What about the Electric Wheelchair?
Smithsonian Online Exhibit on Disability Rights Leaves a Gap on Technology

by Marc Krizack (krizack@sfsu.edu)

America in in love with high tech, especially if it has a computer chip inside.  Certainly it cannot be denied that the seemingly daily advances in computer technology have led to huge improvements in the lives of people with disabilities. But our love of high tech and our dreams of what it will do in the future should not prevent us from seeing that the single most important technological advance which spurred the independent living and disability rights movements 40 years ago had nothing to do with computers.  It was the electric wheelchair.  The electric wheelchair is strikingly absent, but it deserves its place in the technology section of the paean to disability rights now being erected at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Technological Impulse to a Social Revolution

It was in an electric wheelchair that Ed Roberts, first significantly disabled student at UC Berkeley, graduated in 1964.  It was in an electric wheelchair that Ed also became director of Berkeley's CIL and later the first director with a disability of California's State Department of Rehabilitation, a position he held for seven years.  Interestingly, Ed was one of the last of the initial group of UC disabled students to get an electric wheelchair, spending his first two years at Berkeley being pushed from class to class by an attendant.  Ed's mother, Zona Roberts, described the impact Ed's first electric wheelchair had on his life. "Ed getting an electric wheelchair was like Ed's getting to Berkeley. It was that big."

All but one of the first group of disabled students at UC Berkeley, "The Rolling Quads,"   used electric wheelchairs.  It was this group which wrote the grant proposal which led to the founding of the Physically Disabled Students Program (PDSP), one of the first university disabled students programs in the United States and arguably the most prominent. The first three directors of  PDSP used electric wheelchairs.  Virtually all of the slots at the UC Berkeley Disabled Students Residence Program, the first of its kind in the nation, were filled by students using electric wheelchairs.  The first two Residence Program directors used an electric wheelchair, as does the fourth and current director.

The Berkeley Center for Independent Living, the first independent living center in the United States, was founded mostly by wheelchair riders who had graduated UC Berkeley and wanted a support program for the non-student disabled population.  Although the disability rights philosophy seeks to include all people regardless of their type of  disability, it was primarily the electric wheelchair riders who took the lead in developing this cross-disability cooperation.  CIL's early work with the deaf community, in fact, was led by Dale Dahl, a deaf quadriplegic who used an electric wheelchair.

The Early Evolution of the Wheelchair

The first electric wheelchairs were introduced in America in the 1950s.  Whereas today's electric wheelchairs could rightly be called "electronic,"  the first wheelchairs were truly merely electric.  The E& J 840 was a simple machine that had no circuit boards and no smooth, proportional control like today's electric wheelchairs.  Instead, the joystick was pushed or pulled against 4 on/off switches which would cause the chair to jerk when it started, stopped or changed directions.  Some of the jerkiness was mitigated by the two very heavy series wound or field coil motors which would start up slowly.  This was extremely inefficient, not to say downright excruciatingly slow.  The chair had two basic speeds,  high and low, or as the wheelchair mechanics at the time named them, "slow and very slow."  The chair had two six-volt batteries which were connected in parallel for low speed and in series for high speed.  You would have to be stopped to switch between the two speeds.  Yet, for all its faults, it was independent movement.

The next big step in electric wheelchair development was the introduction of electronic circuitry and proportional control drive.  This allowed the wheelchair rider to have greater control over the operation of the chair.  Now, the further the wheelchair rider moved the joystick in the direction she wanted to travel, the faster the chair would go in that direction.  Electronic circuitry also allowed for the replacement of the series wound motors with much more efficient and lighter permanent magnet motors.  Now, instead of being limited to starting off at a crawl, the wheelchair rider could start off at any speed the chair was capable of.

The first of these proportional drive wheelchairs was the Motorette, which was an add-on unit to a manual wheelchair.  The two 12-volt motors sat on top of the rear wheels just behind the rider. The motor shafts turned a small cog which pressed against the rear tire.     The cogs would slip when the tires got wet or if they weren't fully inflated.  Although the batteries were placed forward under the wheelchair, the weight of the motors made the chair tippy.   When the Motorette malfunctioned, "it went crazy and acted like a bucking bronco," said one person familiar with the chair at the time.  Still, the Motorette, when it was working right, made for a faster and smoother ride.

Most of the early electric wheelchairs used  a slightly modified manual wheelchair frame with batteries, belt-drive motors and a control box added on.  The rear axle mounts were placed further back on the frame, pushing the center of gravity of the chair forward to compensate for the added weight of the batteries in the back.  Little else was done to the frame.  Wheelchair manufacturers, at this time principally Everest and Jennings, hadn't figured that the chairs would be used by active persons outside the home or institution.  This led to serious problems when an electric wheelchair rider would drive his chair into a curb at the lightening speed of 3 miles per hour,  bending the caster forks and cracking the frame.

Wheelchair Mechanics:  Unsung Heroes of the Disability Rights Movement

Electric wheelchair manufacturers thought that wheelchair riders would be grateful for the increased mobility.  This was true, but the introduction of electric wheelchairs only whetted the appetite of wheelchair riders to go faster and farther.   This opened up a period of great creativity and innovation in the wheelchair shops at UC Berkeley's Disabled Students Program and the Center for Independent Living.

Wheelchair mechanics substituted stronger and heavier caster forks for the standard manual wheelchair fork.  They welded reinforcing gussets onto sideframes behind the caster barrels to prevent the frames from cracking.  Wheelchair mechanics rewired the control boxes so the standard 12-volt motors could be replaced with much more powerful 24-volt motors.  Dynamic braking, where power from a freewheeling motor is shunted back to the motor to slow it down, was introduced. Larger capacity batteries were added to increase the distance a person could drive the chair on a single charge.

Jim Donald, one of the Rolling Quads who later became a lawyer, came up with an add-on known as "The Berkeley Wheelchair Kit."  This kit included two, powerful 24-volt motors with a system for mounting them horizontally underneath the chair just in front of the rear wheels.   A cog on each motor shaft was pressed against the rear tires, like the Motorette, but the cog was much bigger than the Motorette cog.  The combination of more powerful motors and a larger cog gave a huge increase in the wheelchair's speed with no loss in torque.  Later innovations did away with the cog drive in favor of  belt drive.  Inner tubes were replaced by solid bicycle tire inserts. These and other early innovations, originally developed by wheelchair mechanics and tinkerers, were soon adopted by wheelchair manufacturers.

Although the Smithsonian exhibit correctly recognizes the significant role which the Quickie wheelchair played as one of the first lightweight, mass-produced manual wheelchairs, (Quadra preceded Quickie but the company did not stay around for very long) the introduction and development of the electric wheelchair had a more significant impact, both on the lives of the individuals who used the chairs and on the movement which they led.  Susan O'Hara tried out an electric wheelchair for the first time in 1971 when, during a visit to Berkeley, she was loaned an electric chair for the summer.  "The electric wheelchair revolutionized my life," said O'Hara.  "If people were with me now, it was for a personal reason, not a functional one."  O'Hara went on to become the first director of the UC Berkeley Physically Disabled Students Residence Program.

Katherine Ott, a curator in the Division of Science, Medicine, and Society at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, is curator of the Disability Rights Exhibit.  "There's nothing on power chairs in the exhibit," explained Ott, "because it's a really tiny show.  We thought about using Ed's (Ed Roberts)  power chair, which was donated to us by his mother, but it wouldn't fit into the showcase."

The actual exhibit at the museum is organized in web-based kiosks.  The online version is an exact reproduction of the exhibit in the gallery.  Ott said that she and the many people who assisted in mounting the exhibit were trying to design an object-oriented exhibit that would be able to teach kids about the disability rights movement.   "We wanted to capture historical issues with these chairs," she said.  The bright yellow Quickie wheelchair was a smaller and very attractive alternative to the Ed Roberts' chair, and the museum was able to use the story of the company's founder, Marilyn Hamilton, to impart lessons about people with disabilities and the disability movement to its youthful visitors.  The exhibit can be viewed online at:  http://americanhistory.si.edu/disabilityrights/exhibit.html.