Prologue - Preparing the Way for the Columbia Cars, and the Formation of the Electric Vehicle Company

Prologue - Preparing the way for the Columbia cars, and the formation of the Electric Vehicle Company Electrobat Morris and Salom Electrobat The Electrobat was the first successful electric automobile to ever be created. Mechanical engineer Henry G. Morris and chemist Pedro G. Salom from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania were responsible for this marvel of engineering. Pedro J. Salom was the president of the Electrical Lead Reduction Company which was incorporated in 1899. This company produced products supporting the manufacturing of early batteries. Salom was an electrochemical engineer. With solid backgrounds in battery streetcars, they decided to team up and make battery road vehicles. The Electrobat was the result of their combined efforts. It was patented on August 31, 1894 and it entered production in 1895. It was a slow, heavy vehicle, built like a smaller version of a battery streetcar. The vehicle was indeed a very heavy carriage, with steel tires to support the immense weight caused from the then new Lead Acid Battery. The two men then founded the Morris and Salom Electric Wagon and Carriage Company – the first electric car company in the United States of America. The first test ride for this first electric car was on Broad Street. A special permit was required from City Hall, and a policeman had to travel in front if the EV, clearing any horse carriages to prevent the animals to panic. With continuous research and development, the later versions of the Electrobat were lighter, faster and less ungainly. They had pneumatic tires and steered by their rear wheels. The newer versions ran on two 1.5-horsepower (1.1 kW) motors that worked for 25 miles (40 km) per charge at 20 mph (32 km/h). The pair then expanded their business and went on to build about a dozen hansom cabs based on this model. These cabs competed with the horse-drawn cabs then in service in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. They based their strategy upon the model of livery stables that leased horses and carriages by the trip, by the day, or even by the month. Morris and Salom made 4 types of Electrobats. The first type was made in 1894 and weighed 4,250 lbs with a 1,600 lb battery. It drove 50 miles at up to 15 mph. It had steel tires to support its weight. [Photo immediately below] As research increased, the further models became vastly better. The second model was improved and it weighed 1,650 lbs with a 640 lb battery. The model had two 1 1/2 hp motors, pneumatic tires, and drove upto 25 miles per charge at 20 MPH. The body was designed and made at the Charles S Caffery Carriage Co, across the river in Camden New Jersey, (with the help of Walter C Baker’s bearings and axles). They steered by their rear wheels. The fourth prototype [color photo below] was made in the late 1895 and was even lighter than the others. This model was the best of the lot and it weighed 800 lbs with a 350 lb battery with two 75 lb motors and it drove at 15 mph for 20-25 miles. The Electrobat II took the Judges’ Medal at America’s first automobile contest, the Chicago Times-Herald race in 1895. Two years later, in 1897, they were given the Philadelphia Scott Medal, which was an international award given to those who contributed to the advancement of humankind. The Electrobat made history and contributed greatly to man’s understanding of automobiles. It was a marvel of science, and was a breakthrough like no other. Morris and Salom then sold their patent to Isaac L. Rice of Electric Storage Battery and the company was reincorporated as the Electric Vehicle Company. Bringing Invention to the Marketplace By Joseph W. Slade For Isaac Leopold Rice, inventions and patents were pieces to be fitted together. In creating ways to combine and sell them, he helped invent the modern corporation. Although no one could ever patent it, one of the most important inventions of the late nineteenth century was the modern corporation, and of those who might lay claim to it, Isaac Leopold Rice was perhaps the most brilliant. At his best, a corporate entrepreneur like Rice was as much an innovator as was the inventor of a practical machine or process, for he institutionalized the useful. Rice was extraordinarily shrewd about patents, building more than fifteen corporations to sell technologies devised by other men. His astonishing versatility contrasted sharply with the single-mindedness of many captains of industry, while his cultivated personality differed just as strongly from the flamboyance of the Goulds and the Edisons. Curiously reticent for one so talented, he gave his name only to a now-forgotten gambit in chess, a particularly audacious sequence of moves. Musicologist, lawyer, professor, writer, publisher, financier, and founder of the companies that ultimately became General Dynamics, Rice moved from career to career as if they were squares on the beautiful inlaid chessboards he loved. The Rice gambit called for a calculated sacrifice, and Rice himself often abandoned eminence in one field to pursue it in another. In February 1893, as head of the financial syndicate trying to rescue the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, Rice hastily returned to America when the company filed for bankruptcy. He had been in London raising money on the line’s coal assets as part of his scheme to reorganize the railroad and its mining ventures into the elements of a corporate holding company. This strategynovel for its day—was sabotaged when the company’s president borrowed still more money for further expansion. Disgusted, Rice resigned his chairmanship in May and over the next several months watched from the sidelines as a new syndicate headed by J. P. Morgan stole Rice’s own reorganization plan by forming the Reading Company. Railroads have been called America’s first big business, but everywhere they lay in disarray, their weaknesses exposed by the depression of 1893. Consolidation and reorganization of the railroads was a glamorous enterprise in the late nineteenth century, but the ailing giants required more money and influence than Rice could mobilize. From his experience with railroads, however, he had learned new techniques of organization, finance, management, and competition, and the success of inventions during this crucial period depended directly on the emergence of precisely those institutional structures. It was no longer enough merely to invent a better mousetrap, nor was it enough simply to back it. To be exploited profitably, an invention had to be patented, developed, and perfected, its manufacture assured, demand for it created, its virtues advertised, and distribution systems put in place. The corporation evolved to meet those diverse needs, and Isaac Rice used his corporations to transform electrical, automotive, and naval novelties into familiar commercial and social realities. Inventions “might be called my ‘fad,’” he later said. At the time they seemed to be everybody’s. Since 1882, for example, Americans had applied for patents on some three thousand electrical inventions each year. Nearly all those gadgets seemed to be on display at the Chicago exposition of 1893. Although the largest crowds surged around the huge, humming dynamos, Rice noticed that most of the exhibits demonstrated machines powered by batteries. Despite their potential, the expensive dynamos performed erratically, especially at times of peak demand. The much cheaper batteries were heavy, corrosive, and leaky, but they stored the dynamo’s energy—as “pickled amperes”—so that it could be delivered on demand for virtually any purpose. Rice also noticed at the exposition that one particular battery ran such diverse machines as Otis’s elevator, the electric launches that glided around the midway’s lagoons, and Edison’s new motion-picture cabinet, the Kinetoscope. That battery was the chloride accumulator, manufactured by the Electric Storage Battery Company of Philadelphia, where Rice had grown up. Built since 1888, the accumulator incorporated Clement Payen’s idea for plates of fused lead chloride and the principles of Charles Brush, the Cleveland electrical pioneer. Designed for large capacity and rapid recharge, it was prized by those who wanted dependable power. It was also enveloped in patent chaos. Inexpert examiners in the overworked Patent Office could scarcely distinguish one battery from another, and misinformed court decisions had invited patent infringements and inflated claims by any company that could coax current from an electrolyte. As Edison remarked, “When a man gets on to accumulators his inherent capacity for lying comes out.” Constantly attacking or being attacked, Electric Storage Battery was close to ruin. The chloride accumulator needed an entrepreneur. Schooled in railroad and patent law, Rice established order by using the tools of monopoly and consolidation. He distinguished between financial monopoly, which crippled competition, and temporary patent monopoly, which encouraged not just a particular industry but others as well. Too often, he wrote, gearing up a factory could consume half the seventeen years of a patent’s life; if the courts could not protect the inventor’s right to exploit his discovery fully, then the entrepreneur would have to do it for him. To wield monopoly as an instrument, however, he first had to acquire it. Using his railroad profits, Rice bought enough shares of the Electric Storage Battery Company to acquire a directorship. Then, acting as the firm’s attorney, he began buying patents—more than five hundred. Some he bought to use, some to prevent others from using them. He spent $250,000, a frightening sum for a company whose gross receipts in 1894 were only $300,000. He reduced the risk, however, by incorporating or buying what he called “cognate industries”: the Consolidated Railway Electric Lighting and Equipment Company, the Car Lighting and Power Company, the Railway and Stationary Refrigerating Company, the Lindstrom Brake Company, and the Quaker City Chemical Company.

Load more