My google fu has failed me and I am hoping the dopers can help.
I love old photos and I saw a great photo over the weekend of a beer truck for the Franziskaner Leist-Bräu brewery - probably taken sometime between 1909 and 1914 in Munich. I suspect that it is an electric truck.
I would like to find a place to purchase a copy or poster of that photo and I’d like to learn more about the history of the company that made the truck. There was a barely legible makers plate at the bottom right of the chassis - giving the makers name as as “MEB” - shown in the post of this title.
I have not been able to find a copy of the photo to purchase on the web nor is there very much info about MEB (I have tried the German wiki). All I have found is one brief comment in a book titled “The Electric vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the automobile age By Gijs Mom”. Interestingly, one of its board members was Rudolf Diesel.
Sorry, I can’t help, and the only google result for “Münchener Elektromobil Betriebsgesellschaft” is this thread. But I have to express my amazement that Lenin and Kaiser Willhelm II once used to drive a beer truck together.
First, you must have incredible eyes or a different original photo, to be able to read MEB there.
Second, a brief overview of the Munich tram* system historyis here (German). Short summary: in the 1870s, a private enterprise started with two horse-drawn carriages for the population; by the late 19th/ early 20th centuries, the tram switched to electric; after the war, the private companies were financially overstretched and sold out to the city, which then founded the MVG, which runs the trams, buses and subway U-Bahn.
So if this was a private company doing public transport, it would be part of the MVG history now.
If it was not a company, just a few cars belonging to the brewery for delivery,you would need to contact the brewery, though it has changed owners, too. (You need to be above 18 to enter, and the site doesn’t appear to have an english translation)
What I would recommend is:
the MVG museum run by thefriends of the tramway. They are very interested in all the history and collect information on that. (And as you can see they speak some … kind of English.**)
The MVG itself has, as far as I know, handed over all their historic stuff to the above mentioned “friends” (Fans) to take care of and concentrate more on the current business.
You may wonder why I mention only Trams and not cars; but if it was part of a company for electric vehicles, it would be part of public transport like the electric trams.
Quasimodem’s idea hadn’t occured to me at all, but of course the Deutsches Museum has their own Traffic museum branch and quite a collection of vehicles, too.
*Interesting trivia: Munich streetcars are called Tram after the english name for the small train system used in coal mines, tramway.
** When I visited the Museum, they had translated all info signs into english, but what I noticed was one sign with the German title “Aufbruch in eine neue Zeit” given in English as “Break-up”. While dict.leo does give this as meaning, my first association is the break-up of a relationship, not the start forward into a new era.)
constanze : The picture I posted was an off axis shot from my iPhone, in less than ideal lighting (is was a bar, after all). The framed photo on the wall was large, a meter or so high, so it was easy to make out most of the MEB makers plate. The rest I found in that single reference in google books.
From the research I have been able to do, it appears that electric trams, taxis and trucks were quite common before the war and many cities were banning internal combustion vehicles. All of that seems to have changed after the war. I would imagine that electric vehicles on the front would have been at quite a disadvantage from a charging point of view. That doubtless provided a boost to internal combustion development that overcame the restrictions in the post war period.
