Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [37]
In a presentation to the Franklin Institute, a railroad engineer commented that all the “agitation for good roads” might be too late because “we may have reached an era of electric lines and bicycle paths rendering them unnecessary.”19 At the time it was possible to imagine an American transportation system that didn’t include cars at all, let alone three hundred–horsepower versions that can go four hundred miles between fueling.
So Whitney got his boys together—A. B. Widener, Charles F. Ryan, and a host of other names that now adorn the big buildings of New York—and convinced them that there was money to be made displacing the old horse-drawn carriage with clean, noiseless electric cars. They would churn out thousands of electric vehicles, sending them to the big cities of the world—New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Paris—where they would seamlessly fit into the transportation web that crisscrossed the world’s great human agglomerations. At the back end of all the mobility, there’d be the miracle of electricity, as represented by the central power plants of Edison Electric and New York Heat, Light, and Power, which Whitney and his band of scions of wealth also controlled.20
What five years earlier had been a simple two-man project in Philadelphia had morphed into a play to unify the transportation infrastructure of urban America into one great syndicate. What they needed was scale, and that’s what Pope could provide.
He was the largest manufacturer of the product at the center of America’s latest craze: cycling. Scholars estimate that some ten million bicycles were in use during the 1890s in a country with a population of seventy-five million.21 During the real boom years around 1895, “Pope’s factory at Hartford was running day and night with three ‘gangs’ (presumably shifts) of men, making 150,000 finished parts requiring 500,000 operations every 24 hours.”22 Though Pope’s legacy is disputed, one scholar found “many continuities” between the manufacturing techniques of Pope and Ford, the great symbol of mass production.23 At the very least, Pope would have seemed like a tremendous partner for building a global automobile manufacturing and service concern.
By 1898 the components of Pope’s newly consolidated American Bicycle Company cranked out 800,000 bicycles.24 They made their own tires and steel tube frames, and they assembled them in massive quantities. Pope’s company had also been toying with an electric car concept that had yet to catch on.25 If that was one reason Pope was receptive to Whitney’s offer, the other was that Pope and Whitney, like many other businessmen of the late nineteenth century, believed that scale was the answer to any and all troubles in business and society. Creating an integrated transport company seemed likely to yield greater efficiency, according to the business maxims of the age. “All aggregations of capital, if rightly handled, tend toward the betterment of the public,” Pope said in 1899, the year of the deal. “This is a doctrine which all of us have not yet quite comprehended, but the experiences of every passing year emphasize its truth. It seems to me that we are fairly entered upon a wonderful period of political and financial history.”26 Increasing centralization was tantamount to progress (with a capital P). Even American socialists thought “aggregations” were a good idea. Edward Bellamy’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin-level hit, 1887’s Looking Backward, envisioned a society in the year 2000 in which every industry had been consolidated into one, big socialist enterprise.
In the novel, the wise man of Bellamy’s future notes, “The fact remained that, as a means of producing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion to its consolidation.” To bring back the days of small business “would have involved returning to the days of stagecoaches.” 27 Indeed, the only way to