Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly: Tarzan & Electric Cars
Too Much Curiosity for Only Nine Lives
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Tarzan & The Electric Craze
Edgar Rice Burroughs was a writer as was William S. Burroughs but they were probably unrelated; Bill wrote surrealistic druggy novels — Edgar did not. Edgar’s most famous creation is probably Tarzan, after which Tarzana, California is named, but he also managed to produce a few novels that swirled around Barsoom – the Martian word for Mars in his Barsoom series starting with A Princess of Mars which starred the US Civil War veteran John Carter of Virginia.
Okay. And why are we talking about Burroughs in a Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly about an Electric Craze? Good question, my friend, good question.
Before Burroughs (Edgar) made a mint writing relatively crappy – I mean, easy-to-read – books about a House of Lords member (John Clayton II, Viscount Greystoke) who was raised by chimpanzees in Africa, he (Burroughs) had quite a few jobs. Among his myriad employments was a pencil sharpener salesman, cowboy, stationery store owner, private in the US military, and an accountant, although he wasn’t one.
One of his better jobs — meaning a job that came with a steady salary — was as a salesman for the American Battery Company. The ABC sold batteries for, among other uses, that new-fangled thing called a “car”. This was in 1899. But six years before Edgar was gainfully employed (briefly; he quit after three years), he drove a car around the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. It was not just any car. It was an American Battery Company car. And it was, according to many sources, the first all-electric car in the world. Not just Chicago or the US or the Western Hemisphere but the World. In 1893. Edgar drove it as advertising for ABC’s owner: George T. Burroughs, a US Civil War veteran and Edgar’s father. Was ABC’s electric car of 1893 the first electric car?
What about Thomas Parker?
Parker was a bit of an electric genius called, by Lord Kelvin (a smart & rich person), the Edison of Europe, which I’m sure he meant as a compliment and wasn’t referring to Edison’s penchant for suing inventors who invented stuff before Edison, driving them out of business so he could snap up their patents cheaply. Parker invented a ton (literally) of electronic devices including pumps, generators, and batteries. With these batteries and generators, he provided power to England’s first electric trolley (1885), lighting for mines (1884), and, yes, an electric car. In 1885. Perhaps he built his best and most reliable electric car in 1895, just two years after the American Battery Company’s contestant for the first electric car.
But was Parker the first to build an electric car? What about Andreas Flocken who invented the easily-mispronounced Flocken Elektrowagen in 1888? Or Ányos Jedlik, who invented an electric motor, slapped it on a small model and had it zip around his neighborhood in 1828? 1828? My goodness. Almost 200 years ago, or it will be 208 years after the Tokyo Summer Olympics close up shop, leaving Japan with a huge Olympic debt.
Or what about Thomas Davenport who did something like an electric car but it was actually more in tune with an electric train back in 1834? His electric motor, when attached to a cart, required an electrified track to run around on so, was it a car? Then in 1835, Sibrandus Stratingh and Christopher Becker built a small electric car in the Netherlands with only One (1) drawback: a non-rechargeable battery. It was the 19th century’s equivalent of a throwaway camera. Or perhaps you had to run out of power near a battery replacement shop i.e a blacksmiths.
In 1837, Bobby Davidson built an electric car, probably saw its limitations so he went on to build an electric train instead. In one of his demos of the train, it carried a load at four mph for one and a half miles; then it was run on some general tracks in Scotland. It proved unsatisfactory for hauling anything because of its weak batteries but that didn’t prevent a crowd of railroad-working Luddites from destroying it.
A busy time for Luddites, it was, as they destroyed any machine that could do their work either cheaper, faster, or more efficiently in fear of losing their jobs. Like destroying the automatic loom. Unfortunately, the Luddites were right about one thing; with those machines, many weavers lost their livelihoods because of the Industrial Revolution. Even now Amazon is looking into robots and drones that can work 24/7 without a potty break or air conditioners. These will put a ton of hard-working Americans out of a job.
Electric Car Concerns
Back a hundred years ago people were concerned about three things concerning the electric car:
Battery recharging time
Distance covered in one battery charge
Availability of recharging stations.
Price of the car
Hmmm, those sounds vaguely familiar. You’d think that given a hundred years or so the manufacturing geniuses at GM, Ford, and a few other companies could have figured out answers to those three variables. I guess not. One variable is a concern of all consumers of all products consumed; price, don’t you think?
1859
Gaston Planté. The lead-acid battery. 1881. Camille Alphonse Faure. More better lead-acid batteries. Between Planté’s invention of the lead-acid thing in 1859 and through Faure’s improvements on Planté’s work, a rechargeable batter was developed. Twenty-nine years where intelligent industrialists saw the advantage of the battery and a profit; cheap enough to make, powerful enough to use, and worthy of mass production. Hit it, maestro!
After 1881 the electric car smacked everyone upside the head as a possible candidate for making money. Mainly because of the rechargeable battery and the no-longer needed tracks; those could be saved for electric cable cars, trams, and scooters. I mean, Segways. What? Gone already?
Which brings up two men with similar ideas separated only by time, space, and parentage. Franz Kravogl and Gustave Trouvé. Kravogl in Austria and Trouvé in France both built electric motorcycles. Kravogl in 1867 attempted to ride his around the World Expo in Paris but was hard-pressed to keep it going. Trouvé, also in Paris, tootled around on a three-wheeled electric motorcycle in 1881.
But it wasn’t until the aforementioned Thomas Parker came up with a powerful rechargeable battery (and a company) that electric cars finally made the (moderate) big time. It was Parker who turned the London Underground electric. His company, the Elwell-Parker company, made the cars. They also made electric trams for the underground and the British equivalent of the El in Chicago (like Disney’s electric monorail system.).
The Elwell-Parker company
The Elwell-Parker company merged with a bunch of other like-minded manufacturers and the Electric Construction Company was - poof - created out of thin air. It had, however, a monopoly on electric car market in the 1890s. Now, how big a market was that? Quite big actually. Electric cars outsold internal combustion cars because they didn’t require a servant to start the sucker. The hand crank on the internal combustion car was hard to crank; it broke bones sometimes, and could hardly be expected to be used by what was then called the Fairer Sex or the Weaker Sex, e.g. Females.
Internal combustion thingies were also noisy, required lots of shifting, bounced around a lot, and cost a lot less. What? Yes, the electric car was purchased because it was quiet, didn’t have the noise factor or shifting, and wasn’t quite the bouncy-bouncy thing the internal combustion engine was with its Pistons jumping up and down all the time. It was also purchased as a Lady’s Car or the Ladies Car precisely because it was easy to start. It was also much more expensive than the internal combustion engine vehicle.
Speaking of quiet...
The electric car was quiet but so was another vehicle that sputtered around the industrial nations at that time: the Steam Car. The what? Yes, a car powered by a steam engine not unlike the steam engine that powered Steam Locomotives. If it worked for trains, why wouldn’t it work for cars?
Well, first of all in order to use hot water to power your car you needed hot water and water took time to boil. In fact, the amount of water a steam car needed to heat up depended on the outside temperature (at least until the Doble brothers showed up) and it could take up to 45 minutes for the water to heat hot enough to drive a 5,000 pound car. Not exactly your jump in and run down to the corner malt shop for a drink with Archie and Betty.
On the other hand by 1900 the ratio of cars manufactured and sold in the US ran roughly thusly: Electric (33%), Steam (33%), and Gasoline (33%). Edison built an electric car. Henry Ford, soon to be the sinister racist misogynistic Henry Ford, bought an electric car for his wife (a lady’s car, see?). The Steam Powered horseless carriage, on the other hand, again (to repeat myself) was, as mentioned—again—slow to start until Abner Dobler and more than likely his brothers, invented a method of heating the boiler quickly.
Abner, the perfectionist brother, was one of four brothers of a grandfather who was a blacksmith, among other useful occupations, who created the Doble Nelson company. They became the largest and most profitable recipients of the California Gold Rush. Instead of looking for gold, they made miners’ equipment such as pans, picks, and a water wheel for mining invented by Abner’s father, William.
The sons of William the inventor were John, Warren, Bill, and Abner. Bill was obviously named after his father and the more arrogant Abner was named after his grandfather. By the time Abner was 16, he and his brothers had built their first steam-powered car. Then Abner went off, briefly, to MIT before joining his brothers in Massachusetts to build steam-powered cars. They built at least three before approaching the Stanley twins. The who?
The Stanley Twins
Yes, the Stanley twins: Francis & Freelan. They were inventors, too, of steam-powered cars. And their sister, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, became famous as a photographer. Her brothers developed a developing process for their sister.
Francis & Freelan’s first job was not building steam cars but making and selling maple syrup. Why? Well, they were only ten years old and had the stamina, knowledge, and business acumen to do it so, hey, why not? Better than mowing lawns for a living. They also learned to carve violins when they were ten. Ten!
Both twins went off to college and both twins didn’t graduate but one worked toward becoming an artist and the other... didn’t.
Meanwhile Parker (remember him from up above?) was concerned about, among other things, noise and air pollution. His solution was the electric motor for cars, motorcycles, and trains. Quiet and non-polluting, they were.
They were also fast. In 1899, obviously before the turn of the century, an electric car zipped along a designated race track and/or road at an incredible 105.8 km/h which is about 66 mph. This was far faster than an internal combustion gas guzzler could get up to. Also, Ferdinand Porsche (of the eponymous Porsche and Volkswagen car fame) designed an electric car with a motor on each wheel which set a bunch of speed records. In fact, the first car race in the US was won by an electric car. True story.
The electric car
What happened to it? Well, basically people like Kelvin and the American Battery Company were too successful. Improvements were made in electrical parts, especially the electric starter. With improvements also in the internal combustion engine complete with the new-fangled electric starter, people were no longer required to crank the car up like the propellor on a single engine World War One biplane.
Unfortunately for the electric car and the steam car, the internal combustion, pollution-creating, noisy, unsafe-at-any-speed car was Much cheaper. An electric car went for $2000 to $3000 in 1900; the gas car was more like $400. Who wouldn’t want the cheaper item? As mentioned above, one of the concerns of most consumers was Price. And Internal Combustion Engine cars beat the others hands down.
Gas was cheap, it was everywhere, it was profitable, and it didn’t take a day and a half to fill up an empty gas tank. Henry Ford began mass producing cheap gas cars and the electric vehicle slipped into oblivion until California legislated for a pollution-free car (enter Tesla, GM, Nissan, VW, and a host of other manufacturers looking to make a buck, again, including Dyson the vacuum cleaner company and Apple, which just pulled the plug on their electric car).
And here we are, back where we started 125 years or more ago with entrepreneurs and slimy businesspeople re-inventing the electric car. And maybe a Avatar-esque Tarzan?
We’d love to hear from you. Also, if you’re interested in either fiction writing or bookbinding, I have a podcast at Tedorigawabookmakers.podbean.com. I talk about the books I’m writing and the books I’m making.