The Historic Electrobat Plied the Streets of Gotham, but It Was No Batmobile

It had an odd appearance and an even odder name, but the obscure Electrobat electric taxicab was actually responsible for a number of automotive firsts. It was likely the first commercially successful electric automobile sold in the United States. It was also the first car whose driver was ticketed for speeding. More seriously, according to the historical record, it was the first motor vehicle involved in a fatal accident. The company that made it had a role in the famous Selden patent dispute, and you can still buy a battery from the company (or at least its corporate heirs) that supplied the Electrobat’s power cells.

Henry G. Morris and Pedro G. Salom, both of Philadelphia, were apparently involved in the battery-powered streetcar business in the early 1890s. They had complementary skills perfect for making electric vehicles, Morris being a mechanical engineer and Salom being a chemist who was granted numerous patents for battery chemistry. Salom’s Electrical Lead Reduction Company supplied battery manufacturers.

It’s not clear whether it was a decline in the battery-powered streetcar trade due to the proliferation of streetcar lines powered by overhead wires or because automotive pioneers like Daimler, Benz, and the Duryea brothers inspired them, but by the middle of the last decade of the 19th century, the two men were working on battery-powered automobiles. In 1895 and 1896, they filed applications for three U.S. patents for electric vehicles, numbers 541,001, 578,651, and 603,198.

They called their creation the Electrobat, most likely an allusion to its battery power rather than to flying rodents. The first Electrobat, as described in their first two patents, was essentially a scaled-down version of the streetcars they worked on previously. Developed in 1894, two years before Henry Ford’s Quadricycle, the Electrobat I was powered by a motor intended for a boat. It was heavy and slow, weighing in at over two tons, with much of that weight contributed by the 1600-pound lead-acid battery. It was so heavy that they specified steel “tires” in order to stand up to the primitive urban roads of the day. Interestingly, it had front-wheel drive but rear-wheel steering.

Morris and Salom gave their creation its first test drive on Philly’s Broad Street, but not before they were granted a special permit from city officials, who required a police officer to travel in front of the vehicle to prevent any carriage-drawing horses from panicking and bolting.

The following year, Morris and Salom introduced the Electrobat II, which was considerably slimmed down at just 1650 pounds and based on their third patent. A 640-pound lead-acid battery powered two 1.5-horsepower Lundell motors driving the front wheels, giving a range of 25 miles with a top speed of 20 mph. This iteration used pneumatic tires.

The Electrobat II competed in some early motorcar competitions and even won awards. On September 7, 1896, what is said to be the first automobile race to be held on a track in America took place at Narragansett Park, Rhode Island. Spectators witnessed one of Morris & Salom’s Electrobats race past gasoline-powered Duryeas, recording an average speed of 25 mph.

Progress continued, and a third and fourth Electrobat were developed, further reducing the weight to 800 pounds, with a 350-pound battery.

All of the Electrobats’ batteries were supplied by the Electric Storage Battery Company, also of Philadelphia, the corporate ancestor of today’s Exide corporation.

In 1896, Morris and Salom founded the Morris & Salom Electric Carriage and Wagon Company to produce Electrobats, with bodies built by the Caffrey Carriage Co. of Camden, New Jersey. Their target market was not selling to private owners of automobiles but rather leasing vehicles to the operators of horse-drawn hansom cabs in urban centers like New York City, Boston, and their hometown of Philadelphia.

In part because of that racing success, Morris & Salom Electric attracted the attention of lawyer and investor Isaac L. Rice, who bought them out in 1897. The following year, Rice merged the firm with its battery supplier to form the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC), what some sources say was the world’s first automobile corporation, and what was undoubtedly the first commercial maker of electric road vehicles in the U.S. The first fleet of 12 EVC Electrobats hit the streets of New York in March 1897. The concept was immediately successful, serving a thousand passengers in the first month. By the turn of the 20th century, EVC was operating more than 100 Electrobat taxis and was expanding to other cities.

Then, as well as now, a major challenge in operating EVs was charging times. Lead-acid batteries are particularly slow to charge. To address that issue, EVC converted a former ice-skating rink into a battery-swapping station. Taxis were driven in and had their cells replaced in seconds, allowing each cab to log as many as 100 miles a day.

If you care to delve into the finer details of the Electrobat and its battery-swapping stations, the September 1898 issue of The Horseless Age magazine covered the early EV in depth.

In 1899, cabbie Jacob German made automotive history when his Electrobat was chased down by a patrolman on a bicycle and arrested for speeding. His crime? Going at a breakneck 12 mph in an 8-mph zone. That same year, the Electrobat was also, sadly, involved in the first recorded fatality involving an automobile, when pedestrian Henry Bliss was hit by an Electrobat taxi after he stepped off of a New York City streetcar.

Isaac Rice’s success with EVC brought in major investors and partners, and by the early 1900s, the company was operating more than 600 electric taxis in New York City, with smaller fleets in Boston, Baltimore, and other eastern cities. One of those investors was financier William C. Whitney, a former Secretary of the Navy with holdings in the streetcar industry.

Whitney and his syndicate took control of the Electric Vehicle Company from Rice in 1899, hoping to establish a “Lead Cab Trust.” Whitney planned to have a monopoly on urban transport and raised enough funds to build thousands of cabs, opening branches in Boston, Chicago, and Newport, with plans for offices abroad. The company did manage to produce about 2000 Electrobats and was briefly the largest automobile company in America, but it was never able to dominate the taxi market. The poor performance of Electrobats compared to the rapidly evolving gasoline-powered cars, as well as lawsuits over monopolistic practices, doomed EVC, and by 1901, Oldsmobile had surpassed it as the leading American automaker.

Whitney brought in Albert Augustus Pope and Pope’s Columbia Automobile Co. and reorganized EVC as a holding company for several car brands, including Columbia and Riker. By that point, the Electric Vehicle Company’s major asset, ironically, was the 1879 Selden patent, which claimed a right to royalties from any manufacturers of internal-combustion-powered vehicles. By the time that patent was essentially voided by the courts in 1913, EVC itself had been out of business for six years.

EVC’s collapse in 1907 was hastened by a fire at the charging station, which destroyed 300 Electrobat taxis. That partially explains why there are no surviving production Electrobats today.

The last historical reference to Henry Morris and Pedro Salom that I can find is a 1902 clipping from The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper concerning the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Electric Vehicle Company, with Morris and Salom reported as being present. As the clipping is also the only historical reference to that company I could find, it was probably another one of the hundreds of failed car companies at the dawn of the automotive age. Morris and Salom likely later returned to their careers in engineering and chemistry.