The forgotten history of New York’s first electric taxi fleet-in the 1800s

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imageThe forgotten history of New York’s first electric taxi fleet—in the 1800s

More than a century before Teslas hit the road, battery-powered taxicabs zipped silently through the streets of Manhattan.

New York City had a horse problem in the last 19th-century.Its streets and alleyways were jammed with an estimated 150,000 of the animals—each one producing more than 35 pounds of waste every day.The logistics of disposing that much excrement created an enormous challenge that New Yorkers were eager to solve.And a new invention—the automobile—seemed to be the answer.

An electric start

When the city’s very first motorized taxicab service launched in 1896, it featured a clean energy technology that might shown modern New Yorkers.The cabs were electric vehicles.Produced by the straight forwardly named Electric Vehicle Company, the cars were known as Electrobats and were emerging as the market’s leading electric vehicle.Philadelphia inventions Henry Morris and Pedro Salom patented the Electrobat in 1894 and in two years had developed a smaller, faster version.Weighing in at 2,900 pounds, the new model was propelled by a lead-acid battery.

It achieved a top speed of 20 miles an honor and was capable of covering distances of up to 25 miles on a single charge.

The idea of EVs gliding around New York City in the 1890s might sound like science fiction, but battery-powered automobiles outsold their internal-combustion counterparts at the dawn of the automative age.Electric cars were quiet, clean, and easy to drive.

“Back then, you were lucky if a gas car started in the morning,” says Dan Albert, author of Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless.“It was noisy, polluting, and rickety, whereas an electric car started with a flip of the switch.”

This was the dawn of the age of electricity, a moment in time when technologies harnessing the power source seemed capable of overcoming any challenge.“If you asked people on the street what was going to happen, they would have said the electricity is this magic force,” says electric car historian David A.

Kirsch, authro of The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History.“We harnessed it for light.We harnessed it for traction through the trolley.

It’s spreading everywhere, and now it’s going to take us around.”

Morris and Salom brought the Electrobat to New York and devised an ingenious battery-swapping system inside a former Broadway ice-skating rink to keep the company’s cabs in continuous operation.

Employees maneuvered vehicles with elevators and hydraulics so that an overhead crane could pluck out the depleted 1,250-pound batteries and insert freshly charged ones.The process took only three minutes.“It was much faster than changing a horse team and probably as fast as what we would today associate with filling a tank of gas,” Kirsch says.

The bubble bursts

The Electrobat’s rapid acceleration and quiet ride posed some unforeseen challenges.

In May 1899, cab driver Jacob German became the first automobile operator arrested for speeding after whizzing down Lexington Avenue at 12 miles an hour.A few months later, an electric taxi fatally struck real estate broker Henry Bliss as he stepped off an Upper West Side streetcar.

The first pedestrian killed by an automobile never heard the Electrobat coming.

Morris and Salom decided that rather than sell their vehicles, they would lease them, on either a monthly or per-ride basis.Across New York City, their cab service—the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company—took off.Their taxi fleet expanded from a dozen cars in 1897 to more than a hundred in 1899.

With their business growing, Morris and Salom imagined a grand future for their car.They found new backing from wealthy investors, notably New York financier William Whitney, known for his success in electrifying the city’s streetcars.

Under Whitney’s ownership, the group also purchased a leading battery manufacturing firm, aiming to control the majority of the electric vehicle market nationwide.

The Electric Vehicle Company swiftly expanded its taxi operations to major cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston, eventually becoming the nation’s largest automobile manufacturer.However, its rapid expansion proved unsustainable.Operations outside New York were poorly run, and investors felt swindled when an 1899 New York Herald investigation revealed the Electric Vehicle Company had fraudulently secured a loan.The company’s stock fell, and the enterprise’s finances grew strained by 1902.

Electric cars lose power

The company’s collapse sent shockwaves through the investment community and cast a dark shadow over the formerly bright future of electric vehicles.

“The thing that killed it is not really the idea, the technology, or the business model,” Albert says.“It was the shadiness of the wheeler-dealers behind it.”

A devastating fire destroyed a significant portion of the fleet, and then the Panic of 1907, a nationwide financial crisis, caused car production to plummet, dealing a final blow to electric cabs in New York City.

But gasoline-powered vehicles were gaining momentum in the market.in 1907, local businessman Harry Allen introduced a taxi service with 65 gasoline-powered cabs imported from France.Within a year, his fleet had swelled to 700 vehicles.It seemed New York would never look back.

The EVs’ days were numbered, especially after the affordable, gas-powered Model-T debuted in 1908.Electric cars hung on until the 1920s, while the internal combustion engine grew ever more popular, going on to drive the next American century.

But electric cars would make a comeback.

When 25 all-electric taxis began operation on the streets of New York in 2022, the car of the future arrived—again.

A version of this story appears in the March 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine..

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