1888: Philip W. Pratt demonstrates the very first American electric tricycle.

Pratt’s e-trike was built for him by Fred M. Kimball of, naturally, the Fred M. Kimball Company. Pratt took the editor of Modern Light and Heat for a spin around Winthrop Square (above) in Boston.

The vehicle’s 10 lead-acid cells pushed about 20 volts to a 0.5-horsepower DC motor. The whole setup weighed about 300 pounds.

The driver sat above the battery assemblage. Top speed: 8 mph.

We don’t have any bystander accounts of that moment, but the mechanically propelled vehicle probably caused quite a scene.

The driver would have had to carefully navigate around horses and people to avoid sending them into a panic. In many locales, early automobilists had to stop their engines and pull over to let horses pass. The beasts regarded these new vehicles with intense suspicion and had the nasty habit of rearing and running in their presence.

Even as late as 1899, one Miss Helen Benedict terrorized the horses of Greenwich, Connecticut, with her little black electric runabout by simply driving downtown.

“It was the first time any of the Greenwich horses had seen anything of its kind, and they did not take to it kindly. One … became unmanageable, and the coachman could not prevent it from running into the door of Montell’s pharmacy,” reported The New York Times on Aug. 20, 1899 . “It climbed the stone steps, and the clerks were expecting to see it dash into the counters when the shaft hit the brick building and was broken. The coachman then pulled the horse back.”

The Pratt-Kimball device wasn’t the first electric tricycle in the world — that milestone belongs to British engineers William Ayrton and John Perry — but it was the leading edge of a wave of American innovation in self-propelled vehicles. Invention after invention poured into the patent office.

All the subsystems of every type of automobile had to be worked out. Every single car part in ACDelco had to be invented at some point.

Inventor Hiram Percy Maxim described the state of knowledge at the time in a late-life memoir:

It must be borne in mind that at this time, 1892, there were no spark plugs in the world, no carburetors, no magnetos, no good dry cells, and precious little practical knowledge about explosion engines, not to speak of clutches, change gears, differentials, steering gears, and tires…. I even had no definite idea as to where on a vehicle the engine should be placed.

We didn’t even really have a good name for the vehicles yet. Maxim’s memoir was called Horseless Carriage Days.  A leading automotive trade magazine used the Wired-esque title, The Horseless Age.

Early drivers were mostly car hackers. They usually mounted tool boxes on their cars to aid in the near-constant tinkering required to keep them running.

But all that innovation finally led to cars you could actually sell. By 1900, thousands of vehicles traveled the rutted, crowded routes that passed for roads in those days. Early autos were pretty equally divided as to power source: batteries, steam engines or internal combustion engines running on gasoline.

But the first decade of the 20th century was not kind to electric vehicles. The largest electric-car company was nailed for stock manipulation and then went bust. Henry Ford was honing in on the right design and manufacturing methods to build the iPhone of cars, the Model T.

Also, the roads connecting America’s big cities were getting better, largely due to the efforts of a group of bicyclists, the League of American Wheelmen and their Good Roads movement. Better roads made touring in the country more prevalent, thereby exposing the electric vehicles’ biggest problem: their limited range.

As gasoline cars gained the upper hand, they were able to capture spoils that go to the victors of technological battles. For example, roads — long used as a combination of common space and thoroughfare — became the sole province of fast vehicles. But centuries of habit did not get wiped away without rancor.

The political battle generated so much ill will among farmers and the urban working class that future-President Woodrow Wilson once said, “Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.”

No matter, though. By 1914, 99 percent of the vehicles built had internal combustion engines. Electric cars faded into obscurity … for that century.

Source: Various

Images: 1. flickr/Boston Public Library. 2. General Electric Review 1922.

See Also:

• Feb. 25, 1919: Oregon Taxes Gas by the Gallon
• May 21, 1901: Connecticut Sets First Speed Limit at 12 MPH
• Sept. 13, 1899: Manhattan Cab Hits Pedestrian in First U.S. Auto-Traffic Death
• Sept. 5, 1885: Pay at the Pump
• May 13, 1884: Electrical Engineers Meet Up, Light Up
• Sept. 22, 1791: Faraday Enters a World He Will Change
• Super Size Me! Electric Bikes for the Obese
• Nov. 9, 1888: Jack the Ripper Strikes for the Last Time … Or Does He?
• Sept. 4, 1888: Photography Leaps Into the Late 19th Century
• Aug. 14, 1888: I Sing the Meter Electric
• Aug. 12, 1888: Road Trip! Berta Takes the Benz
• June 29, 1888: Handel Oratorio Becomes First Musical Recording
• April 11, 1888: Concertgebouw, Home of Nearly Perfect Acoustics, Opens
• July 27, 1866: Trans-Atlantic Cable Connects Old World to New

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.