A Few Words About This Picture
This photograph of a taxicab would never have been taken if the Sixteenth Amendment hadn’t been ratified in 1913. The Sixteenth Amendment authorized the federal income tax; the income tax made necessary the invention of a printing taxi meter; this picture showed off the new invention.
John F. Ohlmer, a cash-register manufacturer from Dayton, Ohio, perceived a way to make money for himself while the I.R.S. made it for the government. He realized that businessmen would need records of expenses as small as cab fares to document their deductions from the income tax, and he set about creating a meter that could print a receipt.
Using the principles of the printing cash registers his company made, he filed his first patent in 1915 for what would become known as the Ohlmer 38, and perfected it over the next three years. It had gears, dials, switches, felt ink rollers, and three clocks inside a cast-iron box two feet wide and eight inches high. One clock kept the date and time, another the distance traveled, and the third the waiting time during a ride. The distance mechanism was accurate to the inch, and it was protected from tampering by three locks. The whole thing weighed thirty-eight pounds.
The cars of the day had neither speedometers nor odometers, so Ohlmer attached a device to count the revolutions of the taxi’s front right wheel, connecting it to the meter with a rotating cable. On the cab shown here, the cable tripped the meter and added five cents to the fare every third of a mile.
The meter is visible next to the driver’s shoulder, where there is no front passenger seat. At the beginning of a ride the driver would start the meter by throwing down the “flag,” a small sign on a metal rod attached to the meter; the flag is not visible here because it’s in the down position. At the end of the ride he would turn a knob to print the receipt and then throw the flag back up, clearing and turning off the meter and showing that the cab was again available. There’s no domed “taxi” sign on the roof because that wasn’t introduced until the mid-1930s; would-be riders could tell if an approaching taxi was free only by discerning the position of the flag through the windshield.
The man under the hat in the cab’s rear side window is Col. Charles Huber, John Ohlmer’s son-inlaw. He traveled from Dayton to New York in 1918 as Ohlmer’s representative to seek a market in the city’s four thousand cabs and struck one of his first deals with the seventy-five-cab B&W fleet, to which this taxi belonged (the fleet’s belted logo appears on the passenger door). B&W agreed to lease Ohlmer’s meters at fifty cents each per day; Ohlmer, knowing the business virtues of leasing, never sold his meters. To commemorate the deal, Huber hired a photographer from the Brown Brothers studio to take this picture.
To spiff up the cab for the shoot, he evidently had white walls painted on the tires—hastily and sloppily, as it turns out—and he posed it in the glamorous heart of midtown, on Seventh Avenue above Times Square. The man in the high starched collar and bowler hat (he is unidentified, as is the second passenger in the cab) stands in the exact spot where TKTS, a discount theater-ticket booth, now resides; behind him across the street is the Strand Theater. As striking a detail as any in the photograph is the utter absence of litter on the street—certainly not typical of Times Square today.
The cab itself is a work of ingenuity. If you guessed it was a Ford, you’d be partially right. It’s a Ford from the radiator to the steering wheel; from there on back it is actually pre-automotive. The passenger compartment was taken off a vehicle that the taxi had made obsolete, the horsedrawn hansom cab. At the time a cab built from scratch would have cost $2,500 to $3,000; a Model T sold for about $700, and old hansom carriages cost next to nothing. The owner could buy a Ford, shear off the section behind the front seat, extend the chassis, widen the frame, adapt and stick on the hansom cab, weld, sand, paint, and add a roof covering, and have a taxi for $1,500 to $1,700.
In fact, the picture shows what can be considered the first customized stretch car. Surviving elements of the old hansom include the kerosenefueled lanterns on the side, the rings for door handles, and the two large leaved springs that extend out in front of the radiator grille.
The arrowhead-shaped plate riveted to the side behind the front fender is the cab’s medallion, its official license (New York cabs today still bear licenses in the form of metal medallions; they now ride atop the hood on the passenger side). The medallion allowed the car’s owner to cruise city streets in search of passengers. In 1919 there were 4,000 medallions in use; by 1925 the number would reach 21,000, after thousands were issued at low prices to unemployed World War I veterans. Perhaps the driver of this cab was a veteran; notice the war-bond sticker on the windshield, with its V for victory and the single word INVEST.
The driver, in his seat behind the wheel, wears a uniform. The times and his clientele demanded it. Taxis were a convenience for the well-to-do, and the cabby’s job was not only to drive and collect fares but to get out at each stop and open and close the door for his passengers. He himself, on the other hand, has no door; on his left he is protected by a metal wall welded into place from the fire wall to the center post; on his right is an exposed space where Pullman suitcases and steamer trunks could be stowed, strapped down with the large belt that hangs under the meter. Furthermore, the cab has no headlights, taillights, or rear reflectors. Driving at night, the cabby relied solely on the illumination from streetlamps. He probably never ventured beyond city limits, where no highways would have been lit. And he most likely avoided driving in rain when he could; the cab has no windshield wipers.
The driver had to have a Spartan attitude toward his job; he had no heater in the car and no way to keep out the freezing winds of winter. He could wrap rags around his calves, and don an overcoat that almost touched the ground, gloves, a scarf, and the slouch cap that would soon become his trademark. Why he remained at the job at all is a good question. It’s a question I sometimes ask myself, for I’ve been doing the same job, though under much better working conditions, for more than thirty years. I guess the best answer is that some of us love it. We have enjoyed hearing passengers say “punch me out a receipt” ever since this photograph was taken.
