Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [38]
Thus, it was only logical that transportation would soon be monopolized by a few.
Pope and Whitney sealed the deal and each side of the transaction took half of the Electric Vehicle Company. As an enterprise for building and operating electric vehicles, it seemed to have all the right parts: the Electric Storage Battery Company and its patent on the lead-acid storage battery, the Pope manufacturing apparatus, Whitney’s financial connections, and the central station service model developed by Condict.
BICYCLES AND ROADS, BARONS AND RAILS
As the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC) rounded into shape, there was a brief moment when it seemed that success might be at hand. The New York station was performing well and new offices began to operate around Boston, New Jersey, Chicago, and Newport.
But to say that the EVC was a grand disappointment would be an understatement. Within about a year problems began to appear. In New York the service remained profitable, but the other cities suffered from poor management and operations. The batteries were not properly cared for, nor were the drivers trained well. Led by the trade magazine Horseless Age and its “autoelectrophobe” editor, E. B. Ingersoll, the public started to call the company “The Lead Cab Trust.” The regional operating companies were shut down in February 1901.
People began to suspect that Whitney and his financiers were merely trying to pull some stock swindle. That notion gained steam when the EVC turned patent troll and began brandishing the Selden patent, which it said covered all automobiles.29 Automotive historians of the 1950s have tended to see the problems as simply the gurgling death cries of an electric vehicle industry being taken out by the insurgent gasoline-powered car; they see the death of the EVC as a demonstration of the technological impracticality of the battery-powered vehicle.30 But contemporary historians like Gijs Mom and David Kirsch have taken the company more seriously. Kirsch sees the scheme, if not the actual company, as “the seed of an alternative transportation system for motorized road transport.”31
This alternative transport scheme would have been an electrified adjunct to the existing rail and trolley lines. Urbanites could have gotten anywhere in the country on a combination of rails and electric cabs. It would have been far more energy efficient, but from a consumer perspective, it curbed autonomy.
That turned out to be very important because the company was swimming against a very important cultural trend: the massive popularity of the bicycle. It was the crazy popularity of the two-wheeled bike that laid the cultural, infrastructural, and legal groundwork for the privately owned, gasoline-powered vehicle’s dominance. “Easily the greatest significance of the bicycle was the interference it ran for the automobile,” wrote sociologist Sydney Aronson. “The bicycle did the dirty work for its mechanized successor in a variety of ways.”32
Operationally, the more than six thousand American bicycle repair shops that existed in 1900 became the “logical repair place for the auto” and helped train a generation of mechanics and inventors who would go on to service and create new automobiles. Culturally, the bicycle pulled people off the rails. It got them used to thinking about traveling on their own, whenever they pleased. They turned mobility into a product, not a service. With railroads and horsecars and trolleys, a person paid simply for the ride, not the vehicle itself. Bicycles, however, were different. People owned the machine and could ride it on their own schedule, even late at night or out to where there were no other people. We take for granted how easy it is, even in a densely populated region, to drive