by Bill Fawcett
The total route covered more than 1800 miles, and included portions of the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the California Trail. Beginning at St. Joseph, in northwestern Missouri, the route traversed the plains to Fort Kearney, Nebraska. From there it followed the route of the Platte River (much as I-80 and I-76 do today) to Julesburg, Colorado. From Julesburg it veered north into Wyoming, past the important fort at Laramie, tracing the course of the Sweetwater River to Fort Caspar, then turning through South Pass to wind its way to Salt Lake City. Moving through the arid wastes of the Utah and Nevada desert country, the trail crossed the lofty Sierra Nevada Mountains near Lake Tahoe, descending to Sacramento, where the mail could be put aboard a steamship for the final leg to San Francisco.
The horses were not actually ponies, but instead numbered some 400 pintos, mustangs, Morgans, and even a few thoroughbreds. In general the steeds were small and hardy, capable of traveling through rugged country, possessing the endurance to travel at a gallop for the ten miles or so required for each leg of the ride. Many legendary western characters signed on to ride for the Pony Express, the most famous being William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. They carried the mail in a saddlebag known as the mochila, and postage was charged in the amount of $5 per ounce initially, though the cost was soon lowered to $1 per half ounce in an effort to entice more customers.
The fastest run of the Pony Express carried a copy of Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address across the country in less than eight days. The exact numbers of express runs is unknown, though it is commonly understood that only one rider, and one mochila, were lost during the entire run of the Pony Express. The experiment determined that the route to the west could be employed during all seasons, and helped to map out the path that would later be used for the transcontinental railroad.
Unfortunately for Russell, Majors, and Waddell, their company failed to win the government contract to carry the mail on a long-term basis. The telegraph was coming into its own, and by 1861 the network of poles and wires was quickly being extended across the continent, and would soon allow for nearly instant coast-to-coast communication. By November 1861, the firm had run out of money, and the Pony Express was disbanded as obsolete after a brief, but glorious, run of some 18 months. The closing was announced in October of that year, not coincidentally coming two days after the Transcontinental Telegraph reached Salt Lake City.
The three founders lost several hundred thousand dollars, and were forced to sell out to Ben Holladay, who was operating the Butterfield Stagecoach Line. (After the Civil War concluded, in 1865, Holladay was able to sell his own investment to Wells Fargo for more than 1.5 million dollars.)
In a business sense, the Pony Express was a failure, but it was a failure in grand style. Even today, the image of those solitary riders and their doughty little horses remains a fixture in Americans’ deep connection to their western heritage.
“It’s my invention, dammit!”
—Thomas Alva Edison
Thomas Edison’s Insistence on the Use of DC Power
Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.
Thomas Edison is well known as an inventor and a practical scientist. He personifies the idea of Yankee ingenuity, working in a lab that he owned, uncovering many secrets—especially related to electricity—and designing machines, equipment, and technology to put his knowledge to practical use. He obtained more patents for his inventions—better than a thousand of them—than any other person in history.
Working during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, Edison lived during a time of great technological accomplishment. As is the case with so many of America’s self-made successes, Edison came from relatively humble beginnings. As a boy he worked on the trains running between Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan. He was a poor student, in part because he was not interested in the rote memorization that was typical of education in the mid 1800s. Also, he suffered from a hearing impairment, which impeded his progress in school. This partial deafness also motivated many of his inventions.
His first serious job involved working as a telegrapher, beginning in 1863. At that time, telegraph messages were communicated onto a printed piece of paper, with the dashes and dots of Morse Code read by the telegraph operator. As the technology improved, however, the telegraph system increasingly relied upon the operator’s listening to the signals as they came over the line. Edison’s hearing difficulties made his career choice increasingly difficult, though he worked for some six years as an itinerant operator throughout much of the United States and Canada.
By 1869, however, his ingenuity and frustration combined to put him on the path that would become his life’s work. Instead of operating the telegraph, he put his talents toward making the existing equipment work better. His first creation was a duplex telegraph, which allowed two messages to be sent over the same wire simultaneously, and a printer that would render the electronic symbols from the telegraph line into letters and other symbols. These successes caused him to leave the field of telegraphy to devote his life to invention and entrepreneurship.
Moving to New York City, he began to create a dazzling series of inventions. Many of these related to continuing developments in the field of telegraphy, which was dominated in the United States by the Western Union Telegraph Company. Edison was soon perfecting a quadruplex telegraph machine, one that could send up to four messages at the same time. One of Western Union’s bitter rivals offered the inventor $100,000 for the device, and—despite the bitter legal wrangling that followed—Edison made the deal and was well on his way to the technical and entrepreneurial successes that would establish his enduring reputation.
Moving to Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison designed and built a laboratory to his specifications. Here he continued his creative endeavors, leading to, among other things, the phonograph, the electric light bulb, and several key components that would make motion pictures possible. His inventions laid the groundwork for the budding office machine industry, and his understanding of chemistry—coupled with his growing skill with electricity—allowed the first mimeograph machines to take shape. The amazing phonograph, in particular, brought him a whole new wave of publicity. Edison became known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, as his inventions astounded the world and brought him ever increasing fame.
Edison was a skillful negotiator, and arranged many lucrative contracts for himself, but he was a poor money manager. His diverse interests kept him moving from one interesting project to another during an unprecedented age of invention and innovation. His ideas helped lay the groundwork for the telephone, for which Alexander Graham Bell would gain the patent. Edison had a good working relationship with Henry Ford and was an important early investor in the General Electric Corporation.
During this period of history, the generation of electricity was not yet something that was considered on a city-wide or even neighborhood basis. Rather, electrical power was generated usually within, and for, a single facility. But the success of Edison’s light bulb, among other things, caused people to think, more and more, of the usefulness of bringing electric power to broad areas.
In September of 1882, the Pearl Street Power station, designed and built under Edison’s tutelage, began to operate in New York City. The station generated electricity at the level of 110 volts, and used direct current (DC) to send the power to the surrounding area. This worked all right for illuminating light bulbs, but several problems with DC power began to manifest themselves to those who sought to employ Edison’s power.
For one thing, DC power was difficult and expensive to send over long distances of wire. Additionally, many industrial users of electricity wanted to run large motors that didn’t function well, or at all, with the 110-volt power source. As more and more people in more and more places clamored for electrical power, the disadvantages of DC power became increasingly obvious.
George Westinghouse was another inventor and entrepreneur, though not quite as well known—or experienced in the field
of electricity—as Edison. Nevertheless, Westinghouse formed his own electric company in 1886 as a direct competitor to Edison’s own. The genius behind Westinghouse’s work was a Serbian immigrant, Nikola Tesla, who had obtained a number of patents and was working assiduously on the development of alternating current (AC) power. Unlike DC power, AC could be broadcast over long distances with little loss in power. Furthermore, with the use of transformers, AC power could be employed in a wide variety of voltages, allowing the use of many sizes of electric motors as well as the basic illumination allowed by DC power.
Edison’s massive Pearl Street station generated a lot of electricity, but none of it was broadcast farther than about a half mile from the installation. If all of New York City was to be powered by DC, dozens, or even hundreds, of large generating stations would have to be built right inside the city. Westinghouse’s AC power, on the other hand, could be generated outside the city, economically transported at very high voltages into the metropolis, and then, through the use of transformers, distributed at safe levels to the actual user. The advantages of AC power were clear, and obvious to anyone who understood the technology.
Edison was not about to yield control to his rival, however. Although he did have some genuine concerns over the safety of AC power, he was also motivated by a proprietary sense about the uses of electricity. His passions drove him to some rather extreme tactics in the burgeoning rivalry. He publicly electrocuted animals to demonstrate the dangers of AC power. He suggested that the state of New York adapt electrocution as its primary means of capital punishment. It was Edison’s idea to use the term “Westinghoused” to describe death by electrocution.
Even so, the superiority of AC power was too obvious to ignore. Though Edison himself never publicly admitted it, the decision was made for him. By 1895, the huge Niagara Falls power facility opened, and the electricity generated there was shipped all over the northeastern United States. Edison went on to create still more remarkable inventions, but the competition between AC and DC power was one battle the famous inventor was not able to win.
Modern Mistakes
Even before computers made it faster and easier, there were many ways to take a good idea and make sure it never worked. Today’s ability to make things bigger and near instant means that the failure can be more spectacular than any time in history. Many otherwise brilliant men have worked hard to give us extravagant failure worthy of these high tech times.
“Mere size and proportion are not the outstanding merit of a bridge; a bridge should be handed down to posterity as a truly monumental structure which will cast credit on the aesthetic sense of present generations.”
—Othmar H. Ammann (1954)
A Bridge Too Thin
Teresa Patterson
On July 1, 1940, a crowd of 7,000 people gathered on the banks of Puget Sound to celebrate the grand opening of the third longest suspension bridge in the world. Many marveled as the thin, graceful, 5,939-foot-long ribbon of steel undulated gently over the waters of the Puget Narrows. Called the most beautiful bridge in the world, the Narrows Bridge was a dream come true for the residents of Tacoma and the Olympic Peninsula. After trying for a bridge since the 1920s, through years of bureaucratic, financial, and design issues, and two more of construction, they finally had an efficient way to get between Tacoma and locations on the peninsula. Before the building of the bridge, the only way to reach the peninsula was to take a very long road trip around the southern end of Puget Sound, or a boat. The trip from Tacoma to Gig Harbor, previously 107 miles by car, was only eight miles via bridge. So what if the bridge rippled a little in the wind? It simply made crossing that much more interesting—sort of like a drive-on roller coaster. Few worried much about the motion of “Galloping Gertie.” After all, the bridge had easily survived a 6.2 earthquake during construction, and was designed to withstand winds of up to 120mph.
Four months later, on the morning of November 7, “Galloping Gertie’s” undulations suddenly turned violent during a wind storm, whipping up and down and even twisting sideways with increasing frenzy. The madly tilting roadway tipped Ruby Jacox’s van onto its side. Cars slid uncontrollably across the deck as people on the bridge struggled out of their vehicles, stumbling, holding onto the curb, and in some cases crawling to escape the writhing span. Then, at a little after 11:00 a.m., with a metallic shrieking wail, the bridge suddenly ripped apart, sending the center section—and Leonard Coatsworth’s car with his dog still in it—into the swift flowing waters 195 feet below. Amazingly, no humans died.
Why did it fail? On paper, the bridge was state of the art, designed by one of the most respected bridge architects of the time, Leon Moisseiff. Suspension bridges were not new. They had been around for centuries, though they had only come into their own with the advent of steel and superstrong cable in the late nineteenth century. And the Narrows Bridge could not even claim the longest span. Two other bridges, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the George Washington Bridge in New York City, were longer. It was certainly not the widest; having only two lanes and a sidewalk, in fact it was the thinnest. The same delicate thin roadway that gave the bridge its elegant look was also its fatal flaw.
In most non-suspension bridges wind is not really a significant factor. But suspension bridges are different. Their suspended deck acts like an airfoil, reacting to the wind and creating drag and lift, especially if there are no openings to allow the wind to pass through. If the bridge deck is too flexible, it will move, lifting and falling as the wind deflects off the leading edge in much the same way an airplane wing lifts a plane. If the wind creates just the right eddies and currents, the deck begins to oscillate. It doesn’t necessarily even require a lot of wind. Speed is not as great a factor as frequency. If the wind frequency matches the frequency of the moving bridge, as it did in the narrows, it creates harmonic oscillation. Once that happens the movement of the bridge starts actually building on itself, no longer dependent on the wind, creating greater and greater movement, until the bridge eventually tears itself apart.
In the early nineteenth century, wind was responsible for at least ten suspension bridge failures, though no one really understood why. They did understand that thicker and stiffer bridges seemed to do better against the wind. But Moisseiff forgot all that in his rush to create thinner, more beautiful—and cheaper—spans.
He designed the Narrows Bridge using a revolutionary solid eight-foot plate girder deck, instead of the more common thick open truss. Moisseiff based his design on the “deflection theory,” that the “dead weight” elements of the bridge—the cables and deck—would create so much stabilization against the stresses of wind and traffic that there was no need for stiffening trusses or cable-stays, thus allowing much lighter, thinner spans. Of course the deflection theory was originally formulated for concrete arch bridges—not suspensions.
Despite his fame, the Narrows Bridge was the first bridge that Moisseiff designed himself. While he had worked as a designer on many of America’s long suspension bridges, he had never actually been the primary designer. Moisseiff was not even the Washington State Toll Bridge Authority’s architect of choice. The most spectacular bridge collapse in history might not have happened at all if they had been allowed to use their own architect.
Lead project engineer Clark Eldridge originally created a design for the bridge, utilizing six reinforcing braces on the towers and a twenty-five-foot-thick open truss system on the deck. But Eldridge’s design had an estimated cost of $11 million. Moisseiff told the financiers that he could cover the same span for $6.4 million. In the end, in order to get the money to build the bridge, the State Toll Bridge Authority was forced to use “eastern consulting engineers”—which meant Moisseiff. Eldridge was still the lead project engineer, but he had to build Moisseiff’s design.
In addition to the plate-girder deck, Moisseiff increased the length of the center span while decreasing the amount of support braces for the two towers. The bridge would be lighter tha
n Eldridge’s design—by hundreds of tons of steel—and narrower than any bridge built up to that time.
Eldridge did manage to retain one design element, however. Before construction began, the contractors complained that Moisseiff’s design for the two support piers was “impossible to build.” To keep the project moving, Eldridge ended up using his own original design for the piers in place of Moisseiff’s. After the collapse, those support piers were the only part of the bridge that survived unscathed.
The new Narrows Bridge, built ten years and lots of wind tunnel and vibrations tests later, is almost identical to the design first proposed by Eldridge. But if the collapse had not occurred, engineers might never have done the research into aerodynamics, vibrations, and wave phenomena that led to a new era of stable, safe suspension bridges.
As for “Galloping Gertie”? Her sunken remains lie where they fell, at the bottom of the Puget Sound Narrows, one of the world’s largest man-made reefs. In 1992, they joined the National Register of Historic Places to protect them from salvagers.
“The 2007 Army Corps of Engineers budget was 5.7 billion dollars.”
—U.S. Budget Report
Goldie the Goldfish’s Really, Really Big Cousins
Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.
The complicated relationships between people and animals go back many thousands of years. Humans have domesticated creatures ranging from birds to mammals to fish, primarily for food, but also for transportation (horses and oxen), clothing (sheep), protection, assistance, and companionship (dogs in their many varieties). When people migrated around the planet, they often brought their animals with them. The Spaniards’ transportation of pigs and horses to the Americas, for example, changed the New World in ways that are still being realized today. (Horses had existed in the Western Hemisphere in prehistoric times, but they, along with most other large mammals, became extinct about the time the first humans spread across the two continents.)