1899, the year that electric cars ruled the roads in Britain and the United States
Well over a century ago, electric cars were twice as popular in the United States as those running on petrol. This was at a time when even the Queen of England was driving an electric car.
We regard electric cars today as the epitome of modernity. The British government is fantastically keen on the idea of doing away with petrol engines and plans are afoot to provide public charging points in cities and new residential developments, to encourage the use of such vehicles. The electric car is, we are led to believe, the future of transport. It is confidently asserted in some quarters that in a few years, the ordinary motor car will have become a museum-piece. Despite this optimism, there is a marked reluctance on the part of the ordinary motorist to this new technology. In Britain, fewer than 5% of cars run exclusively on electricity and in America, the figure is even lower. This is strange, because at the end of the nineteenth century, there were twice as many electric cars on the roads as there were ones fuelled by petrol. In Britain, even Queen Alexandra was driving such a vehicle. In both Britain and America, it was widely assumed at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the future of urban transport lay in electrically powered cars.
There were cars with internal combustion ends at this time, but they suffered from many disadvantages and a lot of people regarded them with suspicion and dislike. For one thing, they were very prone to breaking down. The technology was new and the teething problems were many, varied and significant. It must be borne in mind that although we talk of internal ‘combustion’, we really mean internal ‘explosion’. When compressed petrol or diesel vapour ignites; there is a sudden bang, rather than the steady hum we hears from an electric motor. Because modern vehicles are fitted with complex and efficient mufflers, silencers and sound-suppressers, we tend to forget that they are pushed forward by a series of violent explosions, producing loud bangs. Anybody who has ever heard an ordinary car engine running when the silencer has been removed will be aware that it sounds like a machine gun; a deafening and constant crash of explosions. This racket contrasted unfavourably with the almost noiseless operation of electric cars. Early internal combustion engines were both exceedingly noisy and also very smoky and smelly.
Petrol engines at the beginning of the twentieth century were more or less experimental; meaning that drawbacks became apparent after a few months or years. With no radiators or fan belts, such engines were prone to overheating. On cold mornings, it was sometimes necessary to use a hot iron to warm up the cylinders before the engine would start. One particular hazard was that to start the engine, somebody had to place a ‘starting handle’ through a hole at the front and turn it, to get the cylinders moving up and down. The crank frequently took on a life of its own and unexpectedly begun moving violently in the opposite direction; resulting in broken collar bones and wrists or bruises to the face.
Another factor which influenced prospective buyers of cars and served to discourage some of those who might otherwise have been inclined to choose one with an internal combustion engine was the idea of travelling around with a tank full of highly inflammable liquid. This seemed a risky business, after all the petrol could even, as the operation of any engine demonstrated, explode under the right circumstances. All in all, investing in one of the new cars of this type was a chancy and uncertain business. How different was the case for those who chose a vehicle fitted with an electric motor. One simply switched them on and drove away at once.
Sometimes a word comes, in the minds of ordinary people, to represent all that is modern or futuristic. In the 1950s and 1960s ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ were the words to conjure with and anything described as ‘atomic’ was automatically understood to be state-of-the-art or cutting edge. In the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign, much the same connotations were attached to the word ‘electric’. Streets in London were named ‘Electric Avenue’ or ‘Electric Parade’ to show how up-to-date and modern they were.
All of which meant that electric cars seemed at the time like the future of transport. Apart from the semantics of the word, the cars themselves were quiet and reliable; unlike the petrol cars with which they were competing. Nor did electric cars have that air of vulgarity about them that the internal combustion engine brought to mind. Those driving an electric car did not find the need for the goggles, gauntlets, scarves and caps which were associated with the motor car. They were altogether more genteel and sophisticated. This too worked to the advantage of those selling them. Quite a few members of royalty and the aristocracy, both British and European, drove electric cars. Such people would not have been seen dead racing around in a noisy, smelly petrol driven car! In 1901, the year that Queen Victoria died, the City and Suburban Electric Carriage Company published the names of some of those who had purchased their cars; Queen Alexandra, Edward VII’s consort, the Dowager Empress of Russia, the Marchioness of Ripon, the Princess de Polignac, Prince Demidoff, the Duke of Sutherland, the Earl of Derby, the list of noble names was a long one. Selling one of their cars to the Queen of Britain was a smart move on the part of the City and Suburban Electric Carriage Company, for it enabled them to put the royal coat of arms on their publicity material, beneath which was the legend; By Special Appointment to Her Majesty Queen Alexandra.
The electric cars which were on the market at this time had specifications which might do very well for a little smart-car for use in the city today. The top speed of 25 mph would not prove too much of a handicap in London traffic and the range of 80 miles, which some models promised, compares favourably with modern electric cars. The batteries on which the cars depended could be recharged in around three hours.
Looking at the exhibitors in the Automobile Exhibition held at Crystal Palace between 30 January and 7 February 1903 is a disconcerting experience. Some of the names are recognisable, we see Daimler and Wolseley, but also the names of companies which produced only steam-powered vehicles or electric cars. For instance, we find that the City and Suburban Electric Vehicle Company had a stand there, as did Brush Electric Engines, Electromobile, and Thorneycroft Steam Wagons. Any visitor to the Automobile Exhibition that year would not have been able to guess which sort of cars would be the big thing of the twentieth century. Steam and electricity would have seemed just as likely as internal combustion engines.
Electric cars had already been around for decades when the Automobile Exhibition was held in 1903. Sales were slow at first for several reasons; not least of which was that domestic electricity supplies were not common. If your home was lit by gas, then you would not be in a position to plug in your car and recharge its batteries. This problem too had been thought of and it led in 1901 to the first example of a very modern kind of building; the multi-story car park.
The City & Suburban Electric carriage Co had a seven-story car park built at 6 Denmark Street in London’s Soho district. Motor cars were at that time so rare that it had never before occurred to anybody that it might be necessary to have special building of this sort to park them in. This multi-story carpark was used to keep the cars belonging to people who did not have electricity in their homes. They could be charged here overnight or left for weeks or more, if needed. For a small additional charge, the company would deliver the fully charged vehicles to the homes of their owners.
The rarity of mains electricity was certainly a limiting factor in the popularity of electric cars. Since they ran on rechargeable batteries, these would need to be changed regularly, when they ran down, for fully charged ones. Without sockets in one’s home, it was a little difficult to run such a vehicle. In 1910, only 2 per cent of British homes had electricity and it was not until after the end of the First World War that this situation began to change to any great extent. One company involved with electric cars solved the problem by cutting the Gordian Knot and creating their own electricity supply.
At the South Kensington Motor Show in 1896, an exhibitor called Walter Bersey unveiled what he hoped would be the wonder of the age; the electric taxi cab. Bersey hoped to cash in on the abolition of what has become known as the ‘Red Flag Act’, which was due to come into force that November. With the speed limit for self-propelled vehicles raised from 4 miles per hour to 14, he felt that he could make a killing with a fleet of electrically powered cabs, which would render the horse-drawn Hansom Cab obsolete overnight. There was great interest in the idea and the beginning of the service was awaited with interest. The old speed limit and requirement for the ‘footman’ with the red flag ended on 13 November 1896 and the following year, the taxis duly appeared on the streets of London. There had been some teething troubles, as is so often the case with new inventions which are revealed to the public too soon, and it was not until 19 August 1897 that the first of the new taxi cabs began plying for hire.
The Metropolitan Police, like everybody else, were unsure what to make of the new cabs. They laid down four rules for them, to begin with. These were that each cab was to have a driver, that the driver should be able to stop the vehicle on demand, that the cabs could turn in a small space and that they should all be capable of climbing Savoy Hill; the steepest slope in London. To avoid unfair competition, the electric cabs would not be allowed to undercut the Hansoms, but would charge the same fares.
Londoners are well-known for the swiftness with which they coin colloquial expressions for any new or remarkable phenomenon in the capital and so it proved with Walter Bersey’s electric cabs. They became known almost at once as ‘Hummingbirds’. This was due in part to the garish yellow and black livery, which was a sharp contrast to the sober, all-black of the familiar Hansom Cab, but also because of the loud humming noise made by their electric motors.
The Hummingbirds had a top speed of 12 miles per hour, which was more than enough when moving through the congested streets of Victorian London. They were no faster or slower than the horse-drawn cabs. One distinctive feature, which did not meet with universal approval, was installation of electric light inside the passenger compartment. Electric headlamps on the front of the cabs was one thing, but harsh, white light in the interior was felt by some to be a step too far. The dark interiors of Hansom cabs were seen as private and relaxing spaces and not everybody wanted to have bright lights illuminating them and making them visible to any passer-by in the street.
Because of the scarcity and unreliability of the public electricity supply in 1890s London, Bersey decided to erect his own power station; a colossally expensive undertaking. The cost of generating his own electricity combined with various other problems with the fleet of taxi cabs, gradually worked to make the operation uneconomically viable. The cabs were very heavy, weighing two tons, which meant that the tyres wore out very quickly on the hard, cobbled streets of the city. Because the technology was so new, the cabs also had a disconcerting habit of breaking down; something which seldom happened to the more dependable horse-drawn vehicles. Within two years, the Hummingbirds had vanished from streets of London, an exciting experiment which was at least a century to early.
Electric cars flourished for a time in the United States, where they certainly gave vehicles powered by internal combustion engines a good run for their money. The world’s first motor hearse, for instance, made its appearance in Buffalo, New York, in May 1900. It ran on a battery and there were no fewer than 14 electric cars in the procession to the graveyard on the occasion of what might be termed its maiden voyage. As the twentieth century began, almost 80% of the cars on American roads were not fitted with petrol engines. The figures are quite unbelievable; 40% of cars at that time used steam engines, 38% were powered by electricity and only 22% relied upon internal combustion engines. In the race to replace horse power, the petrol driven internal combustion engine was lagging far behind. The most popular and best-selling car in America in 1900 was the Columbia Electric Runabout, which was also, incidentally, the first American car to reach sales of over 1000. Even those whose business was to predict future trends were wholly unable at that time to foresee the inexorable rise of the internal combustion engine. This was the case in Britain, just as it was in America and the rest of the developed world. With electric cars, taxis and buses, to say nothing of steam cars which were breaking the land speed record, how could anybody know that petrol driven cars would one day conquer the world?
Electric cars were popular in America as little, city ‘runabouts’, similar in many ways to the smart-cars of our own time. They had low maximum speeds and limited range, but for city use, these were not major disadvantages. It was the discovery of huge new deposits of oil which brought about the decline of the electric car in the last few years before the First World War. Once cars with internal combustion engines were cheaper to run than battery-powered ones, then the writing was on the wall. More and more roads leading from city to city were now being well-surfaced with macadam and that in turn opened up the opportunity to use cars not merely for gadding about the city streets, but for long distance journeys. This was where the limited range of cars which needed to have their batteries charged for hours after travelling just 30 or 40 miles began to be seen as a serious difficulty. With a car fuelled on petrol, it took only a few minutes to fill it up and be ready to go.
It was, ultimately, cost and convenience which caused the electric cars of the early twentieth century to fall from favour with motorists. Whatever the urging of of governments, it is likely to be those same factors which determine in the future whether the electric car becomes the successor to the internal combustion engine or is destined, once again, to fade into obscurity.
This is great article on the subject. I remember looking in an old printed World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid in the section under automobiles and being surprised that the first electric car was built in 1891. It seems that even back then these vehicles were especially difficult to mass produce and sell, let alone create the complicated supply chains that are needed to acquire the materials to even build them. About a hundred years ago cars required an electric motor to turn the engine over in order for it start, thus eliminated the need for a crank in the front of the vehicle that was very dangerous to turn. Nowadays that same electric motor exists in our gas-powered vehicles as a "starter". At any rate, I really find it hard to see how electric cars are going to be built at the level to replace more than 300 million cars on American roads today. Even with companies like Tesla that know how to produce them in quantity, there is only about half a million electric cars on our roads today. It will take decades before electric vehicles can reach the critical mass necessary to replace internal combustion engine vehicles. I also wonder how long electric cars will last in the Southeastern United States where it is especially hot and humid here. This type of climate severely limits the life of the batteries in these vehicles. I've been using an electric mower for about three years and the battery doesn't work well in the summer heat and recently stopped working altogether and won't re-charge anymore. Another thing I worry about is the fact that there are no coolant systems on these electric cars like there is in gas powered cars. I talked to a firefighter and he said that when an electric car catches fire, it burns at over 5,000 degrees F and you can't extinguish with water, because it is an electrical fire. Contrast that with a gas powered car that burns at !,500 degrees F and takes 10,000 gallons of water to extinguish. None of the politicians pushing this tech say anything about the dangers of these vehicles. So, if you own an electric vehicle and it catches fire, then you have about three seconds to exit the vehicle or you will be a piece of bacon!
Informative and surprising as usual Simon. I think I'm right in saying that you touched on this in your top notch book, The Analogue Revolution.