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

[I]n a short time the use of horse drawn truck wagons for Company work will be as rare as the dodo bird and the left-handed monkey wrench. You'll see a pair of horses drawing one of our rigs about as often as you see a gas jet illuminating the Edison Building. Every vehicle engaged in Company business including dump wagons and pole wagons will be operated by electricity by the first of the year.

--Edison Round Table, 31 October 1921

Twenty-six years later, in October 1947, the Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago scrapped the last of its electric trucks. By 1950 the utility's transportation department owned and operated 824 vehicles, all of them gasoline-powered. ¹ For the preceding half century, however, the company had maintained a fleet that included a mix of horse-drawn, electric, and gasoline-powered vehicles. Nor was Commonwealth Edison unusual in employing a range of vehicle technologies. Between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War, many urban, transportation-dependent 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

In fact, at certain times, under specific conditions and for clearly identified groups of customers, the electric vehicle was both more reliable and cheaper to operate than comparable gasoline-engine or horse-drawn vehicles--the superior technology, that is to say, although its superiority could endure only as long as those specialized markets continued to exist. Technological superiority resided not simply in the physical properties of the individual technologies but in the contexts and systems in which motor vehicles were embedded. Thus it was crucially important who made the decision whether to use motor vehicles and for what purposes. For some organizations--those with established local transport service requirements already being met by horses--electric trucks continued to make sense well into the 1920s.

Today long-haul freight is the backbone of the American trucking industry, but during the five decades separating the Civil War from World War I the central transportation challenge was local collection and distribution. The expansion of the railroads allowed goods to move increasingly cheaply from railhead to railhead, but thousands of horses were needed to move those goods from the railhead to the local distributor. This horse-based, short-haul service created traffic congestion and pollution, and its costs equaled or exceeded those of long-haul freight. ³ Short...