Crude Reality by Brian C. Black

Author:Brian C. Black [Black, Brian C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-05-03T23:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.1. This photo of a German convoy in World War I captures the energy transition of the 1910s as it appeared on the battlefield. The emergence of the internal combustion engine played out on the battlefield first and then the engine found its way toward dominance in each developed nation. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-136090)

The Allies used 125,000 Model Ts on the battlefields of World War I. In addition, truck production doubled. Even though the American auto and truck industry diversified during the war to make other products such as shells and guns, the need for more vehicles grew at a rate faster than ever before. Historian David Kirsch notes that in France, Britain, Germany, and later Russia, truck purchasers received up to $1,200 from the government for the purchase of an approved vehicle—which stipulated ICE-powered vehicles over the electric alternatives. In 1916 and 1917 U.S. manufacturers established designs for a standard war truck, and they subsequently began exporting vehicles to the front. Kirsch writes: “The dramatic role of motor trucks in the conduct of the Great War reinforced and accelerated the standardization of the commercial peacetime truck. . . . By 1919 electric trucks accounted for less than 1 percent of the total number of commercial vehicles produced in the United States, down from 11 percent in 1909.”5

Mobility on the U.S. home front was influenced in basic ways by the needs of the war. For instance, in the United States the strain on the nation’s railroads led the military to emphasize long-distance trucking and to call for the roads that these routes made necessary. In addition, most trucks for the war effort were manufactured in the Midwest and needed to be brought to the eastern seaboard for shipment abroad. From 1917 to 1918, an estimated eighteen thousand ICE-powered trucks made this trip. In the United States, these trips, which were driven by necessity, demonstrated that such vehicles could be used reliably for interstate shipping, in lieu of railroads. Federal funds had begun in 1912 to develop such roads, which primarily focused on rural access for the U.S. Post Office. In 1916, the Federal Aid Road Act focused federal funds on roads that would help farmers get their products out of rural areas with more ease and flexibility.6

Following the war, commercial trucking in the United States became a dramatic example of technological selection: consumers chose the ICE-powered vehicle over the electric alternative. The dominant form of commercial transport within urban areas remained horse-drawn carts; however, electric-powered trucks seemed a superior alternative for short-haul delivery systems. After World War I, though, explains Kirsch, standard practices within the industry—including the use of rail for long-haul transport—forced the “appropriate sphere of the electric truck [to grow] smaller and smaller.”7 Although proponents of electrics pushed for separate spheres of transportation with separate technologies, business owners could not support hybrid fleets. In making their decision for ICE-powered trucks, businesses accepted a cost-benefit scenario that allowed them to succeed across the board, even if another technology (electric power) made more sense for short hauls.

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