Time Change Book One: The Jump

by Alex Myers

  His boat, The Frances, was the single fastest way to traverse the three hundred miles. He was funding development on The Frances Two, a new ship that included many modern refinements he’d designed to meet his own needs. The boat would be at least five knots faster, was five months from completion, and was being built in Nw York. But Jack’s involvement didn’t stop there.

  Some said it was the diversity of its people; New York contained everyone from the millionaire heads of industry to the vast reserves of cheap labor provided by the ever-growing immigrant populations that made the city so unique. New Yorkers liked to be entertained, whether at the circus, the pleasure garden, the theatre, the music hall, or the opera. It was home to the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. And it seemed everyone, rich or poor, wanted one of Jack’s bicycles.

  The guns and ammunition he designed and produced under a licensing agreement were almost literally flying off the shelves. There was such a demand in the U.S. and abroad that they couldn’t be kept in stock. The Colt Arms Company and Winchester subcontracted five other smaller arms companies in an effort just to keep up with demand.

  A part of Jack felt he was creating bad karma with all the money he was bringing in from munitions sales. Europe was begging for anything he could produce. The money was so good that he tried to convince himself it was all for the greater good. He knew the agricultural machines would change the world and be his best bet against the war while the weapons he’d developed would have the opposite effect.

  Jack knew what people needed, knew how to address that need, and knew how to manufacture and distribute items better and cheaper than the pirates did. Every item he and his team pumped out was a winner and most were an improvement over the original that would be invented later.

  Jack was very aggressive with his pricing, so much so that nearly everyone could afford one of his bicycles. Jack bought his raw materials in bulk and used the assembly line technique to manufacture his products. The reason more people didn’t own a Riggs Ryder was he couldn’t make them fast enough. Jack purchased the best machine shop in New York from a man named William Stuttgart. He soon tripled its size and capacity and moved it to his complex in Queens. Stuttgart was a man who paid attention to the smallest detail and put out some of the finest quality goods anywhere. Jack retained Stuttgart as president and overseer of the shop and introduced him to the concept of mass production and interchangeable parts. Everyone in the shop had one specific part of the whole to work on, and output increased tenfold. He also bought two metal shops and a good-sized metal fabricating plant. The plant was pumping out two hundred bicycles a day, seven days a week.

  With the help of Cyrus McCormick, Jack also had a large machine shop mass-producing products in Chicago, a shop which was on its way to equaling the capacity of the Queens location. Jack had originally intended to only sell the bicycle through the Sanger Catalog, but he was being bombarded by requests to purchase them. You couldn’t ride the bicycle down the street without receiving offers from a dozen people to purchase it or one like it. As soon as his newly acquired Cincinnati plant came on-line Jack intended to make a women’s and child’s model also.

  To Jack’s amazement, the bike became a craze, like the hula-hoop or Frisbee in later years, but the difference was that the bicycles served a useful purpose—the need to get from here to there when the only other alternative was a horse. He figured it to last only as long as there were no automobiles, another problem he hoped to rectify soon. Even though the bike was far superior to anything else available, it still had bone-shaking, hard rubber wheels. Jack was in the process of finding a company that could mass-produce his design for inflatable tires. Nonetheless, the Riggs bicycle was probably the highest quality, best-made, dollar-for-dollar item offered anywhere. Inferior copies of the bicycle cropped up here and there with similar sounding names, but the companies making the substandard copies found it impossible to produce them for less than you could buy the better-made original.

  CHAPTER 35

  September 1856

  Samuel L. Clemens

  Dear Mr. Riggs,

  An inventor is a poet—a true poet.

  A man invents a thing which could revolutionize the arts, produce mountains of money, and bless the earth, and who will bother with it or show any interest in it? And so you are just as poor as you were before. But you invent some worthless thing to amuse yourself with, and would throw it away if let alone, and all of a sudden the whole world makes a snatch for it and out crops a fortune. The words that I’m now echoing from the rooftops are “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”

  There have been few pleasures that I’ve experienced in life that compares to that of riding my Riggs’s Rider. I purchased it on a whim and didn’t expect much from this odd-looking new-fangled contraption—and once again, I was wrong. Only poets of lore can accurately describe the experience of the wind blowing through my hair and the fresh morning ether on my face and in my lungs.

  Please understand, Mr. Riggs, that this is my first bicycle. Upon mounting it, I found that the bicycle had what is called the “wabbles,” and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature.

  For instance: If I found myself falling to the right, I put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down. The law required the opposite thing—the wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are falling. The intellect has to come to the front, now. It has to teach the limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.

  Yours in “Wabbles,”

  Samuel L. Clemens

  Jack stood with his mouth open, not believing the letter he had just read. Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was his favorite writer and he recognized parts of the letter from an essay called ‘What is Man?’, a piece Twain would write in the 1880s—twenty-plus years in the future.

  Jack grabbed a pen, dipped it in ink and thought, I need to invent the ballpoint. Writing Clemens a response, he thought of other famous people living and breathing in this era. Jack knew Twain had spent some time in New York and, from the return address, he knew it must be now. Jack invited him over and promised him a ‘new and improved’ Riggs Ryder, one with inflatable tires. He also promised to tell him about some of the books that he would someday write, including one to be called ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’ He left it short and ambiguous enough to catch the curious man’s attention. He wasn’t sure why he thought this, but with the positive reactions he had from Frances, he thought that Clemens might believe Jack’s story about time travel. If not, at least he thought he’d get a kick out of it.

  The ploy worked and Clemens’s response was to show up at Jack’s room at the Astor three days later. Jack offered to take him to dinner at the famous Delmonico’s Restaurant, one of the best in town.

  They walked and chatted, Jack purposely avoiding the subjects Clemens most wanted to hear about. It was still a busy afternoon on Wall Street as streetcars and throngs of people moved along just east of Broadway. A street peddler was relaxing and displaying his wares on the steps of the Subtreasury Building. A tall, heavily mustached Italian man stepped out of Kiernan’s Foreign Telegraphic Agency in shirtsleeves. He stretched, yawned, and scratched his stomach. They passed a group of genteel-looking men milling around the door of a shop with a sign that declared ‘Purveying Wines, Liquors and Cigars’. The imposing spire of the Trinity Church stood like a sentinel over the passing humanity below.

  It looked like Clemens hadn’t eaten in a while and Jack wondered how he’d afforded the bicycle. Only 23, the great man had yet to publish anything other than a few articles, mostly for his brother’s newspaper in Hannibal, Missouri.

  Once they were seated at the restaurant, they both relaxed. As to the bicycle, Clemens said, “I work at a printing shop and I convinced them I could use it for deliverie
s.” He smiled and wet down his mustache. His hair, although wild, was not the trademark white, but a rich auburn, and he was dressed as if he’d just come from work. “We must put up with our clothes as they are—they have their reason for existing, don’t they?” He nodded to indicate the two men walking by, dressed in top hat and tails. “Clothes are on us to expose us—to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of repressed vanity; a pretense that we despise the graces of harmony and form. We put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.”

  Jack thought this profound coming from a man whose white suit would one day become his trademark. “Sounds like you’ve thought a lot about this, Samuel.”

  “I find myself thinking of the most curious things. For instance, personally, I try to dress for the sole purpose of warmth, comfort, and propriety.”

  “I’ve never paid much attention to the way I dress, until recently,” Jack said.

  Sam couldn’t wait a moment longer and finally said, “I’m interested in hearing about the stories you say I will someday write. Are you some sort of seer? A clairvoyant?”

  “I guess you could say that,” Jack said. “I can tell you most anything you want to know about yourself. You grew up in a small town in Missouri on the Mississippi River. You want to be a writer, and eventually you’ll use the pseudonym ‘Mark Twain.’ I actually know more about what you’re going to do in the future than about your past.”

  Samuel stared at him, attempting to figure out what scam Jack was trying to pull, but since he was poor and had nothing for Jack to cheat him out of, he figured he’d listen. “So please, tell me more.”

  “Why don’t we order first and ask for a bottle of bourbon, maybe five or six of their best cigars. That way we won’t be interrupted.”

  Even though obviously hungry, Clemens could hardly eat his meal, and Jack strung him along till after the bourbon was brought and poured before he got into his tale. Jack told him everything—his being from the future, all his exploits since, and Clemens’s career-to-be as Mark Twain the writer.

  The story took more than an hour to tell and Clemens sat enraptured without saying a word. Finally he said, “That is, by a country mile, the most engaging yarn I have ever laid ears on. I’m not sure—as much as it felt good to hear—how much of it I believe, though. On the other hand, you and your inventions are enough to make a man wonder—they do seem quite futuristic.”

  “I have no reason to lie to you. Do you think I have dinner with everybody that writes me a letter?”

  “You do have a point there. In my humble opinion, there are three kinds of people—commonplace men, remarkable men, and lunatics. I assure you, my dear fellow, even if all else is a lie, you are anything but commonplace. As to the other two choices—well, the jury is still out.” Sam laughed and his mood lightened. “Compliments make me vain: and when I’m vain, I am insolent and overbearing. It’s a pity, too, because I love compliments. I even love them when they are not so…. I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.”

  “Have you ever considered writing copy?”

  “I can’t say I’m familiar with that terminology.”

  “Copy-writing, like writing advertisements for newspapers, descriptions in catalogs. Advertising. You know, describing products. At the Sanger Company in the catalog division, they employ some fairly decent artists, but I’m just not happy with the writing. I think you could lend it some pizzazz. Use your humor, make the descriptions quirky and fun, tell a little story.”

  “That’s not really my style of writing. A round man cannot be expected to fit into a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.”

  “And what is it you say you’re doing now? A printer’s apprentice?” Jack asked.

  “You do have a point there. I might consider it.”

  “It’s cleaner, for one thing, and even though it’s not your style, you’d still be earning a living putting words on paper.” Jack lit a cigar and then lit Samuel’s. “How much do you make at the printer’s?”

  “Fifteen dollars a week.”

  “How many hours do you put in?”

  “Fifty, sixty, it all depends.”

  “And how much does the printer charge you for room and board?”

  “About twelve dollars a week. I net three dollars. Thank goodness cigars are cheap and plentiful.”

  Jack thought about it for a moment. “Come work for me writing commercial copy—I figure maybe twenty, twenty-five hours a week, maybe more, probably less—leaving you plenty of time for your own writing. I’ll pay you room and board and one hundred dollars a week.”

  Without hesitating or even blinking, Clemens said, “When can I start?”

  “I figure in about two weeks they’ll have a room ready for you at the place I’m building in Norfolk, but you can start writing tomorrow. I’m working out of the Sanger offices on Broadway.”

  “Do you think we can break bread again soon?” Clemens asked.

  “What are you doing for dinner tomorrow night?”

  “Learning about the future, I reckon.”

  CHAPTER 36

  October 1856

  Charles Goodyear

  The U.S. economy was already doing poorly, getting ready to go into the upcoming depression of 1857; it worked in Jack’s favor that he was one of the few people aggressively hiring. He was spending an ever-increasing amount of time per day scouring the newspapers. He had advertisements running in over thirty major publications in the U.S. and abroad. In New York alone he had quarter-page ads running in the Herald and Tribune with a smaller one in the Times. He advertised for anyone with expertise in electromagnetism, electricity, petroleum and petroleum distillation, internal combustion engines, metallurgy, and chemistry. He so far had interviewed and hired about fifty people from college professors, doctors, and scientists to inventors, handymen and teachers. He didn’t care about the education as much as the ideas and applications. He even hired a dockworker with an incredible affinity with metal extracts.

  In the advertisements he offered free money for research at a well-equipped facility, a monthly apportionment, and room and board. He also stated that the inventors were to keep the patent rights to anything they created or discovered, with Jack setting up manufacturing, advertising, and distribution for a term of ten years. One of his brightest prospects was a young man named Jeremiah Jefferson from Albany who had already made serious inroads in the field of petroleum distillation.

  Half the time, Jack was spending his nights in a room in the Astor Hotel and his days in an office in the Sanger Building. The other half, which he considered the better half, was at the complex he was building in Norfolk. The researchers moved into buildings as soon as they were constructed.

  He found an article in the Times concerning a copyright infringement case involving one Charles Goodyear. The article stated that Goodyear lived on Staten Island.

  It was the day before Thanksgiving and Jack had no desire to be stuck in an office. He decided against taking his own boat. He took a coach to the Staten Island and New York Steam Ferry Company at the Whitehall Slip, later to become the Whitehall terminal in Southern Manhattan near Battery Park. He paid his five cents and boarded the steamship Hunchback which would later be acquired by the U.S. Navy. It was a rather elegantly-furnished single-ender sidewheeler. He stood at the second-level rail and saw Castle Williams on Governor’s Island and then, off to his west, Ellis Island. Liberty Island, then known as Bedloe’s Island, had the Fort Wood’s star-shaped base for the Statue of Liberty, but the lady herself was eerily absent.

  The Hunchback passed the white stone tower of the Robbins Reef Lighthouse, built on a reef situated near the entrance to Kill van Kull, a three-mile-long waterway linking Upper New York Bay to Newark Bay, home of the busiest port in the eastern United States. The boat docked at West New Brighton after a stop in Snug Harbor and the New Brighton wharves. After asking several merchants for directions, h
e finally ran across someone who knew Goodyear and the Great India Rubber Company and was told that Goodyear lived in a section of town known as Factoryville.

  He found Charles and his family destitute, living in an abandoned rubber factory. Charles and his small son were putting away their equipment from a morning of fishing in the Kill van Kull tidal straight. One look at the dilapidated factory that the Goodyears were calling home and Jack knew that the fishing trip was more for food than sport. Jack wondered what the family was going to do for dinner that night.

  Goodyear offered Jack a seat at a rickety table in a corner of the abandoned building that made do as their kitchen. There was one couch with a solitary spring sprouting among the cushions. Several buckets had been placed around the large room to catch drips from the roof. Charles Goodyear, slight of build, short, frail and sickly-looking, seemed an unlikely candidate for the father of the modern rubber industry and the man the blimp was named for.

  “Mr. Goodyear,” Jack began.

  “Please call me Charles.”

  “Thank you, and please call me Jack. I suppose you could say I’m an inventor too.“

  “I’ve seen that bicycle you’ve built,” Goodyear said excitedly. “It’s quite a marvel. I’ve also seen your advertisements in the newspaper.”

  “That’s the reason I’m here to see you today. I’m having most of the bicycles made in a machine shop in Queens that I recently purchased and expanded, and I’d like you to be in charge of making the rubber tires for the bikes. Instead of solid tires, I want the tires to be inflatable for a smoother ride. I’ve got the process figured out and even have working prototypes.”

  Charles Goodyear’s face lit with excitement.