Thanksgiving Day 1895, the Chicago Times-Herald held the "race of the century," a 54-mile contest among steam-, gas-, and electric-powered automobiles. A snowstorm the night before had narrowed the field of cockamamie contraptions to only six-four gas-powered and two electric. Road conditions were so bad that only two contestants limped across the finish line, both under gasoline power. The electric contenders had disappointingly short runs. One of them, however -- a jaunty rig called the Electrobat II -- won a consolation prize for "safety, ease of control, absence of noise, vibration, heat, or odor, cleanliness and general excellence of design and workmanship."

The results of this race were prophetic, foreshadowing the outcome of a much larger contest that would set the future course of automotive transportation. For a few crucial decades around the turn of the last century, electric and gas-powered vehicles duked it out for public acceptance and market domination. Throughout this pivotal phase, electric cars garnered heaps of earnest praise for their superior cleanliness, safety, and noiseless operation. Yet the ultimate winners were loud, greasy, fume-spewing vehicles powered by internal combustion.

What accounts for this seemingly perverse victory of grime over virtue? In his latest book, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives, Edwin Black tries to convince readers that the answer is simple: A scheming coterie of greedy capitalists and wayward politicians bear the blame. Electric vehicles actually outnumbered their rivals in the first few years of the twentieth century, but they fell victim to stock swindlers, patent hustlers, and monopolistic trusts-in particular the "Lead Trust," a cartel that controlled production of the lead-acid batteries that powered electric vehicles, manipulating the supply to raise prices and stifling competition with threats of patent litigation. A few decades later, as the Great Depression descended on America, the author contends that General Motors led a conspiracy to buy up the electric trolley companies that had thrived all over America and put them out of business, the better to boost flagging automobile sales. The government helped tip the balance in favor of internal combustion not so much by anything it did as by what it failed to do -- namely, pursue vigorous policies to promote clean energy alternatives, which, even a century ago, presented a stark contrast to the stench and hazy exhaust clouds of petroleum-powered transport.

Certainly there were plenty of "rapacious monopolies," "rapacious stock manipulators," and "rapacious trusts" (Black uses the "R-word" at least six times in the first 90 pages) behind the rise of internal combustion. But the author does an injustice to the immense amount of research that went into writing the book by lapsing so frequently into the overheated finger-pointing of the conspiracy theorist. In his more dispassionate moments as a historian and journalist, Black reveals a more complex, nuanced picture of cause and effect. Robber-baron types played a role in the demise of the electric car, but so did other factors that are harder to demonize, such as technical roadblocks in battery development, economic realities (cheap oil, expensive batteries), and consumer tastes that favored the "masculine" rumble, shake, and soot of gas-powered cars over what Black describes as the more effeminate virtues of quiet, smokeless, smooth-running electric vehicles. The author's impressive research speaks for itself, building layer upon layer of historical details that defy easy interpretation and bring an obscure slice of America's past to life.

Though Black expresses angry regret about the road not taken, he manages to sound optimistic notes about new technologies that may still deliver the world from its oil-besotted predicament. He touts Honda's FCX, a hydrogen car with an at-home filling station. Tesla Motors will deliver its new electric roadster next fall. Clearly a new "race of the century" is in progress. This time virtue must win, or we'll all lose.
-- Craig Canine