IN THE first decade of the 20th century, transport reached a tipping point. Would the future belong to petrol, electricity or even steam? The stage was set for a decisive showdown when the world’s first practical electric buses hit the streets of London in July 1907. They were clean, quiet, reliable and fume-free, unlike their petrol-powered counterparts, which were widely reviled for their deafening din and evil smells.
Electrobuses, as they were called, were an immediate hit with the capital’s commuters, and the prospect of a successful challenge to the internal combustion engine was greeted with delight by press and public alike. “The doom of the petrol-driven omnibus is at hand,” forecast the Daily News. “The electrobus is probably a more formidable rival than the petrol omnibus, not only to the horse omnibus but also to the tramway,” concluded Douglas Fox, the country’s foremost engineer and designer of many of the world’s railways, at the September 1908 meeting of what’s now the British Science Association.
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The future of electric vehicles seemed assured. The bus, with its fixed routes and hence predictable demands on batteries, seemed a very promising application. If battery power proved its worth here, then other uses would surely take off. And London, the world’s largest city and centre of the British Empire, had a track record of setting global trends in technology, so there would be ripples around the world. Yet, in little more than two years, the electrobus was abandoned in favour of the combustion engine – and we are still suffering the consequences. What went so badly wrong?
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At the start of 1905 there were a handful of petrol-powered buses in London. By 1907, there were almost 1000 – more than in Berlin, New York and Paris put together. Horses still pulled most buses, but petrol had stolen a march on battery power. However, there were problems from the start.
“The electrobus was not a vehicle for change, it was a vehicle for fraud”
Protests about noise and fumes had increased sharply with the surge in motor vehicles. Buses were not the only culprits, but because of their set routes and vivid eye-catching liveries, they were the focus for much of the ire. Newspapers were full of angry letters from the great and the good. One came from a friend of the late Queen Victoria, who wrote to The Times complaining of “the incessant roar and rattle and pestilential atmosphere and dust diffused by these monstrous vehicles”. A protest meeting held at the Medical Society of London was told that motor buses “ought to run underground in main drains, like other nuisances”.
During 1907, the police stopped petrol buses 8500 times because of their appalling noise or noxious fumes. The average London bus was ordered off the road every six weeks. On top of this, they were extremely unreliable. At any time at least a quarter were out of action. Broken-down buses littered the streets.
The electrobus couldn’t have appeared at a better time. Within days of its debut, one of London’s largest petrol bus companies went bust. In the summer of 1907, more than 100 petrol buses were scrapped. Horse-powered vehicles were making a comeback; despite being slower, they were cheaper and far more likely to reach their destination. The industry was in disarray and even supporters of petrol power conceded failure, at least temporarily.
Yet the marvellously clean, green electrobus failed to cash in. The history books generally put this down to its undeniably heavy lead-acid batteries. In fact, the technology worked rather well. The real reason it failed was that a gang of swindlers had a stranglehold on the companies that made and ran it. To them the electrobus was not a vehicle for change, it was a vehicle for fraud.
Taken for a ride
The originator of the swindle was Edward Ernest Lehwess, an enthusiastic motorist and sometime second-hand car salesman with a doctorate in law from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Lehwess was an engaging cosmopolitan character, fluent in English, French and German, and with a well-developed taste for the good life. He was soon joined by Edward “Teddy” Beall, a flamboyant former solicitor who had been the brains behind more than 200 share swindles. Beall had only recently been released from prison after serving a four-year sentence for bank fraud. Given their unsavoury reputations, both men went to great pains to avoid having their names linked with the new enterprise. Beall in particular used dozens of aliases.
It was a con from the start. In the spring of 1906, the London Electrobus Company announced plans to put 300 electrobuses on the streets of the capital. It offered the public the chance to buy shares worth £300,000 to finance the project, claiming that it had acquired a patent for the huge sum of £20,000 that gave it a monopoly on the electrobus. This seemingly guaranteed that investors would reap enormous profits, and the public rushed to invest.
Almost immediately, however, inquisitive reporters exposed the scam. One bought a copy of the patent. He discovered that it was for a motor vehicle transmission – about as relevant to the electrobus as a patent for a hair dryer. It was simply a device for conning would-be investors. Another reporter visited the west London works where the electrobuses were to be built. Instead of finding a production line gearing up to churn out hundreds of vehicles, he found a former stables next to a pub. Alerted by articles in the papers, angry shareholders demanded their money back. It all ended up in court and the electrobus company was forced to refund more than 1000 investors.
Despite this initial setback, Lehwess wasn’t deterred. People’s enthusiasm for clean buses, and their willingness to support them with hard cash, convinced him that he had a sure-fire way of making a lot of money. But first he had to put some buses on the road, and to do that he needed reliable batteries. So Lehwess set sail for New York to meet Charles Gould, head of the Gould Storage Battery Company, based near Buffalo.
Through a series of meetings in the autumn of 1906, Lehwess convinced Gould to ship batteries and a team of engineers to London. Each battery weighed around 1.75 tonnes and could power a bus for just 60 kilometres. Recharging took almost 8 hours, meaning vehicles would be off the road for half of their working day. But Gould’s engineers helped devise an innovative way round this problem. The batteries were bolted to the bottom of the bus. After the morning shift, buses returned to the charging station, where workers unbolted the batteries, lowered them with a hydraulic lift and took them off to be recharged, replacing them with fresh ones. This lightning pit stop took just three minutes.
So Lehwess had his batteries. True to form, he failed to pay what he had promised for them. It would take Gould two years to realise that he too had been conned. Meanwhile, after months of rigorous testing, an electrobus picked up its first fares. The inaugural journey began at Victoria Station at 7.30 am on Monday 15 July 1907, and headed off on a 6-kilometre journey across the centre of London to Liverpool Street Station. With a fleet of six buses on the road, Lehwess and Beall were now ready to take investors for another ride.
“Beall was a past master at conjuring money from his suckers lists”
Beall was a past master at conjuring money from his suckers lists, with seductive circulars promising quick riches. According to one, the return on electrobus shares “should amount to about £26 per annum on the outlay of each £100”. There was no shortage of ingenuous people with spare cash who were taken in. Between 1907 and 1909, the swindlers banked close to £95,000 – worth around £10 million today. Each time they raised more money, they promised to put dozens more electrobuses on the streets, but the number increased only very slowly, reaching a maximum of 20 or so. Of all the money that had been poured into the electrobus enterprise, just £14,000 was spent on buying buses – and even that was paid to a company controlled by Lehwess who, naturally enough, was grossly overcharging for them.
The end came on Monday 3 January 1910. Loyal commuters turned up at Victoria Station as usual to catch their smooth, quiet, fume-free ride, but their electrobuses didn’t arrive. One final scam, a company “reconstruction”, had led to its demise. It was the end of the line for London’s electrobuses. Petrol was victorious in the battle of the buses.
Playing catch-up
It wasn’t quite the end of the road for battery power – electric delivery vehicles lingered throughout the 20th century and electrobuses themselves went on running in Brighton, UK, for another seven years – but it was a decisive setback. The electric vehicle had lost what was probably its best chance of challenging the internal combustion engine.
The swindle didn’t just rob Edwardian investors of their nest eggs, it bequeathed a toxic legacy to the world’s cities. Today, diesel has widely replaced petrol as the most common fuel for combustion engines. In London alone, nearly 9500 people a year die prematurely from breathing nitrogen oxides and ultra-fine particles known as PM2.5, mostly from diesel exhausts.
We are finally facing up to the problem. In 2009, the world’s leading industrialised countries agreed to promote electric vehicles with the twin aims of cutting air pollution and reducing carbon emissions. As a result, battery development is racing ahead. Most modern electric vehicles use lightweight lithium-ion batteries, and the amount of energy they can store has more than doubled in the past six years, while their cost has fallen by two-thirds. Demand for electric cars is soaring. They are still far outnumbered by diesel and petrol ones, but perhaps not for long. In July, Volvo promised to end the production of cars powered solely by an internal combustion engine within two years. Before the month was out, the governments of France and the UK had joined Norway in pledging to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 or earlier.
The electric bus is also making a comeback. There are now around 350,000 worldwide, many of them in China. This year the Chinese city of Shenzhen is due to become the first to run only electric buses. The future of transport has just reached another tipping point. But imagine how things might have been if we hadn’t missed the opportunity to embrace battery power a century ago.
- Mick Hamer‘s book A Most Deliberate Swindle is published by RedDoor on 28 September
This article appeared in print under the headline “All aboard!”
