Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (29 page)

“THERE IS NOT
the slightest doubt but that my [Morrison] buggy preceded every horseless carriage in the world, save only those cumbersome machines built on the order of tractor engines,” Iowa inventor William Morrison boasted after the 1890 debut of his motorized surrey. “I will give $5,000 to any person who can show cuts [i.e., images] of any horseless carriage designed to carry passengers and which was successfully operated before mine was put on the streets of Des Moines.”

While Elisha Otis doesn’t have a historical marker at his birthplace—unlike Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright brothers, to name a few of his esteemed peers—there are at least tributes to him elsewhere, and his name graces the metal skims on the floorboards of elevators worldwide. William Morrison has nothing in his honor, anywhere, not even in downtown Des Moines, where he proved himself an automotive pioneer.

The general concept of a self-propelled vehicle wasn’t new; Leonardo da Vinci had sketched out a model of one as early as the sixteenth century; German engineer Carl (also spelled Karl) Benz was puttering around Mannheim on his Motorwagen in the mid-1880s; and an attorney from Rochester, New York, named George Selden received the first American patent for the idea in 1895. But Morrison was indeed the first in the United States to actually build a real, working forerunner to the modern four-wheeled automobile.

Morrison warrants attention in his own right, but he also represents a host of geniuses whose groundbreaking work has either been crated up and left to gather dust in history’s warehouse or been overshadowed by other innovators. About half a dozen European and American inventors, for instance, patented the incandescent lightbulb years before Thomas Edison. One of them, John Starr from Ohio, is believed to have beaten Edison by decades. Electrical engineer Elisha Gray submitted his telephone patent several hours before Alexander Graham Bell’s attorney handed in Bell’s application on February 14, 1876, but Bell became the more famous of the two. Gray’s defenders argue that
he lost out because an alcoholic Patent Office employee was bribed to ensure that Bell’s claim received priority. (Bell was also accused of later coming to the patent office himself, perusing Gray’s application, and then stealing concepts he later incorporated into his own design.) And more than two years before the Wright brothers briefly dipped and bobbed over the sands of Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, the
Bridgeport Herald
profiled a German-born immigrant named Gustave Whitehead who, according to the article, flew a motor-propelled airplane in Fairfield, Connecticut. Several witnesses later signed affidavits swearing that they, too, witnessed the August 1901 flight. Whitehead could have settled the question and possibly earned his chance at immortality had he, like the Wright brothers, captured his flight on film. (The true inventor of photography is also, of course, a matter of debate.)

William Morrison’s old basement laboratory, or “the Cave,” as he referred to it, used to be in the middle of Fifth Avenue, right between Locust Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Des Moines. I’m not complaining about my Vermont (or any other) hike, but every so often it’s nice to visit sites that don’t require contending with the threat of snakes, poison ivy, randy moose, or crashing tree limbs.

Joining me is local automobile historian Bill Jepsen, who self-published a terrific book titled
Iowa’s Automobiles: An Entertaining and Enlightening History
, which he spent twenty years writing. Bill has driven about an hour in from Boone, Iowa, to show me around Des Moines and share his file on Morrison, which is invaluable because there’s scant information on the man. Bill also deserves credit for actually finding the spot where Morrison worked.

“Were you always a car guy?” I ask Bill after he meets me outside of my hotel in his GMC truck.

“Well, I started out as a car kid,” he says, “sitting on the front steps of our Davenport home in the 1950s at the age of five or so trying to name cars as they drove by.”

Bill graduated from the University of Iowa in 1967, got drafted, and
served in Vietnam, he tells me, as a “Remington Raider.” From my blank expression he can see that I have no clue what that means. “I sat behind a Remington typewriter and filled out reports and records,” he explains. On the GI Bill, he studied twentieth-century American history with plans of becoming a teacher, but he never got certified.

Bill and I approach Fifth Avenue, and there’s strong evidence that Morrison had an early model of his car up and running on this very street years before he officially introduced it to the world on September 4, 1890, during the city’s annual parade, Seni Om Sed. (Des Moines spelled backward. Sort of.) Spectators—up to a hundred thousand in all—clamored for a look at Morrison’s homegrown four-horsepower invention rolling down Walnut Street on steel-clad wooden wheels under a surreylike carriage. By far the event’s most popular attraction, the buggy was greeted by cheers and applause for the entire length of the route.

Scientific journals and gossip mags alike went dizzy over Morrison’s horseless carriage, prompting sixteen thousand letters to pour into his office from both well-wishers and oddballs around the world questioning how it worked, inquiring if they could get their own, and asking if he was married. (He was.) Overwhelmed by the onslaught, Morrison tossed out the letters but saved two whole bushel baskets’ worth of enclosed postage stamps.

What makes Morrison’s car all the more noteworthy is that it was electric. America’s first automobile ran on batteries, not fossil fuels. And the Morrison Electric, as he called it, wasn’t some one-time wonder constructed for his own driving pleasure; Morrison built a line of cars and sold them for $3,600 each. To promote the power and durability of rechargeable batteries, the American Battery Company bought one to exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, sparking national interest. Two years later, ABC entered a Morrison Electric in this country’s first automobile race. Unfortunately, and in a sign of things to come, it lost the fifty-four-mile contest to Frank and Charles Duryea’s gasoline-fueled automobile, the first of its kind in the United States. The Duryea brothers were also first to set up a car-manufacturing plant, followed
by Ransom Olds, who patented the assembly-line process—not Henry Ford, as is commonly believed.

Ford considered producing electric cars, too, but his hero and (later in life) close friend Thomas Edison waved him off the idea after toying with it himself. “Electric cars must keep near to power stations,” Edison told Ford. “The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do, either, for they require a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.”

Initially, though, electric cars were all the rage. Some drove faster than their fuel-powered competitors, and they were less messy, quieter, and a cinch to start, requiring just the push of a button instead of a cumbersome hand crank. (Advertisers pitched these features to female drivers in particular.) The Electric Carriage and Wagon Company put an entire fleet of electric cabs on the streets of New York in 1897, and by 1899 electric vehicles were beginning to outsell cars with combustion engines. An electric taxi in Manhattan even earned the ignominious distinction of causing the first automobile fatality in America; on September 13, 1899, cabdriver Arthur Smith accidentally ran over a sixty-eight-year-old man named Henry Bliss at Seventy-Fourth Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. Bliss died at Roosevelt Hospital the next day.

Bill points out the spot we’re looking for on Fifth Avenue, and, as he parks, I jog up ahead to take pictures. After a few moments, I realize that the light-gray concrete building with red trim now houses some sort of daycare or educational center, and a teacher starts to peer out the large windows and is clearly wondering what this strange man with a camera is doing outside.

There’s no international hand sign for “I’m a history buff, not a weirdo,” so I gesture to her as best I can that I’m not photographing the classroom or any students. The teacher’s eyes narrow to a stern glare, and I slink off after snapping one more picture. I call over to Bill, “Okay, we should probably go.”

“That was fast.”

“Yup,” I say, trying not to seem too suspicious as I hustle out of view of the school window. “Got everything I need.”

Thomas Edison’s counsel to Henry Ford proved right in the end, and electric cars ultimately couldn’t beat out their fuel-guzzling competitors in the early 1900s for the same reasons they still haven’t entirely caught on today—they’re more expensive and they can’t go as far on a single charge as gas-powered cars can travel on a full tank. Their failure a century ago partly accounts for why Morrison himself has been forgotten.

Not that he’d have cared. “I wouldn’t give ten cents for an automobile for my own use,” Morrison told a reporter from the
Des Moines Register and Leader
in 1907. Despite his $5,000 boast about being first (a wager he would have lost to a number of other Europeans but to no American), Morrison wasn’t passionate enough about cars to go around embroiling himself in patent lawsuits. What interested him most were the batteries inside the vehicles, and before moving to California to try his hand at gold mining, he received eighty-seven patents, most of them related to battery storage. Little is known about his life out west except that he made a small fortune and then passed away in 1927. (The exact year of his birth isn’t known, but Morrison was in his mid- to late seventies when he died, and he was buried back in Des Moines.)

Morrison’s apathy about his accomplishments was the exception among early American inventors. All the rest seemed to be engaged in endless legal fights. Elisha Gray sued Alexander Graham Bell over the telephone. Bell got into a scrap with the Wright brothers over patented improvements to the airplane. Henry Ford duked it out with George Selden for hogging the automobile patent without putting it to use. And Nikola Tesla clashed with his former employer Thomas Edison over alternating and direct currents. Tesla also wrangled with Edison’s friend Guglielmo Marconi about who invented the radio, and their feud is proof of how confusing these cases can be. In 1903 the Patent Office sided with Marconi—after having first awarded the radio
patent to Tesla three years earlier. Then, in a decision that stands to this day, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Patent Office’s reversal, giving Tesla final bragging rights. But he never knew of his victory, having died embittered and penniless in the New Yorker Hotel several months before the Court’s ruling.

Few of these wars, however, can compare with Philo Farnsworth’s David-versus-Goliath battle with RCA Communications concerning the patent for electronic television. That a lone, self-taught engineer from Rigby, Idaho—where I’m off to now—took on the world’s most powerful broadcasting company and won isn’t even the story’s most remarkable angle. What’s more compelling, I think, is that Farnsworth came up with the idea when he was only fourteen years old.

“JUSTIN TOLMAN WAS
Philo Farnsworth’s science teacher,” Mike Miller tells me as we drive up to the newly renovated Rigby Junior High School, “and Tolman’s classroom would have been in the old building, which was torn down long ago.” The site is now an empty athletic field, with metal tackling dummies lined up on one end and soccer posts on the other.

Mike is a Rigby native and a sergeant in the sheriff’s department. When I first contacted the local museum, then the library, and finally the public school to find out where Philo Farnsworth lived ninety years ago, nobody could pinpoint the location, and everyone said the same thing: Call Sergeant Miller. He’ll know.

He didn’t, actually. Not right away. But he promised me he’d find out, and he’s come through.

Before we drive out to see where Farnsworth was raised, we pass by his old school. When the fall semester started in 1921, Farnsworth waited by the building’s front entrance to badger Justin Tolman into allowing him to attend his senior-level science class. At first Tolman wasn’t going to let a ninth-grader waltz into his honors course, but he finally relented, and after a few weeks he realized that Farnsworth had a better intuitive grasp of science than the older students, if not himself.