Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [40]
But the Electric Vehicle Company and its vision of centralized transport could not have capitalized on the popular ferment because it was itself controlled by the fathers of young men speeding around the countryside, scaring the horses and occasionally killing the children of poor farmers. Even the chauffer of William Whitney’s son, Harry Payne Whitney, killed a French coffee peddler named Andrieux in 1907 with his powerful car.40 If there was one thing that poor Americans liked less than the young men speeding around the countryside, it was the fathers who bankrolled those young men speeding around the countryside.
In that same year, the Electric Vehicle Company finally filed for bankruptcy, never having been able to provide the kind of integrated service that Whitney originally imagined. He died later that year.
As Kirsch has pointed out, the entire idea of a service-based, multivehicle, electrified system left the American mind with Whitney’s would-be masterstroke. Kirsch wrote in his study of the company, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of Failure, that
the collapse of EVC—far from being an abject, irredeemable technological failure—can instead be seen as a turning point, not simply in the choice of automotive technology, but what is more important, in the choice of business concept that shaped the subsequent development of the American transportation system. The dynamic evolution of technological systems has left us with the decentralized, loosely coordinated, individual-based transportation system of today. In this sense, the fate of EVC took with it a particular alternative vision of personal mobility.41
The electric car, however, didn’t die as quick a death. Hundreds of electric trucks served merchants admirably in the first decades of the century. Electric cars, in absolute numbers continued to be manufactured, but as we all know, the Model T was the iPhone of the consumer car market. Gasoline automobiles dominated from the teens onward.
The dynamics of the fossil-fuel industry had also changed remarkably from the founding of the Electric Vehicle Company in 1899 to 1913. In the late 1870s the world’s then-largest oil field in the Petrolia region of Pennsylvania had given out. The boom-and-bust of the region led some to speculate that crude oil was much more rare than it turned out to be. Then, throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, huge oil finds in Texas and Oklahoma, beginning with Spindletop in 1901, began to allay fears that had plagued gasoline supporters. Fears of an “oil famine” quieted and slowly went away, further solidifying the hold that internal combustion engine vehicles had on the market.42
For bicyclists, all the hard work they’d done for automobiles would not be repaid. Once a relatively fast car reached critical mass, the slower alternatives were no longer available. Bicyclists, electric cars, and horsecarts all became hazards and had to be done away with. Roads had to be made the exclusive province of gasoline-powered cars—or vehicles that could closely mimic gasoline-powered cars’ speed and maneuverability. Cities had to change ship to fit the needs of human beings in their new two thousand–pound exoskeletons.
A cartoon on the cover of the November 20, 1902, Life magazine shows a picture of the round earth covered with speeding automobiles trailed by billowing clouds of dust and exhaust. The humans are depicted falling off the globe and tumbling into nothingness. The title reads, “Who Owns It, Anyway?”43 In 1905 a herd of sheep could dally near central Philadelphia; they’d have been scattered or killed a decade later. The motor car transformed what the road was. Once we went down the gas automobile path, the ride acquired tremendous momentum. Nonetheless, changing technological directions remains