From the archive: on this day in 1897

The LEVC TX, road tested three issues ago, broke with more than a century of convention in being electrically driven, but it wasn’t the first cab to be so. In fact, London’s very first self-propelled taxi was.

For all of human history, every wheeled vehicle had harnessed animal power. But horses moved in unstable equilibrium; got tired; got spooked by noise and busy streets; got ill or injured; needed food, sleep and carers; and left unpleasant mess everywhere.

So of course people tried to create self-propelled vehicles from the very earliest days of electrical engineering. But it wasn’t until the 1890s that batteries and motors had matured enough – along with suspension, steering systems, tyres etc – to make EVs practical.

At the age of just 23, engineer Walter Bersey produced his first EV, a bus. Next came a van and then, just in time for the famous Emancipation Run of 1896, a cab – although it apparently required some assistance from a train…

In late August 1897, reporters crowded into a Lambeth factory for the inauguration of Bersey’s London Electrical Cab Company.

His cab featured a 40-cell, 170Ah battery and a 3hp motor at the rear axle. Its driver used a lever with a few forward and reverse positions, the foremost unleashing 10mph; a small steering ‘capstan’; and a braking foot pedal, which would automatically stop the motor.

The really clever thing, though, was how the battery was charged, which would be required every 50 miles – about a day’s work for a ‘jehu’. Energy was sent into the factory by a private supplier (there was no national grid yet) to charge batteries on trolleys. When filled, they were loaded onto a hydraulic lift and swapped for a flat battery that had been removed from the suspended tray under a cab’s body.

The Metropolitan Police had previously refused to license any self-propelled cab, but it was fine with this EV, so long as each driver proved he could steer and stop it.And so 12 of these cabs were put into service as London’s first without a horse, drivers paying 20 shillings per day (£100 in today’s money) to earn up to £6 (£630).