Drive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age

by Lawrence Goldstone

  But the genteel world of rank and file was not sufficient to sate Rice’s outsized intellectual energy. He missed the rough-and-tumble of business. While attending the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he noticed the disproportion of innovations and gadgets that were electrical. So many entrepreneurs and inventors were rushing to electrical technology, it seemed, that the United States patent office had become swamped with more than three thousand applications per year. Rice also observed that the most sophisticated devices, including Otis elevators and Edison’s Kinetoscope, were powered by a new, powerful, quickly rechargeable battery called a chloride accumulator, a lead-acid process that came to be known as “exide” technology, for “excellent oxide.” The process appeared to have been patented and the sole manufacturer was the Electric Storage Battery Company of Philadelphia, a city Rice knew well. After some cursory investigation Rice was convinced he had uncovered a company ripe for just his sort of restructuring, and so he began to buy up large blocks of stock.

  Electric Storage Battery had been founded in 1888 by a fast-talking promoter named William Warren Gibbs. Raised on a farm in Hope, New Jersey, Gibbs had dropped out of school to work as a grocery clerk, but he had somehow charmed Frances Ayres Johnson, the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, and persuaded her to marry him. After the wedding, Gibbs moved to the city to make his fortune and used his father-in-law’s connections to secure funding to purchase a gas company. After a year or two, however, Gibbs realized he had chosen a declining technology. He bought up some patents for lead-acid rechargeable batteries, purported to produce more energy for a longer period, although no one had thought to produce them commercially. Gibbs convinced some of his investors in the gas company that electricity would put them out of business and, even though he had put them into that business, cajoled them to fund the new venture. He then set out to build batteries to store power for electric lighting.

  The market for chloride accumulators turned out to be much larger than even Gibbs had anticipated. Arrays of Gibbs’s batteries were soon employed in a wide variety of industrial processes. In 1891, in a major coup, Gibbs sold thirteen thousand exide cells to the Lehigh Avenue Railway Company to power six of their streetcars. The horseless vehicles were immediately popular and sales boomed. But while revenues poured in, expenses were sucked out. Rather than build up the company’s cash reserves, Gibbs began to buy up other companies to expand his reach. At the same time as he was trying to corner Philadelphia’s electricity market, Gibbs learned that the patent controlling the exide process might not provide the exclusivity that he and his investors had thought. Patent examiners were, for the most part, ignorant of the mechanics of electrical power generation, and competing patents might actually have predated his.

  At that juncture, Rice began amassing stock. He purchased sufficient shares to become a director—and also the company’s lawyer—and soon after that gained control. His first act was to buy up every patent that might be a threat, and he spent $250,000 to do it, almost the equivalent of the company’s 1894 revenue. But Rice also oversaw the purchase of a number of companies that used batteries, and thus provided a guaranteed market for his product.

  For all his maneuvering, however, Rice was no mere stock manipulator. He saw himself as an inventor and a prophet and asked investors to put money behind him on that basis. Those who did were rewarded handsomely. Using hybrid processes from the patents the company owned, Rice oversaw improvements to the original exide product and fabricated the most advanced battery in the world.*3 He also came up with designs for containers, connections, frames, and switches, thus giving his battery more practical utility. Rice soon quadrupled the company’s revenues, taking in more than $1 million, and Rice’s batteries were eventually used in machine tools, telegraph offices, home appliances, and even player pianos. Exide generation remained the favored technology for the better part of a century.

  But Rice’s ambitions were yet more grandiose. In addition to the free-running electric streetcars that had become all the rage, he saw huge arrays of exide batteries powering ships, locomotives, massive telephone exchanges, and office buildings. While none of these came immediately to pass, in 1894 Rice heard of a newly patented device that would do quite well in their place. That year, an electric car was successfully test-driven by two Philadelphia engineers, Henry Morris and Pedro Salom.4 They called their invention an “electrobat,” and their journey down Broad Street required both a special permit and a policeman to precede the vehicle for the protection of horses. Morris and Salom’s vehicle was slow and immensely heavy—more than two tons, 1,600 pounds of which were primitive batteries. The wheels were steel to support the weight, and the front set was larger than the rear. Isaac Rice offered to help—and to invest—and the two quickly improved on their design. Soon Morris and Salom had produced a lighter and faster model, 1,600 pounds, of which only a third was exide battery. With the lighter weight came pneumatic tires and front and rear wheels of equal size. They soon had an even more efficient version, 800 pounds, with two 75-pound motors that could run at 15 miles per hour for 20 to 25 miles on a charge from 350 pounds of batteries.

  With Rice in the wings, Morris and Salom entered the Electrobat II in America’s first automobile race, the 1895 Thanksgiving Day jaunt up Chicago’s north shore won by the Duryea brothers. The Electrobat II fared poorly in frigid conditions—as did almost everyone else. Aware that battery life was adversely affected by the cold, Morris drove so slowly to conserve charge that at times he hardly appeared to be moving. He and Salom had placed relays of charged batteries every few miles, but Morris never even made it to the first station. He turned around halfway and barely made it back to their home base before the battery gave out. But the race was a success for the Electrobat nonetheless. They won a gold medal for design and left Chicago convinced they had established beyond doubt both the technical and commercial feasibility of the electric car. Not that there weren’t doubters. Hiram Percy Maxim, who rode in the Electrobat as an “umpire” (as had Charles King in the Duryea vehicle), returned to Hartford with “all my ideas as to the storage-battery-driven carriage confirmed.”

  But Maxim’s was the minority opinion, and once back in Philadelphia Morris and Salom set about seeking commercial outlets for their invention. Quite clearly, the limited range of a single battery charge—no more than 25 miles—made the vehicle appropriate to cities rather than country roads. In January 1896, they incorporated as Morris and Salom Electric Carriage and Wagon Company. One of the stockholders in the new company was Isaac Rice. By early 1897, Rice had bought out Morris and Salom entirely. Morris and Salom never said why they sold their patent, but it was a terrible decision. Although they attempted other ventures—they formed the Electrical Lead Reduction Company in 1899, to sell battery components—neither was involved in a successful enterprise again.

  Now president of the company—Gibbs was vice president—Rice wasted no time. In March 1897, he announced the introduction of a “public electric cab service,” beginning with “twelve vehicles of the coupé, surrey, and hansom patterns, operated with electric storage batteries.” The cabs would be “handsomely constructed and finished, and equipped with pneumatic tires.” Side running lights and a reading light inside would provide additional touches of modernity. The hansom was fashioned so that “the up-to-date ‘cabby’ is seated on top of the battery box, from which point the various controlling levers are easily accessible to him. Under his seat is the so-called controller. From this device, which is simply a peculiar electric switch for connecting the battery with the motor for various speeds, a handle projects.” Another lever was used for turning, with a treadle for braking, sufficiently effective so that “the vehicle may be stopped within its length even when running at full speed.”5 The idea was so novel that Rice would need the New York city council to grant a “special license…as there is no provision for public cabs without horses.”6

  Rice’s hansom fleet would be the first use of motorcars for
public transportation in the United States. By then, in most of America’s major cities, overhead trolley cables had been supplanted by huge rows of exide cells percolating under the feet of a burgeoning number of urban commuters. This, the most successful experiment in mass transit yet undertaken in America, poured money into Rice’s coffers—by the time he was ready to launch his first fleet of hansoms, he had achieved a virtual monopoly on storage batteries.

  The linchpin of the system was the power and endurance of the exide cell, of course, and thanks to Rice’s improvements Electric Storage Battery was producing batteries that had no equal: they provided “the greatest amount of output with the least weight, and combined low cost of production with high efficiency.”7 The life of an exide battery was “one and a half to two years and the cost of replacing the positive plates is far less than that which would have been required to keep a horse shod.” With a range of up to 40 miles, a cab could do quite a bit of business on a single charge in the tight confines of New York City.

  Like every plan Rice devised, the operating methodology for the hansoms displayed elegance and ingenuity. The cabs obviously could not waste precious battery charge cruising the streets for fares or even waiting, as did horse-drawn hansoms, at taxi stands. Instead, they were dispatched on call from a central charging station that was constructed at 1964 Broadway in a converted warehouse. As a result, most fares originated at restaurants, clubs, hotels, theaters, or the homes of well-to-do individuals, all of which were also the most steady and reliable sources of revenue. “Charging station” was a bit misleading as well. Batteries were not charged while sitting in the beds of the cabs. One of the elements of the battery’s design was the ability to quickly remove and replace it in the vehicle. Thus, when a battery was discharged, the driver swapped it out at the charging station and returned to work while the first battery was again brought up to snuff.

  Although at first blush this process might seem cumbersome, especially for an array that weighed 1,200 pounds, in practice it worked quite well. An electric crane was mounted on girders above the 16,000-square-foot “battery room.” “The batteries are placed on stands arranged in eight long rows, and, corresponding thereto, the crane is equipped with eight electric hoists, one over each row….The vehicle to have its battery removed, or a new battery loaded, is backed up to one of the two platforms so that the opened end of the battery compartment is against the loading table….The further handling of the cab and batteries for loading and unloading is entirely under the control of the crane operator.”8 The mechanism was so well defined that a battery could be switched in less than four minutes, after which the cab would be in service for another 40 miles. Finally, to accommodate any driver who could not make it back to the charging station and had become stranded, a thirteenth cab was always kept in reserve to be used for road service.

  The hansom cabs became a fad. “Many of the chappies and men-about-town are availing themselves of the opportunity to try the sensations of riding in a horseless vehicle….Even aristocracy has been bold enough to overcome convention and step into a horseless cab,” reported Horseless Age.9 With the experiment working to his satisfaction, in September 1897, six months to the day after Rice introduced the New York fleet, he merged Electric Battery and Electric Carriage and Wagon to create the Electric Vehicle Company. The merged company, incorporated in New Jersey, was capitalized at $10 million, an immense sum at the time, and a thousand times greater than the $10,000 at which Morris and Salom had capitalized Electric Wagon. Rice then announced that he was ordering components for one hundred additional vehicles, this at a time when no more than fifty vehicles per year were produced in the entire nation. Alexander Winton, by then America’s leading gasoline car manufacturer, would that year complete only four vehicles.

  Producing one hundred vehicles presented quite significant logistical problems—Electric Vehicle did not build its own products but rather assembled motors, carriages, brakes, and other mechanisms purchased from outside suppliers. Building the charging stations required to service the vehicles was also a major undertaking. Suitable facilities had to be found, strategically placed to allow maximum flexibility; then each had to be constructed and staffed by highly trained personnel.

  But Isaac Rice, like Henry Ford, had a singular eye for talent. When Morris and Salom incorporated Electric Carriage and Wagon, Rice prevailed on them to hire a young engineer named George Condict. He proved so adept that it is doubtful Rice’s plan could have succeeded without him. (Rice may or may not also have anticipated Morris and Salom’s departure, but Condict quickly and seamlessly assumed their responsibilities when they were gone.)

  No one manufacturer of any of the components, except for the batteries, could begin to fill the entire order, so the cabs arrived with sufficient differences in specifications to make standardization impossible. And the initial order of one hundred vehicles was just the beginning—Rice planned to order hundreds and hundreds more. Any charging station, then, needed to be built to accommodate a variety of different machines. Condict, who had also designed the original station, “a marvel of modern mechanical engineering,” created a layout flexible enough to allow for the sort of fast changes that the hansom fleet required.10 Although building such a facility was obviously costly, the popularity of the electric hansoms created economies of scale in battery production that to some degree balanced out the expense.11

  In 1898, Rice built his charging stations in Manhattan, and while he fell slightly short of his goal of one hundred vehicles, scores of electric taxis ferried passengers on New York streets. For quite a while, the electric cab was viewed as something of an oddity, a bizarre contraption missing a front appendage, although why proper New Yorkers felt more comfortable staring at a horse’s rump than the streets on which they were riding is puzzling. Still, doubtless many did. “There is a seeming brazenness to the whole performance,” wrote society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker. “I dreamed once that I walked down Fifth Avenue in my pajamas in the full tide of the afternoon promenade, and I almost died of shame before I awoke. Yesterday, I had something of the same feeling as I sat there and felt myself pushed forward into the very face of grinning, staring, and sometimes jeering New York.” But Cholly eventually became inured to the lack of “the protection of a horse in front of me.” He simply “returned the wicked glances of the bicycle ladies on the Boulevard, and when I got back to Fifth Avenue I was almost as much at home and felt almost as devilish as the other chappies whose faces were glued to the club windows.”12

  Early in 1899, the electric cab seized the opportunity to achieve wide acclaim, and in doing so, it set in motion a series of events that would doom electric automobiles for a century. February of that year saw a particularly vile stretch of weather plague New York City. Storms, both rain and snow, sometimes one after the other, left many of the city’s roads impassable. On the eighth of the month, an unexpected blizzard descended on the entire East Coast and left New York streets “blockaded with banks of drifted snow. The snow on the sidewalks was drifted high over the boot tops of the struggling pedestrians. A high northwest wind lifted and carried along in the murky atmosphere particles of solidly frozen snow that cut and stung like so many needles.”13 The conditions played havoc particularly with horse traffic, as “truck horses slipped and fell or were stalled in freezing slush.” Even worse, the fire department, which relied on horse-drawn wagons, was “greatly handicapped.” With railroads also knocked out, the only vehicles that seemed capable of navigating through the ankle-deep frozen slush were Electric Vehicles’ cabs. As a result, every taxi they could put on the street was full virtually every minute. The “whole rolling stock of the company in active operation [was] literally coining money.”

  William M. (William Manley) Van Der Weyde / Museum of the City of New York

  The electric taxi conquers the snow

  Even better, every New York pedestrian who was forced to slog through the slush with frigid, sodden feet could see his or her mor
e fortunate fellow citizens being transported to their destinations in comparative luxury. The streets were not cleared for nearly a week, just in time for a brief thaw, a rainstorm, and a return to subfreezing temperatures. Once again, the only public conveyances that could negotiate the ghastly conditions were the pneumatic-tired electric cabs.

  By the end of February 1899, all doubts about the commercial potential of the electric car had vanished. Not one month later, the speculators arrived, led by the rapacious, charismatic Jekyll-and-Hyde financier William Collins Whitney.

  Few men in the history of American business are more enigmatic. Patriarch of the great family fortune, Whitney was at once a political reformer and a political hack, a man whose sound management saved New York City millions and one whose stock manipulations bilked both private and public interests out of just as much, a generous patron of the arts and the epitome of Gilded Age greed. Dubbed “Warwick the Kingmaker” by Elihu Root, after the fifteenth-century English earl, Whitney was described by a muckraking journalist as “having wonderful mental gifts…brilliant, polished and suave…physically handsome, loved by most men and all women…displaying those talents for diplomacy that made him the mastermind of presidential cabinets and the maker of American presidents.”14

  Whitney was born into a distinguished family in 1841, and although he would have been ideal officer material for the Union Army, he spent the war in school. He graduated from Yale in 1863, then studied law at Harvard, after which he joined a prominent New York firm. Whitney combined law and politics, helping to organize the reform-minded Young Men’s Democratic Club, and then became, with Joseph Choate, one of the young attorneys Samuel Tilden employed to build the case that eventually brought down Boss Tweed. His own foray into elective politics was not successful: he failed in a run for district attorney in 1872. But when Tilden was elected governor in 1875, Whitney was rewarded for his loyalty with an appointment as New York City’s corporation counsel. In his seven years at that post, Whitney helped recover a substantial portion of the loot that Tweed had appropriated from city coffers, estimated at as much as $20 million. He also oversaw agreements with private contractors and holders of city franchises, experience that he would later put to good use.