The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway

by Most, Doug

  Brunel began to tinker, first on a writing and drawing machine, and then on a contraption that measured out pieces of thread and wound them into small balls of cotton. The cotton balls were soft and elegant, although exactly what purpose they might serve was not entirely clear. Had Brunel patented his machine, there is no telling the fortune that might have come his way. Instead, he failed to act, and the machine was widely adopted and used, and he received not a penny for his contribution. One bad business break after another eventually landed him in serious debt, and in 1821, Brunel, with a wife and three young children at home, was jailed at King’s Bench Debtors Prison. It was a humbling and humiliating experience.

  Just before his imprisonment, Brunel, by now fifty years old, had sketched out in detail an enormous, cast-iron, circular device. He called it a shield, and in his patent application he described it as a machine for “forming tunnels or drift-ways underground.” There was nothing else like it. With hydraulic presses rotating it and propelling it, this shield could push forward underground, excavating dirt and rock while supporting the ground above the hole that it dug. The shield, Brunel believed, was the future of tunneling, but from behind bars there was little he could do with it.

  In a letter that he wrote to authorities, Brunel begged for his release. He explained that he had refused offers in prior years to leave England to help another country with an engineering crisis, because his loyalty to his new homeland mattered most to him. “If I see honourable and personal employment here,” he wrote, “you may be assured that I shall not be wanting in zeal, but shall devote my future services and talents for the benefit of this country.” Every day he remained imprisoned he grew more dejected about the time away from his family. He wrote an emotional letter to his close friend, Lord Spencer: “My affectionate wife and myself are sinking under it. We have neither rest by day nor night. Were my enemies at work to effect the ruin of mind and body, they could not do so more effectually.”

  As Brunel’s depression deepened, the Duke of Wellington finally recognized the good that Brunel could do for their country. The duke ordered that the five thousand pounds Brunel owed be taken from the Treasury and used to free Brunel of his liabilities. In a gracious letter of thanks, Brunel wrote to the duke on August 21, 1821, and promised that the only way he could express his gratitude was in “preparing plans for the service of the British government.” As it so happened, the duke had just the project for him.

  On February 18, 1824, a group of men gathered at the City of London Tavern in the Bishopsgate neighborhood. With its low ceilings, flagstone floors, roaring fires, and cavernous dining room that could seat 350 people, it was one of London’s most popular restaurants. It was also an appropriate place to make history. That evening, after a long round of toasts, the Thames Tunnel Company was created. Its mission: to build the world’s first tunnel for vehicular traffic and to do it directly beneath the Thames River.

  * * *

  TRAFFIC IN LONDON WAS AT a standstill, particularly across London Bridge. Thousands of people were crossing the Thames River daily either on the bridge or by ferry, but the waits became interminable, and the merchants downtown were helpless as they lost business to the round-the-clock congestion. The city needed a thoroughfare to connect the two banks of the Thames, for pedestrians and for a steady line of carriages, too. A bridge was the obvious solution, but London already had those. Brunel proposed something bolder. Using his patented shield, Brunel suggested that he and his nineteen-year-old son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, would burrow a tunnel under the bed of the Thames. Until then, whenever workers had bored underground, the edge of a river had always marked the end of the line. It was a river, after all. Where else was there to go? Brunel dismissed that defeatist attitude. You go under the river, that’s where you go.

  * * *

  THE FATHER PUT THE SON in charge, and in 1826 their work began. Isambard Brunel was just twenty years old, a heavy smoker and Napoleon-like in stature, but his father entrusted him with the role of chief engineer on the project. The Brunel shield was an amazing machine, twelve linked frames made of cast iron, each twenty-two feet tall and three feet wide. Three compartments stacked on top of each other were able to hold and protect workers from falling debris. The compartments were fenced in on the sides and open in front, where the workers could stand and reach out their arms to work. A large screw on the shield’s bottom was turned to push it forward, and as it inched ahead, workers in the compartments efficiently bricked up the tunnel wall. Wheelbarrows carried the excavated mud to a long string of buckets that were lifted up a shaft. The process was smooth, but slow. On a good day, the shield pushed forward twelve inches at most, and each one was nerve-racking for the workers. The roof of the tunnel was just sixteen feet beneath the riverbed of the Thames, and that meant that water leaked and even flooded daily.

  On May 18, 1827, around five o’clock in the morning, Richard Beamish, a twenty-nine-year-old Irishman working as an assistant civil engineer on the Thames Tunnel, noticed that as the tide rose, the ground in the tunnel seemed to come alive. Occasional bursts of diluted silt leaked in, but that was not unusual. The workers that arrived at six in the morning were reluctant to enter the tunnel, but the day passed uneventfully. As night arrived, Beamish anticipated trouble, and he removed his polished Wellington shoes for a pair of greased mud boots and shed his holiday coat for a waterproof one. It was well into the evening when Beamish heard one of his most powerful men cry out for help, and he sent an equally strong worker to find him. A rush of water suddenly burst into the tunnel and lifted the men up, and quickly the water level began to rise up their legs and reach their waists. Beamish feared for the men working on the shield, but they managed to scurry down and to reach the bottom of the shaft, where they could climb a staircase to safety. That’s when Beamish looked down the tunnel and saw a sight he would never forget.

  “The water came on in a great wave,” he recalled. “A loud crash was heard. A small office, which had been erected under the arch, about a hundred feet from the frames, burst. The pent air rushed out; the lights were suddenly extinguished.” The men climbed the staircase in darkness, and as they reached the surface, they heard a hundred voices shouting. “A rope! A rope! Save him! Save him!”

  Below, one old worker had been caught by the wave and was hanging on for his life. Without hesitating, young Isambard Brunel, whose father was out having dinner at the time and thus had no idea of the near catastrophe he was missing, grabbed a rope, slid down an iron pole in the shaft, helped tie the rope around his worker’s waist, and called for him to be hoisted up. Once he was up, the men conducted a roll call. “To our unspeakable joy,” Beamish wrote years later, “every man answered to his name.”

  * * *

  SUCH GOOD FORTUNE WOULD NOT last. On the morning of January 12, 1828, Beamish arrived around six and waited with the next shift while they downed some warm beer. Suddenly, a watchman rushed over to them. “The water is in! The tunnel is full!” Beamish grabbed a crowbar and broke down a locked door to a staircase that descended into the shaft. He had only gone down a few steps when Isambard Brunel, hurled up from the tunnel by the massive wave, landed in Beamish’s arms. “Ball! Ball! Collins! Collins!” Brunel muttered the names of men he had been with just seconds earlier, and now they were gone, along with four others who perished in the flooded tunnel. More than four thousand bags of clay and gravel were needed to plug the hole in the riverbed that had caused the disaster, but it almost did not matter. Calls for the tunnel to be sealed up poured in to Marc Brunel. The risk, the public cried, was not worth more deaths. But even though his own son was nearly killed and required months of recuperation from both a knee injury and internal wounds, Brunel insisted the work continue. “The ground was always made to the plan,” he said. “Not the plan to the ground.” But until more money could be raised, and the public reassured, Brunel and the Thames Tunnel would have to wait. A brick wall was erected in the tunnel, and it was turned into a tourist attra
ction for a small fee so that the tunnel company could at least recoup some of its costs. “The Great Bore,” as journalists derisively called the tunnel, was presumed dead.

  * * *

  ON MARCH 24, 1841, Marc Isambard Brunel was knighted. And nearly two years to the day after that, on March 25, 1843, the Thames Tunnel opened. What Brunel had predicted at the start would take three years to build had taken eighteen. “Another wonder has been added to the many of which London can boast,” the London Times wrote. “Another triumph been achieved by British enterprize, genius and perseverance.” The tunnel would not have been built had the Duke of Wellington not freed Brunel, who used a government loan in 1837 to restart the tunneling. A new and improved shield also helped, this one weighing 140 tons. It replaced Brunel’s original one and proved to be stronger, faster, and safer.

  For the opening ceremony, a “tunnel waltz” was composed, flags were raised, bells rang out, and, at four in the afternoon, a signal gun fired and a procession began moving down a spiral staircase into the western archway of the tunnel. Marc Brunel, who had suffered a stroke a year earlier that left him mostly paralyzed on his right side, insisted on attending the celebration and was greeted with cheers as he walked through the tunnel. The throng of thousands burst into song, and the words of “See the Conquering Hero Comes” echoed off the walls. More than a hundred burners atop lamp posts placed in the arches provided the light. The first day the tunnel was opened, fifty thousand people walked the entire length. But there were others who could not bring themselves to join them.

  Marc and Isambard Brunel had dug a tunnel beneath the Thames River wide enough to serve as a road for vehicles. They had proved that the underground could be safely conquered and that man no longer had to stop digging when a river stood in the way. But what the father and his son could not do, the London Times reported on the day of the Thames Tunnel’s opening, was wipe away centuries of man’s fears overnight.

  The majority of the visitors went the whole distance, 1200 feet; many, however, proceeded only a little way, pausing and looking about with an air of suspicion every four or five yards, while some would not venture into the tunnel at all, but remained in the shaft or on the staircase, yet amongst the majority there was a perceptible anxiety, and notwithstanding the brilliance of the lights, the singular reverberations of the music, the shouting of the admirers of the undertaking, and all the means that were taken to give éclat to the event, and encouragement to the spectators, notwithstanding also the physical heat that oppressed them, it was evident that there was a lurking, chilling fear in the breasts of many.

  3

  A FAMILY FOR THE AGES

  ON MAY 6, 1635, JOHN WHITNEY and his wife, Elinor, gathered up their five sons, boarded the small wooden ship Elizabeth and Ann from England, and crossed the rough seas of the North Atlantic to start a new life. Some time later, their ship, carrying 120 passengers, pulled into Massachusetts Bay, and they quickly settled into a sixteen-acre farmhouse in Watertown, the second largest settlement in Massachusetts next to Boston. Two months after arriving, on July 5, Elinor Whitney delivered their sixth son, Joshua, the first Whitney to be born in America, and two more boys would soon follow, making eight total. Though Elinor died before she turned sixty, her older husband had plenty of life left in him. Four months after his wife’s death, John Whitney married Judith Clement. However, like his first wife, she also died before he did. When John Whitney finally died on June 1, 1673, at the age of eighty-five, he left behind him a collection of boys who scattered across Massachusetts to raise their own families. None took more pleasure in this, apparently, than General Josiah Whitney, who, when he wasn’t busy defending Boston Harbor during the Revolutionary War, was busy in other ways, fathering sixteen children with his first wife, and then nine more with his second. Of all of the general’s descendants that would follow, it was a grandson of Josiah Whitney who began the family’s ascendance to greatness.

  James Scollay Whitney was born on May 19, 1811, in the Western Massachusetts town of South Deerfield. His father owned a country store in town, and when James wasn’t attending class, he was working beside his father at the store. By the time he was twenty-one, he had inherited the store from his father and faced an important moment in his young life. He could choose to settle in South Deerfield and live a respectable life defined by his father’s business. Or he could set out for bigger things.

  Three years later, James Whitney made his decision. A superb horseman, he had always been interested in military affairs, and in 1835 he was commissioned as a brigadier general in the state militia. For the rest of his life, anybody who knew him closely didn’t call him by his name, but simply General.

  In 1836, Whitney married into one of the state’s most prominent families. His bride, Laurinda Collins, was a descendant of Governor William Bradford, a man who was so popular that he was elected to his office thirty times in the 1600s and who helped settle Plymouth Colony and drafted the Mayflower Compact. Not even a year after they married, their first child was born. On September 16, 1837, a girl they named Mary Ann arrived. Two years later, Henry was born, on October 22, 1839; and two years after that, on July 5, 1841, William arrived. Two more children, Susan and Henrietta, would follow (Henrietta’s twin died unnamed just three days after being born).

  With a growing family, the couple was eager to start their own life, and so they left South Deerfield for nearby Conway, a hilly town cut through by two pretty streams, the South and the Bear, and not far from the shadows of Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke. In Conway James Whitney built a long white two-story home. His family lived in the back, and in the front he opened a country store with his brother-in-law, Anson Shepard. Shepard & Whitney established itself in Conway as the place to come and talk. The giant elm tree out front and the old stove in the center of the store became popular spots for people to gather around and to talk not only about local gossip but also about more important affairs affecting their town, their state, and their country. James Whitney could talk politics with anyone, and in just three years he established himself as one of Conway’s most astute political and financial leaders, comfortable swapping opinions on business and the military with anyone in earshot. Over the course of his sixty-seven years, until the day he died on a cold Boston street, it would remain one of James Whitney’s most endearing traits, the ability to befriend people no matter their politics, wealth, cultural interests, or personal agenda. It was a quality his sons took to heart at an early age, even as they went their separate ways.

  HENRY

  The boy was not even ten years old when the old gentleman who ran a country store in Conway decided to teach his young employee a game. This wasn’t the boy’s first job. Living in the small town of about fourteen hundred people, Henry Melville Whitney used to help a local farmer drive a cow out to pasture in return for twelve cents a month and one egg. But one Sunday, while hurrying home from church, Henry took a shortcut and snagged the velveteen pants his aunt had sewn for him on a fence, and thus he needed to earn some more money. Which is how Henry found himself stocking shelves at a country store.

  On his first day, after the owner had outlined his duties there, the boy had a question.

  “Where do I sleep?” he asked, knowing that he’d be working long days and would need some place to rest.

  The two grew close, until one day the storekeeper pulled out his chess set. It wasn’t an easy game to teach such an active boy, since it involved patience and strategy. It was made even more difficult because Henry could hardly hear his instructions, the result of a near-fatal bout with scarlet fever when he was little. As he grew up Henry learned from his mother, Laurinda, that if he stuck a finger into a glass of water and then into his ears, it helped just enough to make hearing easier. It was one of many lessons the Whitney children learned from their mother. She ran a tidy house, writing proper letters to her extended family on a regular basis and making sure the children never neglected their studies or chores. She had a favorit
e outfit that she wore nearly every day, a simple black dress and a crisp, fully starched white hat with streamers. Her prim look did not do her outgoing personality justice. She was as talented a horseman as her militia-trained husband, maybe even better, able to control a four-horse team with ease and grace. It was a feat that always impressed her children.

  Her skill and competitiveness rubbed off on Henry, as the storekeeper would learn. He had figured that playing chess would be a fun way for him and his young worker to fill the long days and evenings. And he enjoyed Henry’s eagerness to try new challenges. Over the course of several weeks and months, he taught Henry the rules of chess. And each day Henry soaked up a little more strategy and acquired a little more skill, until one day he beat his teacher. And then the next day, he did it again. This was not what the storekeeper had in mind when they had started playing, but he had clearly underestimated the boy’s thirst for knowledge and competitiveness. They continued playing every day, until the pupil became the better player and the teacher grew frustrated about losing all the time; eventually their games stopped.