaker in his bid to become the fastest man alive. MICHELIN
Undaunted, Jenatzy vowed to return with an even more powerful electric car and wrest the record back for Belgium. Chasseloup-Laubat assured him he would defend French honour.
The Red Devil was true to his word and, when the bitter rivals next met at Acheres ten days later, Jenatzy took the honours (and the record) with a 49.92mph (80.33km/h) time. By this time, the battle for supremacy had become an international talking point. The Automobile Club de France appointed officials and marshals to scrutinize the trials and avoid any accusations of cheating.
Jenatzy was an early pioneer of aerodynamic streamlining. The torpedo-like shape of La Jamais Contente, manufactured from a lightweight aluminium, tungsten and magensium metal alloy called Partinium, can clearly be seen here. MICHELIN
With national honour at stake, Chasseloup-Laubat raised the bar to 57.60mph (92.69km/h) in March 1899. For his part, Jenatzy was confident he had a secret weapon, one that would put the count in his place once and for all. His car had a sophisticated chassis with semi-elliptic leaf springs front and rear. Its lightweight cigarshaped wind-cheating body was designed around the aerodynamic principles used by airship manufacturers – although any wind-cheating benefit was largely invalidated by the driver sitting in the air stream and by the exposed chassis beneath. It was fashioned from ‘partinium’ – a new metal alloy of aluminium, tungsten and magnesium invented by a Frenchman called Henri Partin – and powered by a pair of DC Postel-Vinay 33hp (25kW) motors. The Michelin brothers, Edouard and Andre, pitched in with special pneumatic tyres designed to run on the car’s 55cm (21.7in) wooden-spoked wheels.
Camille Jenatzy
Belgian civil engineer, Camille Jenatzy, was an early believer in the adage that ‘racing improves the breed’.
Camille, who was born in 1865, advertised his electric cars by pitting them in competitions. He made his racing debut in 1898, winning a rain-soaked Chanteloup hill-climb by covering the 1,800m (1.1 mile) course at an average speed of 17mph (27km/h).
Jenatzy did not take part in the first speed trial held at Acheres, west of Paris, which set a new world land-speed record. When he heard the record had been set by the Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat behind the wheel of a car built by Jeantaud, his bitter manufacturing rival, Jenatzy challenged the dashing French count to a rematch.
The two men traded speed records throughout the winter of 1899 – a contest finally decided in Jenatzy’s favour when he became the first man to break the 100km/h (62mph) barrier – a record that would stand for three years.
Jenatzy’s love of speed exceeded his love of electric vehicles. Realizing an electric racer would never be viable over a long distance, he turned to petrol–electric hybrid powertrains and competed in the 1900 Gordon Bennett Cup in a Bolide hybrid of his own design. He also patented a magnetic clutch, used by Rochet–Schneider for a short time.
Jenatzy led something of a charmed life, walking away from several massive accidents, including a huge crash at the Circuit des Ardennes in 1902 when his car slewed off the track and into a ditch.
He drove for Mercedes in 1903 and would probably have won the Paris–Madrid race but for (of all things) a fly in the carburettor. Putting that disappointment behind him, the same year he won the Gordon Bennett Cup for Germany, coming home twelve minutes ahead of the second-place car.
The Belgian had a very successful racing career and retired from international events in 1908.
Jenatzy also had a wicked sense of humour and his fondness for practical jokes cost him his life. In 1913, during a hunting party with friends in the Ardennes, Jenatzy decided to frighten his fellow hunters by creeping up to their lodge, hiding behind a bush and imitating the grunt of an angry wild boar. His impression was rather too good. One of the fearful guests leaned out of the window and shot the practical joker dead.
Certain that he had the beating of his bitter rival, Jenatzy named his new challenger La Jamais Contente (‘Never Satisfied’) perhaps after his own frame of mind.
The high-speed battle commenced on 1 April, 1899. Perhaps it was over-confidence that led Jenatzy to start his first run too soon, or maybe he just couldn't wait to try his new machine out.
Whatever the reason, La Jamais Contente whistled down the timed kilometre before the officials were ready. Jenatzy was certain he had broken the psychologically important 100km/h (62mph) barrier, but due to his impatience there was nothing to prove it. Worse still, he did not have the luxury of a second run, having no spare batteries to hand. Jenatzy had to watch as the count set a new time. The Red Devil had a notoriously fiery temper (in his obituary The New York Times said that he raced with ‘demonical fury’) so one can only imagine his confrontation with the embarrassed timekeepers. Humiliated and angry, he vowed to return.
He did so on 29 April when, in front of a large crowd (including the Count Chasseloup-Laubat) he raced his car down the track. When the run was finished, Jenatzy, who was still smarting from the embarrassment of the debacle earlier in the month, jumped down from the car and strode over to the flustered timekeepers who were still working out his speed. After the timepieces were double-checked they announced he had set a new record of more than 105km/h (65mph). Jenatzy was ecstatic – he had become the first man to break the 100km/h (62mph) barrier and had done so with ease.
Jenatzy laps up the applause of the crowd after setting a new land-speed record of 105km/h.MICHELIN
La Jamais Contente was a remarkable vehicle for its time – a pioneer of electric propulsion, direct drive (to reduce friction losses the motor was directly mounted on the driven axle) and aerodynamics, although not everyone was impressed. The author W. Worby Beaumont wrote with eery prescience:
This is without doubt a higher speed than any other human being has ever travelled on roads, but it was only for about three-quarters of a mile that it was maintained. This vehicle was of no use in any way as a guide for any other class of vehicle.
Beaumont’s prediction would prove to be correct – although that did not prevent other land-speed pioneers copying the bullet-shape of La Jamais Contente in a bid to grab the record for themselves. Jenatzy held the record for three years, until another Frenchman (Leon Serpollet) broke it in a steam-powered racer. However, his time for an electric car stood for more than half a century – a reflection, perhaps, of the electric vehicle’s spectacular fall from grace in the subsequent two decades.
In 1989, the spirit of La Jamais Contente was resurrected for an attempt on the land-speed record for electric cars. A replica – called Toujours Vitesse – was driven by British enthusiast Doug Lambert at Elvington Air Field, near York.
The car was sponsored by Exide and the Merseyside and North Wales Electricity Board. However, that was to occur in the future. In 1899, electric cars were literally on top of the world.
Doug Lambert attempts to speed record for an electric car at Elvington air field, near York, in 1989.
In January 2010, more than a century after Jenatzy set his record, Michelin used La Jamais Contente at the Detroit Motor Show to publicize its part in the development of electric vehicles.
CHAPTER TWO
ELECTRIC CABS AND THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE COMPANY
The Electrobat: the Electric Cab
Although electric cars were popular with wealthy private individuals, as the twentieth century dawned they enjoyed their greatest sales success as electric cabs. Electric ‘horseless carriages’ plied for trade in major cities across the world – and America in particular. For a time, their advantages of smooth running, reliability and simplicity appeared to be a winning combination and led to the first attempt to creation a truly nationwide personal transport infrastructure.
In America, the story really began in 1894 when business associates Henry Morris and Pedro Salom designed and built an electric vehicle in a mere two months. Morris, who was a mechanical engineer, based the design on lessons he had learned while working on battery-powered trams. He used a modified motor taken from a ship, a lead-acid battery slung as low as possible and carriage-style wheels. The vehicle, which was completely open rather like a wagon, had plenty of room for Morris and Salom and was steered via a tiller arrangement that controlled the rear wheels. It had carriage-style spoked wheels and side-mounted lamps. The first stunned pedestrians who saw it bouncing down the road in Morris’s home city of Philadelphia must have though it looked like a runaway crate on four wheels. It certainly didn’t have the attractive lines of a horse-drawn carriage.
The Electrobat: designed by Henry Morris, who used his knowledge of work on battery-powered trams to create a horseless carriage capable of transporting two people. The tiller-type steering can clearly be seen. AMERICA ON WHEELS MUSEUM, ALLENTOWN, PA
Morris was the first to admit that his first electric carriage had allowed form to follow function – making the vehicle more attractive to prospective customers would come later. Instead, the duo’s first electric vehicle was a proof-of-concept lash-up – a way of refining the mechanical design before moving on to more ambitious things.
Altogether, the car weighed a hefty 4,250lb (1,927 kg), including the 1,600lb (725kg) battery pack. The claimed performance was 15mph (24km/h) and it had a scarcely believable 50-mile (80km) touring range.
For the first test ride on 31 August 1894, the two business partners had to apply for a special permit from City Hall and, rather like the red flag act in England, a policeman was detailed to walk in front of the whirring vehicle to warn horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians of what was coming their way.
Morris and Salom patented their idea the same day they took to the Philadelphia streets and their vehicle went into production the following year. Each vehicle was hand-built, rather like a horse-drawn carriage, and the partners were continually refining their ideas with the result that no two Electrobats were exactly the same (automobile mass production was still some way off). Later Electrobats used two 1.5bhp motors that were good for a 25-mile (40km) range and a top speed of 20mph (32km/h), which was plenty fast enough on the roads of the day. They were considerably lighter, too, thanks to a significant reduction in the weight of the battery from 1,600lb (725kg) to 640lb (290kg) – the fourth, and final, Electrobat ran on a battery that weighed a ‘mere’ 350lb (158kg). The reduction in weight meant the Electrobats were able to run on pneumatic tyres, rather than steel, for a more comfortable ride. The bodywork was built by the Charles Caffrey Carriage Company, in Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River. The Caffrey Carriageworks also built steam vehicles including, in 1895, an intriguing four-wheel drive version with steam motors on each wheel. The motors could be selected together or individually via a lever.
The Electrobat was a modest success – despite not finishing, the second-generation Electrobat took the judges’ medal at the Chicago Times-Herald Chicago-to-Evanston race in 1895 – but Morris and Salom had bigger plans for it. In 1896, they founded the Morris and Salom Electric Carriage and Wagon Company and continued to refine their design. They reckoned their invention would be the perfect inner-city hansom cab and set out to corner the market. By early 1897, a small fleet of Electrobat cabs were competing for business on the streets of New York. The passenger sat at the front, accessed via two outward swinging doors, and the driver sat on top and behind rather like his predecessor, the coachman. New Yorkers came to know the drivers as ‘lightning cabbies’ denoting the fact that their vehicles were powered by electricity. The novelty factor alone made battery-powered cabs popular with trendy travellers and they could be hired for a single trip, a day or even (if you really wanted to show off to your friends) an entire month. By June 1897, the Electrobats were doing steady business – making 632 journeys carrying 1,580 passengers and covering an impressive 4,603 miles (7,406km) in a single month.4 The charges were the same as for a horse-drawn carriage: a dollar for the first two miles and fifty cents for each subsequent mile. If hired by the hour, a cab cost $1 per 60min. Soon electric cabs built by Morris and Salom were operating on the streets of London and Paris, too. Maximizing operational time was vitally important for a cab – lengthy recharge times would have made them financial non-starters – so the battery box was fitted to a roller tray. Entrepreneur Issac L. Rice, who took over in September 1897, refined the system. When the batteries ran low, the driver simply called into a charging station where it was removed and replaced in one smooth operation. The cab backed into a charging dock. Hydraulic rams lifted it up and held it in position with a loading table while the battery pack was rolled out. At the same time, an overhead crane swung a fresh battery pack into place on the table directly behind the cab. When everything was ready, a hydraulic ram pushed the 1,250lb (567kg) battery pack into the cab, where it automatically connected. A maintenance operator slammed the doors of the battery compartment closed before waving the cabbie on his way. If the operation went smoothly, an electric cab could be turned around and back on the streets in a few minutes. The contacts were made automatically as the tray locked into place and the circuit was completed by the driver turning a switch. A hand lever governed the top speed, which was a maximum of 15mph (24km/h). A conventional plug socket was also provided for recharging in an emergency or overnight.5
A feature in American Machinist on 8 July 1897, claimed:
The electric hansoms, offered for public use only since March 15th of this year, are meeting with public favour to the extent it is claimed of paying current expenses and leaving an actual profit, the rates of hire being the same as those of horse-drawn hansom cabs in New York City.
Four months after they first took to the streets of New York, the business was already making money. Electric cabs were a hit.
Bersey Electric Cabs
Walter Bersey, a precocious 20-year-old who had designed his own dry battery, was the first businessman to introduce a ‘self-propelled’ vehicle for hire on the streets of London. His early cabs resembled horseless carriages with twin 3.5bhp Lundell-type motors, a two-speed gearbox (with clutch) and chain final drive. They were capable of a steady 9mph (14km/h) – more than enough to give them an edge over horse-drawn carriages. The forty-cell battery box was designed to slide out for quick changes – having encountered a problem, Bersey had found a way to engineer around it.
The public had their first glimpse of Bersey’s cabs at a motor show in South Kensington in 1896 and a dozen were working for a living by August 1897. They even took part in the London to Brighton Emancipation Run in November 1896, but could not complete the route. Their batteries exhausted, the cabs ignominiously completed the route by train. Bersey contracted out the manufacture of his cabs to the Great Horseless Carriage Company (the bodies were made by Arthur Mulliner, of Northampton), and, at its peak, his company had more than seventy. His rates were competitive with horse-drawn cabs but the electrics boasted a level of luxury hitherto unknown – although the provision of electric lighting was not universally welcomed. Some passengers felt the internal lighting made them too conspicuous. They were nicked-named ‘humming birds’ for the sound their motors made as they drove by and their yellow and black paintwork.
A Bersey electric cab from 1897. The yellow and black coachwork made them a distinctive sight on the streets of London.
Unfortunately the business got off to a rather inauspicious start when, just three weeks after the humming birds first took flight, a cabbie was charged with driving while drunk. The intoxicated driver was trying to negotiate one of the busiest thoroughfares in London – Bond Street – when he hit a wall. Magistrates fined him 20 shillings.
Less than a month later, a far greater tragedy struck when a 9-year-old boy, who had hopped on the back to hitch a ride, was pulled under when his coat was snagged by the drive chain. The poor youngster became the first child in Britain to die in a motor accident. Edward Nichol, the cabbie, told the inquest at Hackney Coroner’s court that the Bersey was doing no more than 5mph. A juryman suggested fitting guards between the wheels and the chassis. The cabs were operated by the London Electric Taxi-cab Co. and could carry four passengers plus a substantial amount of luggage” after “Taxicab Co.”
Sadly, Bersey’s dream of London taxi-cab domination was foiled by poor batteries and bad luck.
Nor were the cabs a model of reliability. Long hours and heavy use exacted a heavy penalty on the batteries, which quickly wore out and ruined tyres with their weight.
In a bid to balance the books, Bersey was forced to charge drivers more to lease their electric cabs. The daily rate of six shillings (30p) soared to more than double that – prompting many cabbies to quit in disgust.6
The Electromobile taxi ser vice was popular among wealthy residents of London.
Bersey responded by withdrawing the original fleet and replacing them with a new design that had improved batteries, but another highly publicized accident, when a Bersey ran out of control and crashed outside Hyde Park, was the final nail in the coffin. Faced with a hostile press, rising costs and fewer passengers, Walter threw in the towel. Some of his cabs were sold off at a cut price to independent cabbies, the rest were scrapped.
Other companies stepped into the breach. The Lambeth-based British Electromobile Company sought to take over where Bersey left off. It ordered a fifty-strong fleet of electric cabs. A Leeds engineering company built the chassis, which were fitted with bodies crafted by the famous Gloucester Wagon Company (among others). The cabs were operated by the London Electric Taxicab Co. and could carry four passengers plus a substantial amount of luggage.7
Here an Electromobile taxi is at the head of a queue in London 1907.
Originally, Electromobile – which also furnished the City of London police with an electric ambulance stationed at St Bartholomew’s hospital – hoped to run a fleet of 200 such cabs and, for a while, they were rather successful, but the advent of petrol-engined cabs with their vastly improved range drove the electric taxi fleet off the roads by the 1920s.
The Electric Vehicle Company
The early success of electric cabs in America brought Morris and Salom’s invention to the attention of Isaac Leopold Rice, president of the Electric Storage Battery Company, of Philadelphia. Rice, a brilliant lawyer who had made his name saving ailing railroad companies from financial ruin, had snapped up many of the most promising patents on battery technology (at the turn of the twentieth century many American inventors made money by patenting ideas and selling them, rather than actually manufacturing anything). His company held more than 500 such patents, including Charles F. Brush’s highly-prized patent on lead storage batteries, and had acquired them by snapping up rivals such as the Car Lighting and Power Company, the Lindstrom Brake Company and the Consolidated Railway Electric Lighting and Equipment Company. This relentless consolidation had made the Electric Storage Battery Company a highly successful enterprise, grossing its first million dollars in 1895 and installing batteries in the central power generating stations for cities across America. Rice enjoyed almost total domination of battery manufacturing and saw electric vehicles as a potential goldmine ripe for consolidation. Accordingly, he made Morris and Salom an offer they couldn’t refuse and, on 27 September 1897, the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company became the Electric Vehicle Company.
Rice was in the perfect position: he manufactured the batteries and the vehicles. The Electric Vehicle Company had a guaranteed supply of discounted batteries from the Electric Storage Battery Company. Soon, improved Electrobat cabs were plying for trade in several major cities. In New York, operations were run out of an old indoor cycling rink on lower Broadway. The headquarters was hugely impressive, boasting a degree of integration hitherto unknown. The upper floor had space for 100 cabs and the lower was converted to be the charging area with space for 200 battery packs that were held in wooden racks. The company’s business offices were located at the front of the building, while off-duty drivers had a place to relax at the rear. At each end of the battery room were massive elevators for raising and lowering cabs to the storeroom above. If a driver had finished his shift, and his carriage wasn’t needed, it was moved aside in the battery room, washed and cleaned before being transferred to the upper floor via the rear elevator. The station eschewed its own electricity generator, preferring to take a supply from the Edison service. Rice took the company’s consolidation a stage further when he bought the Consolidated Rubber Tire Company and was able to supply the vehicles with discounted tyres – something they required frequently due to the fact that the 3-inch pneumatic tyres of the day struggled to cope with the great weight of an electric vehicle. By 1899, the EVC’s cabs were using 5-inch tyres made from half-inch robber hose and pumped to 60psi (414kPa).
Development of the cabs continued apace. The Electric World magazine noted:
Of the external and visible improvements over the old type, one is an increase in the height of the hood, the older vehicles being so low as to have an unprepossessingly ‘squatty’ appearance compared with horse drawn cabs.
But a programme of near constant upgrades took their toll on the hard-pressed fleet managers. Cabs were built in batches of fifty and each batch was different. Nothing was interchangeable – not even the batteries – leading to on-going maintenance problems and a looming spare parts headache.
Then Rice had a stroke of good luck. New York was hit by blizzards in December 1897 and the bad weather continued into January 1899. The snow and hard-packed ice made it impossible for horse-drawn cabs to operate but their battery-operated rivals had no such problems. The heavy battery packs and 5-inch tyres meant they could carry on no matter how inclement the conditions. Dejected horse-drawn cab companies were forced off the road. They even advised desperate customers to try their electric rivals. Suddenly, everyone needed an electric cab. Electrical World magazine noted:
The cars ran through the whole night, the last coming in about 6 o’clock in the morning, by which time the snow had reached an average depth of about eight inches, and much more where drifted. Other cab companies turned over orders to the electric service rather than fill them themselves.
Although the cabs seemed to be working fine, management cut down on their mileages as a precaution. The drivers were ordered to return to base for fresh batteries every 10 or 12 miles (16–20km). As one contemporary writer noted, the battery-operated vehicles were ‘literally coining money’.
The EVC employed drivers to man its cabs – rather than lease the vehicles to owner-operators – and this seems to have caused problems because many of them had no prior experience of driving an electric cab. Battery maintenance was often neglected leading to high failure rates. The drivers were paid $2 a day, plus whatever tips they picked up from well-heeled passengers. In a bid to encourage greater productivity, the company also introduced a bonus scheme for drivers.
For all his acquisitive nature, Rice was, by most accounts, something of a benign business magnet. He was a keen chess player (the Rice Gambit is named after him) and a founder of the Poetry Society of America. When his electric submarine business ran aground during the financial panic of 1907, he covered many of its debts with his own money. Long after his death, the submarine business, and several others, would be consolidated into a new company called General Dynamics, which still remains one of the largest defence contractors in the world. Rice bought companies to combine them into a greater whole and had high hopes that the Electric Vehicle Company would be his greatest success. However, a syndicate of so-called electric-streetcar ‘traction magnets’, led by the politician, lawyer and businessman William C. Whitney, saw even greater potential in the EVC.
Whitney’s crew was made up of very powerful men. Whitney himself was a former United States Secretary of the Navy and his associates included Peter A. B. Widener, the former city treasurer of Philadelphia, and the Wall Street financier Thomas F. Ryan. Whitney had a home on New York’s exclusive Fifth Avenue and, as he sat looking out of a window during yet another blizzard in the big freeze of January 1899, he took note of how the electric cabs kept running when everything else was forced off the streets. The success of the little battery-powered cabs set Whitney thinking – could they be a beneficial adjunct to the syndicate’s streetcar interests?
No doubt, they were also keen to get their hands on Rice’s slew of battery patents in the hopes of creating another transport monopoly to go with their streetcar combine. Whitney envisaged creating a transport colossus with electric cabs and streetcars at its hub. The snow was still on the ground when Whitney and Ryan made their move and made Rice an offer he couldn’t refuse.
