

“It’s slightly smaller than a golf cart and operates much the same way,” Marshall said. “We weren’t sure when we recreated the steering wand how it would operate, but it’s pretty intuitive. It doesn’t take any time at all to get used to.”

By 1916, Osborn was in Gulfport, Miss., helping to organize exhibits and concessions at Mississippi Centennial exposition in 1917. There are no further accounts about what happened to Osborn or to his electriquettes.

But there were reports that similar vehicles were used at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, on the boardwalks of Los Angeles beach towns and perhaps sent to the East Coast.

However, Marshall said history is silent on what happened to the San Diego fleet and whether any still exist.

VIPs in the carts

House Speaker Joe Cannon and a poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature from India, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, posed in the vehicles. Silent film stars Fatty Arbuckle and Mable Normand fashioned a nearly-14-minute short about the fair around the electriquette. (It is online at the Library of Congress website.)

roger.showley@utsandiego.com (619) 293-1286 Twitter: rmshowley


