Technologies in Tension: Horses, Electric Trucks, and the Motorization of American Cities, 1900-1925

Abstract

and the outbreak of the Second World War, many urban, transportationdependent organizations used combinations of different technologies.Well into the 1920s, thousands of electric trucks provided valuable, reliable service in urban delivery and service vehicle fleets.This article traces the history of the electric truck in U.S. cities during the first quarter of the twentieth century.Although internal combustion had emerged as the leading technology in the passenger car market by 1905, the market for commercial vehicles was much slower to adopt a single technological standard.Private firms in urban areas did gradually accept the passing of the horse, tentatively at first but with growing enthusiasm, and many chose electric trucks to replace their fleets of horse-drawn vehicles.The long Indian summer of the electric truck, in David Sicilia's phrase, thus presents a paradox for traditional interpretations of the history of the motor vehicle industry.If the electric vehicle was an inherently inferior technology, doomed to failure by the iron laws of lead and acid, why did so many successful, progressive, profitable companies-such as Commonwealth Edison, in many respects the flagship electric utility of the United States in the first third of the twentieth century-continue to purchase and use them through the 1920s?Did these organizations simply bet on the wrong horse, as automotive historian John Rae proposed in explaining the failure of an early electric taxicab company?Or does the success of the electric truck offer a window into the complex evolutionary process by which trucks gradually displaced horses? 2 2. For most of this century, historians of the Automobile Age have focused on the passenger automobile, relegating the commercial vehicle to secondary status.The limited literature on the truck includes: Louis Rodriguez, "The Development of the Truck: A Constructivist History" (Ph.D. diss, Lehigh University, 1997); Robert Alan Raburn, "Motor Freight and Urban Morphogenesis with Reference to California and the West" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1988); John Montville, "Wheels for Commerce: A History of American Motor Trucks," in The American Car Since 1775, ed.L. Scott Bailey (New York, 1971); Robert F. Karolevitz, This Was Trucking: A Pictorial History of the First Quarter Century of Commercial Motor Vehicles (Seattle, Wash., 1966).On the presumed inferiority of the electric vehicle, James J. Flink typified a view held by many scholars when he described "the inherently superior technological feasibility of the internalcombustion engine for the motorcar at that time"; America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 307.Also see: James Rood Doolittle, The Romance of the Automobile Industry (New York, 1916); James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 10; John B. Rae, The American Automobile: A Brief History (Chicago, 1965), 12-13; James M. Laux, The European Automobile Industry (New York, 1992), 13.Virginia Scharff has implicitly depicted the electric alternative as an inferior technology: see Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York, 1991), 35-50; "Gender, Electricity, and Automobility," in The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life, ed.Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992); and "Putting Wheels on Women's Sphere," in Technology and Women's Voices: Keeping in Touch, ed.Cheris Kramarae (New York, 1988).Urban historian Clay McShane has taken a similar line; see Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994), 110.For a dissenting view, see Michael B. Schiffer, Taking

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