The E-Scooter Invasion Traces Back to a 1915 'Autoped' That Suffragettes Rode

Key Takeaways

• •1915: The Autoped — first motorized standing scooter — invented in New York
• •Suffragette Lady Norman commuted on one in 1916 London
• •Production ended by 1919 — streets were too dangerous without regulations
• •2017: Bird launches modern e-scooter sharing, sparking a global industry

Timeline

In 2017, electric scooters appeared on the sidewalks of Santa Monica, California, seemingly overnight. Nobody asked for them. Nobody was prepared. Bird, the company behind them, hadn't bothered getting permits. They just deployed hundreds of scooters and waited to see what happened.

What happened was chaos — and then a revolution.

But this wasn't the first time motorized scooters disrupted a city. That honor belongs to the Autoped, invented in 1915 by Arthur Hugo Cecil Gibson in New York City.

In 1916, Lady Norman commuted on a motorized scooter in London. She was a suffragette fighting for women's right to vote — and riding the future to work every day.

The Autoped was a gas-powered standing scooter with a small engine mounted over the front wheel. You steered by leaning the column forward (to accelerate) or back (to brake). It could reach 35 mph and travel 30 miles on a tank of fuel. It was manufactured by the Autoped Company of Long Island City and sold for about $100 — the equivalent of roughly $3,000 today.

The Autoped quickly found a surprising audience: women. In an era when cars were expensive, dirty, and required physical strength to operate, the Autoped offered independent urban mobility. Suffragette Florence Norman — known as Lady Norman — famously commuted on her Autoped through London in 1916. Photos of her riding to work at the suffrage offices became iconic images of women's independence.

The scooter also attracted celebrities, aviators, and even postal workers who tested it for mail delivery. But the Autoped had a fatal flaw: the streets of 1915 weren't ready for it. There were no scooter lanes, no regulations, and no helmets. The Autoped was too fast for sidewalks and too slow for roads. By 1919, production ceased.

The Autoped failed in 1919 for the same reason e-scooters almost failed in 2018: nobody had figured out the regulations yet.

A century later, the same story played out. Bird and Lime deployed thousands of e-scooters with no warning and no permits. Cities scrambled to regulate them. Accidents spiked. Scooters blocked sidewalks. Politicians raged.

But unlike the Autoped, modern e-scooters survived the backlash. Cities learned to regulate them — dedicated parking zones, speed limits, geofencing. By 2026, e-scooters operate in over 500 cities worldwide and are recognized as legitimate public transit.

The root of the e-scooter revolution isn't a Silicon Valley startup. It's a suffragette riding a gas-powered scooter through London in 1916, proving that sometimes the future arrives a century too early.

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