A lot of folks don't know that electric cars competed with the internal combustion engine in the first two decades of the 20th century. There were electric vehicles in the 19 teens and the 20s and a little bit later, putting around the streets of Bloomington Normal
today, over a million electric vehicles are sold in the United States every year. It's been a boom for the automotive industry and the startups like rivian and Tesla. But it's not the first time a manufacturer tried to sell electric cars in the US. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today we're talking with an historian who has tracked down the little known history of an electric car manufactured and marketed in the Midwest in the late 50s and early 1960s
I'm Bill Kemp. I'm the librarian at the non profit McLean County Museum of History, where in downtown Bloomington we occupy the old courthouse right in the historic center of downtown. I've been at the museum for 21 years, and as I always remind people, the museum is a nonprofit. We are not directly connected to the county of McLean, nor the city of Bloomington, so my salary is paid for by people who support the museum, and we rent the courthouse from the county. So we're really proud of being not only a nonprofit, but a nationally accredited Museum, which is very rare for county historical societies. And I'm giving a class at Heartland this semester on the I think, just a fascinating and somewhat underreported story of the Henny kill a lot.
So tell me about this class before rivian bloomington's forgotten history with the car of tomorrow. Now today in Bloomington, Normal, Illinois, for those that aren't in the area that might be listening, there is a major electric vehicle manufacturer, rivian, but this isn't the first electric car manufacturer in Bloomington, Normal, Illinois.
And the Henny kilowatt was a prototype or experimental electric car, electric vehicle manufactured, actually engineered and manufactured in Bloomington at the Eureka Williams manufacturing plant on Bloomington Southeast side. And there were two model years in 1959 and 1960 so in two hours in the class time, we'll look at the history, the fascinating history of this car that was well ahead of its time, giving battery technology in the late 1950s the Henny kill a lot. We'll look at that fascinating story, because it kind of sets the stage for rivian Right? And that just kind of story that's taken over the Twin Cities, mostly for the better, but in the class. I'll also look back at the early electric vehicle era of the early 20th century. A lot of folks don't know that electric cars competed with the internal combustion engine in the first two decades of the 20th century, and that story played out here locally.
There were electric vehicles in the 19 teens and the 20s and a little bit later, putting around the streets of Bloomington, normal so we'll talk about that, and then also electric transportation generally. Right? People are often surprised when they visit the museum, or they talk to me and they learn that Bloomington Normal had a streetcar system, which was not uncommon for a community even as small as or a medium sized city as Bloomington. So beginning in 1867 and into the Great Depression, there was a streetcar system, and from the 1890s onward, it was electrified. So you had that, but you also had an inter urban system connecting Bloomington with other cities in central Illinois and even down to St Louis. That was a different Electric Railway. So using electricity for transportation is not new. So I'll kind of go through that history from the late 19th and through the 20th century, but look specifically at Bloomington Normal.
One of the things that really surprised me that you just mentioned, and it's part of this class, is that I think a lot of us have this concept that one day, people were using horses for transportation, and then the next day, all of a sudden, they're all hopping into Model T's. And there was this long period, really where that wasn't the case. So what kind of things other than electric cable cars, were happening in the early 1900s that were replacing the idea of just, you can't go very well if you can't go on foot or a horse or something,
yeah, you're you're right, right on the mark there. Steve during the early, very early automobile era, this would be the late 1800s early 1900s and. You had throughout the country, kind of tinkerers, mechanics, blacksmiths, engineers, young folk, people, experimenting. And Bloomington was no different than any other community. So there were a series of kind of small automobile startups, if you will. George fish in 1906 started the fish automobile company in Bloomington, and there was at least one prototype automobile made. I don't know if that was gasoline powered or not. The more fascinating story during this early experimental era, before the nation settled on the internal combustion engine, gasoline powered personal transportation. You had kind of this wild west, and there's this incredible story of Ingersoll Moore. He was a superintendent at the Chicago Mountain Railroad shops on Bloomington West Side. He was the superintendent of the planning mill. And the Chicago Mountain Railroad shops were until the rise of State Farm, the most important and largest employer in the Twin Cities.
We know the Chicago and Alton railroad today is Union Pacific and Amtrak, but back in the day, it was a main line passenger railroad and freight Chicago and Alton and their main railroad shops to refurbish primarily steam locomotives. Was located on the west side of Bloomington, literally a city unto itself. He had 1200 to 1800 skilled and semi skilled craftsmen, one of them being Ingersoll Moore, the superintendent of the playing mill. So he started to experiment with early vehicle prototypes. And he created this, we know he created one steam powered prototype vehicle, which was not that unusual for the period, but more unusual was this kind of Rube Goldberg clockwork like contraption consisting of coiled springs and levers and gears that you would wind up and then that would propel you for so many blocks before then you would continue the process. We have part of this kind of complex mechanical system, again, of coiled springs and gears and levers. We have a model of part of the engine in our collections at the museum. So that kind of gives you an idea as to the kind of the Wild West, early era when everybody and their grandmother was experimenting, and kind of what would be the future of the automobile flash forwarding
several decades into something that you had mentioned earlier with this car that I was so surprised to learn was manufactured commercially in Bloomington, normal Illinois, you have the Eureka Williams company. I know the name Eureka from vacuum cleaners. What was this company? Not to get too deep into it, but it was an important employer in Bloomington. But what was this company doing right around the time where they were getting up to the point where they were developing what would become this electric car? Yeah,
a wonderful question. This company, Eureka Williams. We know Eureka today is a vacuum and household appliance manufacturer, but we need to step back just a little bit. It all begins in a way with Charles U Williams, Bloomington, resident entrepreneur. He went by C period u period Williams. Cu Williams first made a name for himself in the picture postcard business, and then got into the automobile business and built, in 1911 a four story showroom for this new fangled contraption, the automobile. We know that today is the paxtons building on East Washington Street. So it was a showroom to sell new automobiles, but also a garage to repair automobiles. And then five years later, in 1916 he opened an adjacent building to the immediate East. We know that as the castle theater today, because the first floor has always been a theater, but above there, then that was where he would store additional automobiles, and had a service garage and had a livery for automobiles before garages people needed a place to store them, and CU Williams was one of the first to get in on This kind of new business of the automobile by building these this garage complex on East Washington Street. And he sold gasoline powered automobiles, but also electric vehicles as well. And he had an electric charging station in the 19 teens. So this is the garage on East Washington Street.
So the issue of electric automobiles does go back a while. So he's in the picture postcard business. He's in the automobile sales and repair business. World War One. His son, Walter Williams is really kind of the the engineer behind the family, and he designs. A home oil burner to heat homes using waste oil, right? This is a period where fossil fuels are needed for the war effort overseas, so using waste oil to heat your home in this contraption called the Williams oil O Matic burner that becomes a fairly internationally successful company, Williams oil O Matic. They establish a factory on Bell and Hannah Street, which that those buildings are still there today, and are primarily in the oil burner business, both residential and commercial, selling these burners throughout the world. They employ a lot of tool and die makers, machinists. They do precision machine work. During World War Two, they're manufacturing what are known as oil gears, which are kind of these hydraulic devices used to help aim anti aircraft guns. So you've got a very sophisticated machine shop going with a pattern shop, tool and die shop. You've got tool design. You have an engineering department, and in 1945 Williams oil and Matt Bloomington will merge with the Eureka vacuum company in Detroit, and all the manufacturing and the home offices will be relocated to Bloomington, hence Eureka Williams is born.
So they will manufacture, yes, vacuum cleaners, floor polishers, but continue to manufacture oil burners, but get into a whole lot of things given their employees, including institutional and school furniture heaters for aircrafts and all sorts of things. That's a pretty diverse portfolio, and that was not uncommon for the pre and post World War Two era, when this country made all sorts of things. So Eureka Williams then will merge in around 1950 or so, I don't know the exact date, with the union Electric Corporation, an East Coast large umbrella organization that had its hands in a lot of different business fields. So National Union Electric Corporation. So it will be the merger of national union electric and Eureka Williams that the Henny kilowatt. This prototype electric car will be designed and manufactured. So the head of national union Electric Corporation, C Russell Feldman, is a huge fan of what the golf cart, the electric golf cart, which are becoming very popular in the post war period. So he's looking toward the future and perhaps modifying the electric golf cart for personal transportation for the home. And that's what, exactly what will happen in the late 1950s so national union, Electric Corporation and their merger with Eureka Williams, they will work with, kind of a pioneer in the electric car business.
So somebody out at the California Institute of Technology and design, and most of the design work was done in Bloomington for this prototype electric car known as the Henny kilowatt. Only 200 were manufactured in two model years, 1959 and 1960 they used a repurposed Renault dolphin car body, which worked well. Renault was getting out of the domestic market in the United States. They tried to market this kind of, what they called a frisky, thrifty family car, but it was underpowered for the for the American consumer. So they were beginning to ship back all these Renault dolphins. And so this project at Eureka Williams, they gladly snapped up a fair share of them. Removed the drive train, right? So you've only got about 1200 or 1300 pounds. The Renault dolphin also was rear engineered so it had its engine was in the back, which was perfect for reintegration. When it came to an electric car, the problem was the battery power just wasn't there.
And the electric car industry is still, to some extent, though they've solved it to some extent, are still struggling a little bit with this issue, but it was the major problem they just could not overcome in the late 1950s so the first model for the prototype, Henny kilowatt, had 18 two volt batteries, and then I think there was also a little extra charger there. It could only go about 40 miles per hour, and you needed a relatively flat terrain, if you had any sorts of elevation, then those numbers plummeted rather quickly, and the range was only about 40 miles. The second model year, things improved slightly, where the reconfigured battery packs are able to go about 60 miles an hour in ideal conditions and have a range of about 60 miles. As well kilowatt so that the odd name Henny kilowatt. Where does that come from? Kilowatts a measure of energy that's simple enough. Henny was one of the many companies under the National Union Electric Corporation banner. Henny motor company manufactured school busses, municipal busses. They were heavily involved in the Cold War defense complex. They manufactured missile trailers and all sorts of kind of specialized motorized equipment during the Cold War. So that's where the term Henny comes from. You talked
about the two volt batteries, which is just staggering to me that any motor vehicle could run off of those. But how would they charge them? It was something where it was just just easy to get an extension cord in the late 50s and plug it in somewhere. So
if you purchased a Henny kill a lot, you were given a charging cord, and that was just kind of a standard cord that a household cord, and it plugged into a regular household outlet. The problem was the charge to fully charge your honey killer would take about 10 hours. So there was a process involved. Now, clearly, given the 1950s 1960s right? This is the era of what the Buick Riviera and the Ford Mustang, right? So what are you going to do with such an underpowered, woefully underpowered automobile? Eureka Williams was well aware of this problem, so they were initially marketed to electric utilities as an idea to kind of sell an electric future to the American consumer, the high water mark of the Henny kilowatt, if you if you will, would probably be the spring of 1960 when the Henny kilowatt was showcased at an electric utility convention at Boca Raton, Florida. And so the Associated Press and United Press International and other newspapers picked up this story that electric utilities throughout the country were purchasing this prototype electric vehicle, designed and manufactured in Bloomington, Illinois.
Now the thought for electric utilities, the thought was, well, these vehicles perhaps in a dense urban environment, they couldn't go very fast or very far, but they would be good for meter readers, for example, or bill collectors. Electric utilities, power plants, physically large plants, right area wise acres of plant space. So electric vehicles might be good to putter around your plant to get from area to area. And electric utilities in the pre and post war period often sold electric appliances because they wanted to promote the use of electricity. So stoves or hair dryers or curling irons or whatever the case, the electric automobile fit into this all electric future, which looked very good to electric utilities, especially if they had a monopoly right in a specific area, and then people were using their juice to charge their cars and not using fossil fuels. So they were kind of showcased by these utilities. But as we know from the papers we have at the McLean County Museum of History, we have a lot of primary source documentation about the development, sale and use of the Henny kilowatt in the early 1960s that for the most part, the the electric utilities were not happy with the Henny kilowatts. They just could not get the job done, especially if your utility was located in area with hills or any sort of mountainous terrain, they were all but unusable.
You talked about maybe the incentive for the folks that are pushing the use of electric utilities for this car. So now we look at the rapid rise of electric vehicles over the last several years here in the United States, and it seems to me that it's driven by, first of all, that, the hunger for more energy use period more sources. So you have all of these pressures on the use of fossil fuels, and the rising cost of fossil fuels, the instability in the market, because it's not necessarily always controlled domestically, and the cost of the fuel itself. So it seems to me that those are factors that maybe are driving a consumer need for electric vehicles. Now, what did the folks at Eureka Williams think was the market demand for an electric vehicle back in the late 50s? Why did they think this is something that we're going to be, even if it's a niche we've got enough people that are going to buy this thing. Yeah,
that's a great question. So they knew they couldn't, given battery technology, compete with the internal combustion engine, but it could be an automobile, the electric car, for a niche market, and they were. Marketing we, you know, in the collections, in the archives of the McLean County Museum of History, we have marketing material where we see them making a pivot from electric utilities to the consumer, specifically suburban American housewives. So it'd be a second automobile in the suburb. In fact, some of their promotional literature set would say, or did say, the Henny kilowatt was as suburban as the patio.
So this would be a light car to putter to the to the grocery store, to pick up the kids at school, to drop the husband off at the Metro station as he catches his train to work downtown. So, you know, we're kind of infused with the patriarchy of the period, certainly, but this is a lighter car, a quieter car that doesn't have as much muscle power, won't go as fast, thus, perhaps would be safer, certainly cleaner. You don't have dirty things like oil and things of that nature. So in fact, electric automobiles were marketed to women in the early 20th century, as well as quieter and cleaner than the the early kind of much noisier, much messier automobiles of the period. So, so I don't know if that answers your question, but they were certainly looking to the post war growth in the suburbs and families needing a second car, but maybe just a kind of a lighter second car to putter around town.
So you had your Buick Road Master you sell to the patriarch, it's right, and then, you know, but it's okay to have this smaller, underpowered electric vehicle for mom to go to the
store, right? And a lot of the promotional material made much ado about how simple it was to operate. You know, you simply turned a switch. You didn't have to really pay attention to RPMs or anything like that. So, again, there's genderizing going on here, absolutely.
So whatever happened with this? So they made it for two years. They didn't sell. A lot of them. Did they give up completely on on this then? And yeah, they could things
they could never, you know. It was an attempt, you know, and they quickly lost entrance once they realized the battery technology wasn't there, which was really no surprise, but also they just couldn't reach their price point, which was $3,500 so they were selling them to electric utilities at a loss the automobile itself for about $3,650 today, if you adjusted for inflation, right, those figures are meaningless unless you put it in today's dollars, you'd be talking about a Henny kilowatt costing about $40,000 in 1960 that was just too much for an electric car.
So two model years we we believe about 200 were manufactured, 46 or 47 sold. 70 or so were kept in a warehouse south of downtown in the old warehouse district for about 15 or so years after manufacturing was completed, and then they were purchased by the Tiffany Motor Corporation down in Florida and shipped down there, and we don't really know what happened now, every once in a while, the museum where I work will be alerted. Hey, did you see that a Henny kilowatt is on auction in California, here or there? So we do know that there are several, if not more than a several Henny kilowatts still out there today, I believe there's a museum in Missouri that has a Henny kilowatt that's working on refurbishing it and for display. So the Henny kilowatt does survive in some manner. Today, we do have papers, primary source documentation, on the development sale and use of the honey killer one. How did we acquire those? Well, in 2011 that's when Electrolux left Bloomington Normal. Electrolux was the Swedish appliance manufacturer that purchased Eureka Williams. Later Eureka when they purchased Eureka Williams Eureka in Bloomington, they maintain manufacturing facilities here, so Eureka vacuums and other appliances were manufactured here into the late 1980s early 1990s before manufacturing was shifted south of the border to Mexico. Electrolux, though kept offices here until 2011 at the old Mennonite hospital on Main Street just north of downtown Bloomington.
So they kept offices here until 2011 when they. Those offices, ending the presence of what was first Williams, oil amatic, later Eureka, Williams, and then Eureka, and then A, B, Electrolux, F. When that ended in 2011 we got a call at the museum saying, we're cleaning out our offices. We have a lot of historic papers, scrapbooks, promotional materials, catalogs, photographs, sometimes blueprints and plans.
Could you come and take a look at it? And that's what we do at the museum. We come and collect the papers that tell the story of the people that called McLean County home. So we were eager, so we spent several days there, myself and archivist George Perkins loaded up several car loads of material, brought it back to the museum and sifted through it in about one cubic feet of material that it would be about one banker box of material all pertains to the Honey kilowatt. So it's an absolute gold mine, for students, for community residents, for researchers, for PhD candidates, whoever is interested in this kind of brave new world we're entering the electric automobile era, you get a really interesting snapshot of a gone, but not forgotten chapter in the history of the electric automobile in the United States that
you can tell, is there any legacy from the way that they developed this vehicle, going through the other attempts to develop an electric vehicle all the way to what we see now with this major manufacturing facility of rivian located in the same town, essentially, or was it something where that technology sort of got put by the wayside and somebody found a different way to get to that?
Yeah, that's an excellent question, and I don't know if I've ever really wrapped my head around that. What What became of the design work and all the input and time and energy and blood, sweat and tears that went into the development of the Henny killowatt? Was it all for naught? Or did future electrical engineers and designers pick up a little pieces? I I just don't know the answer to that. So I suspect, given that the papers that are now in house at the McLean County Museum of History. I mean, we might have been the first people to ever look through some of that stuff, since it had been tucked away in some office of Eureka Williams back in the early 1960s so I'm not sure how much of, if anything was ever made use of. I guess
the interesting thing to note is that, you know, history is in a straight line. You don't just have a plus b plus c and you get everything there. There's stops and starts. And when you talked about the development of this technology, seemed like there are a lot of stops and starts, people starting from different places. And that's kind of not how we often think about the development of certain things.
History is always much messier than we tend to think. But to understand and appreciate the past, we do have to attach a narrative or a story or a much smoother timeline than there normally is. So it's just, it's a part of just being human and trying to understand and appreciate the past. But yes, once you dig into the dirt a little bit, you're gonna you're gonna find it. The story is always a little bit more complex than you once and then you once thought, Well,
Bill, thanks so much for coming in today and talking to us about this, the history of this Henny kilowatt electric car built in the late 50s in Bloomington, Illinois, decades before they built the rivian R 1t electric vehicle here in the same town. And thanks for putting together this presentation that anybody can come and see at Heartland Community College.
It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Bill Kemp is an historian at the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington, Illinois, and he's teaching the history class before rivian bloomington's forgotten history with the car of tomorrow at Heartland Community College in the continuing education division. If you're interested in other interviews about history, alternative energy or more, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening. You.
