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HISTORY

An Early Road Warrior

Electric Vehicles In The Early Years Of The Automobile
Carl Sulzberger

 
This is the first part of a two-part article that looks at the rise and decline of electric powered automobiles and trucks in the United States during the last years of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century.

The Dawn of the Automobile Age

By the latter years of the 19th century, technology had developed to the point where practical self-propelled road vehicles became possible. Numerous inventors and backyard tinkerers in Europe and North America were hard at work on steam, internal combustion, and electric-powered replacements for the horse and muscle power to move people and goods. Milestone achievements included the construction in the early 1860s of the first practical internal combustion engine by Belgian Etienne Lenoir in France, Nicholas Otto's four-cycle engine built in Germany in the late 1870s, the use of Otto-type gasoline engines by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz who are credited with producing the first commercial automobiles in Germany in the late 1880s, and the introduction and spread of electric power generation and distribution systems by Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, beginning in the 1880s.

In 1900, there were a total of 2,370 automobiles in New York, Chicago, and Boston. Of these, 1,170 were steamers, 800 were electrics, and only 400 were gasoline-powered. All three types of motive power for road vehicles competed for supremacy, and each had distinct advantages and shortcomings. Steam-powered cars borrowed technology earlier proven in railroads and ships. The steam engine was powerful and efficient, could burn many different fuels without modification to generate steam, could accelerate smoothly and silently by the simple use of a lever-throttle, and needed no shifting of gears. However, steamers required some minutes to get steam up from a cold start, involved a complex array of gauges and valves to be sure that water and fuel were proper, that cylinder oil was reaching the pistons, and that steam pressure was adequate for operation. An additional inconvenience was the weekly thorough cleaning that the boiler, burners, and other operating parts required. The range of a steam car was about 25 to 30 miles before the boiler water had to be replenished. Closed circuit condensers to capture and reuse waste steam were introduced later, extending the range of the steamer to as much as 150 miles between water stops. However, this development came too late to save the steamer. There was also a persistent rumor that the steam boiler could explode at any moment without warning. While there was little actual danger of such an occurrence and there is no record of a steam automobile boiler exploding, many prospective buyers avoided steamers. Despite its positive qualities, the steam automobile was nearly extinct by 1920.

Gasoline-powered internal combustion automobiles at that time were noisy, smelly, and polluting. They were unreliable and prone to mechanical problems and, worst of all, had to be cranked by hand to start them. This process required a strong arm, was inconvenient, and often resulted in skinned knuckles or, if the crank kicked back, a sprained or broken wrist. Despite these disadvantages, gasoline-powered vehicles could travel fast, could be equipped with powerful engines, and had great range because gasoline was available at many locations at an early date. Also, many early automobilists were attracted to the noise and perceived glamour of the gasoline automobile. As is well known, the early disadvantages of gasoline-powered vehicles were overcome in time. Even though there have been and continue to be many attempts to develop and successfully commercialize alternative-powered vehicles, the internal combustion engine became dominant early in the 20th century and remains so today.

The electric automobile was silent, clean, and simple to operate. However, its range was limited by the charge of its batteries. Thus, electric cars were restricted to areas where they could easily return home to recharge or where recharging facilities were made available by a local electric power company. Also, early electric cars were slow compared to steam or gasoline-powered cars, with the normal cruising speed being less than 20 miles per hour. Higher than normal speeds cut down on the range that, in the early days, would only be about 25 to 40 miles. Also, the batteries required careful and frequent maintenance and added a great deal of weight to the vehicle. As we will see, electric road vehicles enjoyed some success in the early years of the last century but ceased to be a viable commercial product by about 1920.

Edison and Ford

Thomas Alva Edison, the developer of a practical incandescent light bulb and the first direct current (dc) electric power generating and distribution system, and Henry Ford, the famous automobile developer and inventor of modern manufacturing and assembly methods, both contributed greatly to the industrial and social transformation of society and the creation of the modern world. Ford joined the Detroit Edison Illuminating Company in 1891 and became chief engineer by 1896. In his spare time, he had already built his first gasoline-powered automobile, which he called the "quadricycle," and was working on a second. In August 1896, Ford attended a convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies at Manhattan Beach, New York, and, after dinner, was introduced to Edison as the builder of a gasoline car. Edison, though hampered by his increasing deafness, expressed great interest and asked many detailed questions. As later related by Ford, Edisom reportedly advised:

Young man, that's the thing: you have it. Keep at it. Electric cars must keep near to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won't do either for they have to have a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke, and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.

This first encounter led later to a friendship that endured until Edison's death in 1931. Ford, some 18 years Edison's junior, looked up to Edison as one of the greatest inventors of all time and always addressed him as Mr. Edison. He also took his mentor's advice to "keep at it."

By 1899, Ford had left the Detroit Edison Company and launched his first small automobile manufacturing enterprise. Later, Ford and Edison were to collaborate on projects involving electric cars and an electric starter for Ford's famous Model T car. While Ford remained committed to gasoline-powered vehicles and Edison, despite his words of encouragement to Ford in 1896, believed that the future belonged to electric-powered vehicles, they shared a belief in the coming Automobile Age. They both strongly advocated the need and social desirability of making efficient, inexpensive automobiles, however powered, readily available to the great mass of the population. At the beginning of the 20th century, automobiles remained primarily the province of the wealthy.

Early Electric Vehicles

The first successful electric automobile in the United States was built in 1891 by William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa. This vehicle was the only American automobile exhibited along with five European vehicles at the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. (See Figure 1.) Morrison's automobile was equipped with a four horsepower motor and a 24-cell battery weighing 768 pounds—more than half of the vehicle's total weight. Top speed was a breathtaking (for the time) 14 miles per hour. In 1897, the Pope Manufacturing Company, Hartford, Connecticut, became the first American builder and seller of electric cars in quantity. Pope's Columbia Electric Phaeton, Mark III, weighed some 1,800 pounds, including 850 pounds of batteries, and had four forward speeds of 3, 6, 12, and 15 miles per hour. Intermediate speeds could be achieved by switching between two of the four fixed speeds. A planetary gear-reduction system simplified shifting in that the driver simply moved a control lever forward to marked notches for the forward speeds, to a neutral position to stop and backward for reverse. This vehicle could run up to 30 miles between battery charges and remained in production with little change for some years. Other pioneering American electric car makers included the C.E. Woods Company and Andrew L. Riker, who first marketed cars in 1896 and 1897, respectively. (See Figure 2.)

Electric vehicles enjoyed early success, especially when compared to the relatively primitive gasoline-powered vehicles then available. The first American automobile race on a track was held at Narragansett Park, Cranston, Rhode Island, in 1896. It was won by a Riker electric car that covered the one-mile track in less than three minutes at a speed of about 25 miles per hour and defeated five gasoline-powered racers. Riker later covered a mile in 63 seconds in an electric at a race sponsored by the Long Island Motor Club in 1901.

In 1899, there were some 12 manufacturers of electric vehicles in the United States. In 1900, 28% of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States were powered by electricity. The Electric Storage Battery Company (ESB), a producer of lead-acid batteries, including Exide brand batteries, began operating electric cabs in New York City in the last years of the 19th century. William C. Whitney, the New York streetcar magnate, became interested in ESB and, after a bruising battle, managed to gain control of the company in late 1898. He envisioned expanding the electric cab business to many large cities. In 1899, Whitney and the Pope Manufacturing Company combined to form the Columbia Automobile Company to build and sell cars to the public and the parent Electric Vehicle Company to build electric cabs and to operate the company's cab businesses. The Riker Motor Vehicle Company was absorbed by the Whitney and Pope interests in 1900. Beginning in 1901, the Electric Vehicle Company produced both gasoline-powered and electric automobiles. (See Figure 3.)

While the future looked bright for electric vehicles at the dawn of the last century, the slow and uneven spread of electrification would remain a major impediment to their wide adoption and use. Almost a score of years after Edison's Pearl Street Station success, universal electric lighting largely remained a dream. As such, the necessary widespread infrastructure for recharging electric vehicle batteries, either at home or at a nearby location, simply did not exist.

Batteries for Electric Vehicle Use

The storage or secondary battery was a relative latecomer to the field of electric battery technology. Gaston Planté, a French chemist, made the first practical design in 1859. His work with a lead-acid system using lead compound electrodes and a sulfuric acid electrolyte resulted in the first commercial storage batteries that were suitable for scientific instruments and telegraph use. Camille Faure, a French engineer, and other European researchers improved on Planté's early designs, leading to practical lead-acid batteries becoming widely available by 1890. When a battery operates, oxygen is given up by the positive electrode, the negative electrode is oxidized, and electric current flows.

The advantage, of course, of the reversible storage battery is that it can be recharged and reused when its electrochemical power has been exhausted. By applying dc power to a battery's terminals at the proper voltage and current, the electrodes are returned to their original chemical state with oxygen being taken from the negative electrode and added to the positive electrode. This cycle can be repeated again and again. The disadvantages of the lead-acid storage battery are that it is heavy, difficult to correctly recharge, and very corrosive. Early lead-acid batteries typically had a power density of 4 to 6 watt-hours per pound of material, requiring between 125 and 187 pounds of battery for each horsepower-hour delivered at the battery terminals.

Edison, believing that the lead-acid battery was too inefficient and corrosive, set out in 1900 to multiply the storage capacity some threefold and to make a less corrosive battery. His plan was to use an alkaline solution (e.g., 20% potassium hydroxide) for an electrolyte to avoid corrosion and iron or iron oxide for a negative electrode. Edison's search for the correct positive electrode material lent itself to his style of empirical science where many thousands of experiments were laboriously performed using hundreds of materials and combinations of materials. After a large number of experiments failed to yield a satisfactory positive electrode material, Edison's friend and business associate Walter Mallory offered his condolences on the apparent lack of

Why man, I've got a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
Finally, graphite combined with nickel hydrate was found acceptable as the positive electrode material. The new Edison nickel-iron-alkaline battery had a power density of some 14 watt-hours per pound, resulting in a battery weight of 53.3 pounds per horsepower-hour. This was some 233 percent better than contemporary lead-acid batteries. The new battery went on sale in 1904, but negative reports quickly came in. The battery containers tended to leak, the cells were of uneven performance, electrical contacts failed, and the batteries quickly dropped about 30% in power capacity. Edison removed the batteries from the market, absorbed the financial loss, and set out, more determined than ever, to correct the problems.

After thousands of additional experiments between 1905 and 1909, Edison developed a process to make thin metallic nickel film or flake by alternately electroplating thin layers of copper and nickel on a metal cylinder and then dissolving the copper away in a chemical bath. The resulting nickel flake positive electrode offered improved electrical contact and conductivity while conserving weight and extending electrical capacity. After a ten-year quest at the cost of over a million dollars of his own money, Edison could announce in 1909 that his improved battery was complete. He promoted this advance by staging such things as a 1,000-mile endurance tour and other shorter tours using Bailey and Detroit electric automobiles equipped with the new device. (See Figure 4.)

The Edison battery extended the range of electric vehicles to as much as 100 miles between charges and had a higher power density that did lead-acid batteries. Also, it was lighter than equivalent lead-acid batteries and could be recharged in half the time, resisted decomposition, was virtually completely reversible, and lasted three to tentimes longer than lead-acid batteries. However, its voltage capacity was only about 1.2 V per cell versus almost 2 V per cell for lead-acid batteries. As a result, more cells were required, making the Edison battery much larger than an equivalent lead-acid battery. This offset the advantage of lower per unit weight. Further, the Edison battery could not be subjected to hard use, required careful maintenance, and was seriously affected by cold weather, its alkaline electrolyte becoming slushy and weak. Its biggest drawback remained its price, some three and a half times a much as an equivalent lead-acid battery.

Edison envisioned his nickel-iron-alkaline battery to be the salvation of the electric automobile. It was not, and while some manufacturers such as the Anderson Electric Car company used the Edison battery in many of its Detroit electrics, most electric vehicles continued to use lead-acid batteries, themselves constantly undergoing improvement. However, the Edison battery won wide acceptance as a very rugged industrial battery where dependability and long life were important and where controlled conditions and adequate maintenance were available. Such uses included power plant standby power sources, railway signaling, miner's lamps, and other railroad and marine applications.

Edison's decade-long unrelenting campaign to build a better electric vehicle storage battery, while not achieving Edison's original objective, stands out in the annals of battery technology. The vast amount of empirical work conducted during those ten years has provided a storehouse of data and knowledge for later battery researchers.

Recharging Electric Vehicle Batteries

The advent of electric central stations and power distribution systems both enabled and limited the use of electric road vehicles and their growth in numbers. In the last two decades of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century the pace of electrification was slow and uneven. In 1900, few middle class and working class households had electricity, and most wealthy families similarly lacked electric service. Moreover, outside the home, there were few places for an electric vehicle to be recharged, even if electricity was available in a city or town. In most rural areas, electric service was virtually unknown. At the same time, kerosene, gasoline, water, and other services were widely available for steam- and gasoline-powered vehicles.

Vehicle batteries had to be recharged frequently, and charging required significant time. Saving time by boosting batteries at high current in repeated quick charges reduced battery capacity and service life. Also, there were at least three plug designs in use in the early years of the last century, and no standardized connection system existed among either the car manufacturers or the public utilities.

The Edison dc electric supply system predominated for a time in cities and in other built up areas. With dc service supplied at 110 V or sometimes 220 V, there was a mismatch between the vehicle's battery voltage and the supply voltage. With most cars having 16 to 48 cells producing about 2 V each, connection to a 110-V dc system, for example, required a rheostat to convert the excess power into heat. Meters were also needed to correctly adjust the voltage and current. The charging had to be closely monitored to avoid overcharging and possible damage to the battery.

The introduction and spread of alternating current (ac) electric power systems in the 1890s and later presented the problem of converting ac to dc for battery charging. Initially, this was accomplished with a costly rotary converter made up of an ac motor coupled with a dc generator. A rheostat was needed to adjust the dc output of the converter to the needed battery input voltage. Up to half of the power could be wasted by the rotary converter and the rheostat. Before Westinghouse and General Electric produced and marketed rotary converters and controls for home charging in 1900, these devices had to be individually made up by an electrician.

During the first decade of the last century, the mercury arc rectifier in which ac is converted to dc in a large mercury-containing bulb was commercialized by both Westinghouse and General Electric. While mercury arc rectifiers replaced the more costly rotary converters, their operation had to be closely watched because the automatic shutoff designed to work when the charging was complete often failed. This could result in an overcharge and battery damage.

Another battery problem was that they required frequent and careful maintenance or they quickly lost their ability to hold an adequate charge. The periodic checking of the cells with a hydrometer, the addition of water or sulfuric acid as needed, and the replacement of dead cells was better accomplished with the batteries out of the car. However, wrestling hundreds of pounds of batteries into and out of the vehicle every few days was both inconvenient and tiresome. By 1901, most cars came equipped with a plug and connections to allow recharging batteries on the vehicle. This convenience had the unintended effect of contributing to less careful battery maintenance and thus more rapid battery deterioration.

One answer to the problem of assuring adequate battery maintenance was to have a fleet of vehicles operate out of a well-staffed central station where charging and all maintenance activities could be conducted by specialists. This system was used by the New York Electric Vehicle Transportation Company. Taxi service began in March 1897, and by 1899 there were 60 electric cabs having a top speed of 15 miles per hour in operation in New York City. (See Figure 5.) After three or four hours of use, each cab's batteries required a leisurely eight-hour recharge. Since it was obviously uneconomic to have each cab out of service for two thirds of the time, a system was implemented where a cab with a depleted battery reported to the central station and had its battery removed using a specially designed hydraulic grappling device and replaced with a fresh battery installed using a specially designed crane. The depleted battery was then taken to the charging room for proper recharging and any needed or scheduled maintenance. Using this system, the cab was back on the street earning fares in a short time.

In 1899, John Van Vleck, an engineer at the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in New York City, designed an electric supply "hydrant" for curbside installation at intervals along city streets. His idea was that an electric vehicle could simply park next to the device, plug in, and receive metered current to recharge its battery. In 1900, General Electric actually produced a commercial version of Van Vleck's device, termed an "electrant," that would dispense 2.5 kWh for 25 cents. While the "electrant" received favorable publicity, there is no record that they actually went into service in quantity. Their installation would have required an electric utility to purchase the devices, run wires, and secure any needed rights to install the devices on private or public property. (See Figure 6.) Interestingly, some utilities, including the Salt River Project (SRP) in Arizona, have more recently installed charging stations for the use of current or future electric vehicles. The station pictured in Figure 7 is one of eight presently in service in the Scottsdale and East Valley area.

Up Next

The further development of the electric vehicle in the years after 1909, its peak popularity in 1913, attempts to save it, and its eventual decline through the early 1920s will be discussed in the second and concluding part of this article in an upcoming issue.

For Further Reading

M.C. Schiffer with T.C. Butts and K.K. Grimm, Taking Charge — The Electric Automobile in America. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution, 1994.

E.L. Throm and J.S. Crenshaw, Popular Mechanics Auto Album. Chicago: Popular Mechanics, 1952.

D.A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000.

R.W. Clark, Edison, The Man Who Made The Future. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1977.

R. Conot, A Streak Of Luck. New York: Seaview Books, 1979.

M. Josephson, Edison. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.