Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [36]
The million dollars was an enticement for Colonel Albert Pope, who was the country’s leading bicycle maker, to tie up with the Electric Storage Battery Company (ESB). The ESB had bought out Morris and Salom’s Electric Carriage and Wagon Company, which had successfully opened up a cab service in Manhattan with thirteen modified Electrobats. During April 1897, their first month at Broadway and West 39th, Morris and Salom happily reported to the Society of Western Engineers that they had served a thousand passengers and the small fleet collectively traveled two thousand miles across the city.13 There was just one problem with the vehicles: They did not have the range of their gasoline competitors. Batteries, even our modern lithium ion ones, do not pack as much energy per pound or cubic volume as gasoline does.
That disadvantage could be mitigated with an efficient central station that would allow for fast battery swapping. During that year Isaac Rice and the ESB took over more active management of the enterprise. In particular, they asked George Herbert Condict to design a new way to swap batteries in and out of cabs quickly. Condict responded with an ingenious system that drew on his experience supervising a Manhattan streetcar line that used swappable batteries for power. The ESB constructed it in a converted skating rink at 1684 Broadway to service the rapidly growing fleet.14
When a cab drove into the station, technicians secured and centered it with hydraulic shoes. They then hitched the 1,300-pound battery tray, which ran underneath the cab, to a hydraulic piston that pulled out the whole thing and sat it on a table, where “an overhead crane plucked it from the table and deposited it in the charging room.” They slotted in a new battery and off the cab went again into the wild Manhattan streets. Transportation historian David Kirsch, the most sensitive of contemporary historians of the company, called it “a marvel of modern mechanical engineering. For the first time, industrial practice was brought to bear on the age-old problem of transportation over city streets.”15
The business caught Whitney’s eye. In the early 1890s, while working Whitney’s political connections, the Metropolitan Street Railway Company received exclusive license to operate horsecars in Manhattan. Forgotten now, this mode of transport used horses to pull buslike vehicles along rails. The rails reduced friction, thus allowing equine teams to pull dozens of humans to and fro.
Although there were several options for mechanizing this form of transportation, Whitney’s band of barons had gone with electricity, and it “was an integral component of their success.”16 He trusted electricity as a moneymaking enterprise and began to imagine a syndicate that could control all kinds of electrified mobility within and between cities. Electric trains called interurbans would run between local towns, trolleys would provide service along major routes, and the electric vehicles would serve any other intracity mobility needs. Urbanites wouldn’t buy a car: They’d be able to go anywhere on one type or another of electrified transport.
The electric car of the late nineteenth century was a perfect vector for this vision. Slow by modern standards but faster than horses, they were quiet, clean, maneuverable, and relatively safe.17 The electric vehicles of the time couldn’t be driven long distances, but in 1899 that didn’t really matter. In 1904 only 7 percent of the two million miles of American roads between cities were surfaced, and usually that surface was gravel, not asphalt or anything that could stand up to large amounts of traffic.18 Who would build the roads that would support long-distance