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Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America by Michael Brian Schiffer

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1996.0096

1097-3729

Peter J. Hugill,

American Environmental and Regional History

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 379 merits recorded decades later. In one especially misleading instance, Gartman opens his chapter on the 1920s with a conversation from the 1930s between Sloan and General Motors designer Harley Earl, complete with quotation marks and expletives. Yet in the citation, Gartman admits to have “pieced together” the conversation from 1969 and 1983 sources, inserting “characteristic expletives” (pp. 68, 233-34). In contrast, when Gartman builds his arguments for the 1950s and later, his evidence enables him tojuxtapose effectively the marketing reasons for automobile designs with “the functional excuses” in­ tended to legitimate gadgetry and other technological display, such as rocket-mocking tail fins (p. 165). Yet even here, an important part of his argument lacks evidence, namely, that consumers accepted these functional excuses in order to purchase extravagant aesthetics and power instead of safety or efficiency. How does he know that consumers found their “religious utopia in steel” (p. 160)? And in what sense did consumers by the 1970s “begin to see” through the superficiality of automotive aesthetics to the costs of Fordism (pp. 173, 183)? Is it not simplistic to describe the 1960s’ “frenzy of social movements, [as] each protesting a particular cost ofFordism” (p. 185)? Finally, although insights from social theorists such as Max Weber and Barbara Ehreneich can guide our thinking, they are not evidence for actual consumer or class behaviors. Pamela Walker Laird Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America. By Michael Brian Schiffer. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Pp. xiii+225; illustrations, bibliography, index. $24.00. Among writers on the history of the development of the automo­ bile, indeed of technology in general, there is a strong liking for lost causes. Most variations on this theme follow the line that “if only the-------- had been better developed/not suppressed by evil forces, then the smelly, noisy, nasty -------- could surely never have tri­ umphed.” Such writing is, of course, characterized by a utopian scheme that fails and a heroic romantic lead whose plans or desires are thwarted by the usual suspects. In the case ofthe electric automo­ bile, the lost utopia is a world mobilized by clean, quiet, electric vehicles. Michael Schiffer, an anthropologist, offers us two romantic leads: the Wizard, Thomas Edison himself, and middle-class woman­ hood, thwarted by gender inequality in its mission to save humanity from the smelly, nasty, noisy, dangerous gasoline-engined automo­ bile. 380 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Most such romances are also a cracking good read, and Schiffer does not disappoint. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm Schiffer fails to do justice to the opposition, which materially reduces the book’s academic worth. As the author properly reminds us, the triumph of the gasoline-engined automobile was not a forgone conclusion at the turn of this century, although the triumph of automobility was. All three competing automobile technologies—gasoline, steam, and electric—had strengths. Electric motors develop maximum torque from rest, which makes them very easy to drive and attractive to neophytes. Gasoline engines need a torque-multiplying transmis­ sion: Ford’s planetary transmission in the Model T was the first that was user-friendly. Gasoline engines are also hard to start, or were until Kettering worked out the electric starter for Cadillac in 1912. Given these disadvantages, why did gasoline-engined automobiles thrive so mightily in the period before these innovations? Schiffer gives us the right answer, but the nature of his romance prevents him from accepting it. Electric automobiles, like steamers, had terrible range and poor power-to-weight ratios. Electrics could run perhaps 50 miles on a charge. Batteries accounted for 40 per­ cent or more of total weight. Weight and aerodynamics are the ene­ mies of good vehicle performance. Schiffer fails to tell us just how vital touring or, rather, geographic competence was to success. He completely fails to mention the importance ofAmerican companies copying the 1901 Mercedes, the first really successful touring car, both technically and in terms ofsocial acceptance. Gasoline automo­ biles offered their buyers, however mundane their own lives, the illu­ sion that an automobile could take them anywhere on the planet, even before hard surfaced roads. In this reading, and Schiffer under­ stands it...