by Most, Doug
Brower asked the coach-making business of Wade & Leverich in 1827 to design and build for him a vehicle that could hold twelve people. The vehicle, which he called Accommodation, had large wooden wheels with spokes, open sides, and two compartments inside, each with a forward-facing and backward-facing seat for three people. Steps on the side made getting in and out easy, and for a flat fare of one shilling, passengers could be whisked almost two miles up and down Broadway. In bad weather, the driver would sometimes go slightly out of his way to get a passenger closer to home.
Emboldened by the success of Accommodation, Brower added a second vehicle with some improvements. The door was in the back, with iron stairs, and inside the seats ran lengthwise instead of across. The new design made the ride more social for passengers, thus the name Sociable was painted on its side. Boston, in the same year, had seen a similar service introduced, which ran on a regular schedule. For twelve cents, passengers could ride between South Boston and the downtown area. But no other American city jumped on the experiment, and for a short period Boston and New York alone had these precursors to urban mass transit systems.
While Americans were just getting used to the idea of riding with others, Brower began to hear of an even bigger, more lumbering vehicle taking over the streets of Paris and London. It was called an omnibus, and on a spring day in 1831, he introduced it to the streets of New York. The sight of the driver sitting on a raised seat and a small boy standing on the rear steps to collect the fare of twelve and a half cents was jarring for New Yorkers at first. But before long more than a hundred decorated omnibuses were crowding the streets of the city, with names painted on the sides, from George Washington to Lady Washington to Benjamin Franklin. They were popular. And they caused complete chaos.
For the individual owners of the omnibuses, nothing mattered more than the paying passenger. Drivers whipped their horses repeatedly to speed them past a competitor to the next potential fare, even if it meant a harrowing few seconds for those already on board. Grazing a lamppost to cut a corner or to cut in front of a rival was fair game, and pedestrians not paying attention could get maimed by a cornering horse or the trailing carriage. Nobody benefited more from the crowded, jostling cars than the pickpocket. The omnibus, which had started out with such promise, quickly lost favor with the people. “Bedlam on wheels,” is how The New York Herald described it. The bedlam would not last, and it would give way to something better.
* * *
ON A BITING MORNING IN late 1832, Walter Bowne, a former state senator entering his third term as New York mayor, joined a sidewalk crowd of high-society gentlemen in top hats and ladies in satin dresses standing in the Bowery district. They came to see where street transit systems were headed. A year earlier, Bowne had signed an ordinance allowing the New York & Harlem Railroad Company to build a railroad between the Harlem River and Twenty-third Street. It was promised to the city that a transportation system on rails would be a dramatic upgrade for passengers, a smoother and faster ride than wooden wheels on cobblestone streets, and much easier for the horses. It took months for a route to be agreed upon, and on November 26, 1832, shouting spectators lined the downtown streets to come see what they had been told was the future of transportation.
Flat iron strips had been fastened to blocks of stone embedded in the ground, and steel wheels were designed with grooves to ride directly on the rails. The new carriages, on the outside, looked no different than omnibuses except they were bigger, able to carry up to thirty people. But the three compartments each had their own entrance door, and the seats and sides were lined with a fine, plush cloth.
When the signal was given, the horses trotted off and the first carriage filled with city officials zipped away behind them at a speed the spectators had never seen. It even caused some to gasp, with a mixture of fear and excitement. A second car followed right behind, carrying the top men of the New York & Harlem Railroad Company. As the vehicles pulled away, the railroad officials knew that for their experiment to succeed financially, passengers would have to feel safe riding on rails rather than on the solid street they had grown accustomed to. They would need to prove that starting and, more important, stopping were as simple as applying the brake designed to grind the wheels to a halt. The two carriages had gone only a few blocks when John Lozier, the vice president of the company, stood at the corner of Bond Street. As the trotting horses neared, he raised one arm. The driver of the first car quickly brought his vehicle to a stop. But the driver of the second, thinking he was still steering an omnibus, pulled on the reigns of the horses rather than applying the brake, as he’d been taught. The horses neighed and slowed, but they couldn’t stop in time, and they collided into the first car. The passengers emerged unscathed, and the damage to the cars was minimal. Other than a few snickers from the spectators, what perhaps was the first street railway accident in the United States could do nothing to dampen the excitement of the ride that preceded it.
“This event will go down in the history of our country as the greatest achievement of man,” Mayor Bowne said afterward.
The Courier & Inquirer, one of New York’s leading papers of the day, gushed over the event. “Those who made violent objections to laying down these tracks and fancied a thousand dangers to the passing traveler, now look at the work with pleasure and surprise,” the paper wrote the next day.
By the 1840s the omnibus was not even a decade old on the streets of New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Albany, and Cincinnati. But already it was dying. A respected doctor and author named Asa Greene had made the routine challenge of crossing Broadway sound like a modern-day video game. “You must button your coat tight about you, see that your shoes are secure at the heels, settle your hat firmly on your head, look up street and down street, at the self-same moment, to see what carts and carriages are upon you, and then run for your life.”
The street railway car carried more passengers, rode faster, and provided a quieter, smoother ride than the omnibus, and any fears that people had of its safety vanished once they climbed on board. The “age of the omnibus” that the newspapers had been so quick to herald only a few years earlier was over. The age of the street railway was here.
* * *
ON NOVEMBER 3, 1849, Alfred Beach could see clear down to the Hudson River from his top-floor office in downtown New York. That morning, Scientific American had published an article he wrote suggesting just about the craziest idea that New Yorkers had ever heard. It would be laughed at, mocked, and, ultimately, ignored. Nobody took it seriously in the days and weeks after it appeared, except for the young man who wrote it.
Looking out from his window at the corner of Fulton and Nassau streets in one of the city’s tallest buildings, Beach could look up and see the next tall building being built, or he could look out to the water and see the parade of boats floating past in the New York harbor. The waters used to be filled mostly with tugboats, fishing boats, sloops, and the occasional mammoth steamship pulling in from Europe after the long crossing. But more recently, Beach was seeing a new type of boat dominate the harbor: Ferry boats, operated by more than twenty competing lines, were whisking an increasing tide of passengers out of Manhattan and taking them to the nearby shores of New Jersey, Staten Island, or Brooklyn. The suburbs were calling, luring city residents with open land, affordable rents, and a peacefulness that made New York feel increasingly less appealing. But there was also another, more troubling, reason that the big city no longer held the allure it once did.
On the chopped-up streets, garbage and debris were mixing with the perfume of horse-drawn carriages and piles of dung to create an odor that was almost unbearable to breathe in. And the packed sidewalks and overcrowded streets were grinding New York to an angry standstill. On some mornings, the carriages would be forced to stand motionless for half an hour or longer. When they finally moved at all, it was inches or feet at a time. One horse would lurch forward, then another, and just when it seemed as if the congesti
on was about to ease, it wouldn’t. All day long, drivers jostled with other drivers, whipping their own horses or the one next to them, competing for passengers. The horses didn’t like it any more than the well-dressed passengers inside the carriages they were pulling. The animals neighed at each other and sometimes raised up their front legs, causing fear and pandemonium. Pedestrians who tried to cross the street knew the risk they were taking carried deadly consequences with one misstep.
“We can travel from New York half-way to Philadelphia in less time than the length of Broadway,” The New York Tribune wrote. Beach didn’t see a problem in this clutter. From high above the city streets, he saw opportunity.
In 1849, Beach, by now sporting the skinny mustache that would become his trademark feature, lived a walkable distance from his office. And yet dodging the horses, the carriages, and the throngs of people each day turned his short walk from his office near City Hall to his house over on West Twentieth Street into a treacherous hour-long commute. After three years of listening to a parade of inventors promote their dreams to him, Beach decided it was time to share his own dream for his city, in an essay he published in Scientific American.
“Nothing less than a railway underneath, instead of one above,” he wrote. “Railway life down stairs, instead of railway life up stairs. The idea is at least original, but anything except feasible, that is so far as the expense is concerned, for there would lie no difficulty in executing the work. To tunnel Broadway through the whole length, with openings and stairways at every corner. This subterranean passage is to be laid down with double track, with a road for foot passengers on either side—the whole to be brilliantly lighted with gas. The cars, which are to be drawn by horses, will stop ten seconds at every corner—thus performing the trip up and down, including stops, in about an hour.”
Beach’s proposal went nowhere. The newspapers ridiculed him and New Yorkers sneered. Who would risk going down there under the streets and sidewalks? That’s where you go when you’re dead. It was ludicrous. “It’s better to wait for the Devil than to make roads down into hell,” one critic said of the idea of subways. Only somebody who worked at a science magazine would believe something so outrageous could actually work. On and on the criticism went. Reluctantly, Beach took the hint and moved on.
* * *
ON MARCH 4, 1861, IGNORING the advice of those who feared for his safety, the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, decided to travel through the streets of Washington to his inauguration with President James Buchanan. Together, in a horse-drawn carriage, they rode from the Willard Hotel to the steps of the Capitol Building. In the two months leading up to the inauguration, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina had seceded from the Union, and a civil war appeared unavoidable. Yet in his speech Lincoln promised peace unless an attack on his people left him no choice.
“There needs to be no bloodshed or violence,” Lincoln said, “and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority.” Five weeks later it was, with the first shots fired at Fort Sumter. Not even the Civil War, however, would slow the transportation revolution under way. On January 9, 1863, nine days after Lincoln ended slavery by signing the Emancipation Proclamation, workers in London achieved one of mankind’s greatest industrial breakthroughs. After four years of digging through mostly thick clay and rock, London opened the world’s first subway.
But while London’s subway, which came to be called the Underground, proved that a long tunnel could be built beneath a city to carry trains and move millions of passengers, it had numerous fundamental flaws. Those trains were powered by steam, and from the very first day the tunnels were filled with dark soot, black smoke, and showers of sparks that made for an altogether miserable traveling experience. Even the chief inspector of railways in Great Britain, Captain Douglas Galton, cautioned other cities from following London’s lead. “An underground road is enormously expensive to construct,” he said. “It greatly interferes with street traffic during construction, from the large quantities of material to be removed and brought to the surface; it can never be wholesome or free of deleterious gases, and in foggy weather it is always full of thick atmosphere, which increases the liability to accident and is very disagreeable to passengers.” A rousing endorsement to a historical achievement it was not.
Beach believed the air in a subway had to feel no different than the air above ground, and just like he had taken apart the typewriter and made it better, he set to work to improve upon London’s breakthrough. Five weeks after the underground Metropolitan Railway opened (and introduced “the metro” into the lexicon of transportation), Beach found his inspiration.
* * *
WHILE LONDONERS WERE STILL BUZZING over their new subway, another invention in the same city caught Beach’s eye. The British postal service had approved a charter for a British engineer named T. W. Rammell and his partner, J. Latimer Clark. The two men had designed an underground, airtight tube that could carry mail and packages the short distance between a London post office and nearby suburb. Distributing the mail throughout the world’s largest city was an immense and time-consuming task, and Rammell and Clark promised to make it easier. Their tube was only four feet in diameter, hardly big enough to carry people, but what excited Beach, and impressed British postal officials, was how the mail was moved inside Rammell’s tube.
With a thirty-horsepower steam engine, Rammell produced compressed air that could blow a five-foot-long canister through the tube. The tube could carry 120 mailbags a day, blowing them the one-quarter mile in fifty-five seconds, a huge improvement over the ten minutes it took workers to push mail carts the same distance. It was so efficient that the post office gave Rammell a contract to build a maze of forty-eight tubes under London’s streets. When Beach heard how well this pneumatic-propulsion system worked, and that a couple of curious daredevils had even managed to climb aboard it for a short joyride, he was more certain than ever. It was clean. It was smooth. And when Mechanics’ Magazine wrote of Rammell’s invention, “We feel tolerably certain that the day is not very distant when metropolitan railway traffic can be conducted on this principle with so much success,” Beach was convinced.
In 1865, he did for himself what he had done thousands of times for other inventors. He began the application process for a patent and set his eyes on the 1867 American Institute Fair.
* * *
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: IN THIS metropolis of the commerce of the new world, the American Institute uplifts the banner of labor and of creative art,” Horace Greeley, the president of the institute and longtime editor of The New York Tribune, told the thousands gathered on the armory’s floor in his opening address on September 12, 1867. He spoke about America’s ability to create tools for farming that were far superior to anything seen in Great Britain. “No nation on earth can make them as good in quality or as cheap in price as we can make them here.” His speech ended with loud applause, and the doors to the fair were thrown open.
Alfred Beach was there. And instead of one invention, he came with two. One was a small tube, twenty-four feet long and two feet wide, which was built to move letters and small packages through it with air blown by a fan. But most visitors barely stopped to study it.
His second idea was suspended from the ceiling by strong cables, and it stretched across the vast room, to all four corners. There was a long plywood tube, and fitted snugly inside of it, with only an inch to spare on the sides, was a cylindrical car with an open top that was big enough to hold ten people. The car rested on four wheels, and a steam engine positioned at one end of the tube powered a large fan that blew the car on its rails. When the fan was reversed, it acted like a vacuum and sucked the car back to its starting point. Throngs of people would stand for hours beneath the tube, lining up to ride it or simply to watch the car go back and forth. Beach himself made sure everybody at the fair, in the city, and beyond knew about the excitement surrounding his creation.
In an article in Scientific American pu
blished just before the fair opened, Beach wrote that he had developed a transportation system that was as “swift as Aeolus (god of breezes) and silent as Somnus (god of sleep and dreams).”
Halfway through the fair, on October 19, another article on Beach’s pneumatic tube appeared in Scientific American. At the time that his article appeared, more than twenty-five thousand people had already ridden the tube and a new line was forming every day. Beach wanted to make sure the crowds kept coming.
“The most novel and attractive feature of the exhibition is by general consent conceded to be the pneumatic railway, erected by Mr. A. E. Beach,” the article began. It spared no words of self-praise. “The car fits the tube like a piston and travels both ways with the utmost regularity and steadiness. Nothing can be more gentle and pleasant than the start and stoppage; no jerking or wrenching of any kind is observable.”
The article focused on the railway’s details, but in one line, it planted the notion that perhaps the pneumatic railway was the future of transportation. “It is probable that a pneumatic railway of considerable length for regular traffic will soon be laid down near New York.”
Of the hundreds of inventions that filled the floor of the armory for six weeks, Beach’s pneumatic tube was the sensation that could not be ignored. Everybody wanted to ride on it, and by the time the fair closed in November, more than seventy-five thousand people had. Beach wanted everyone to remember what they had witnessed, so that he could begin to push the idea with New York’s lawmakers. He published a pamphlet in which he described in the simplest terms how his pneumatic railway worked.