The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (13 page)

The next year only reinforced in Sprague’s mind how badly he wanted to be a pioneer in designing the perfect electric motor. In April 1884, when Edison finally asked Sprague to step away from lighting and turn his attention to using electricity to create power, it was too late. Sprague had decided he no longer wanted to report to Edison or have to rely on Menlo Park’s resources. He told Edison he had made such progress on his own that he wanted to be recognized for what he achieved independently, and not as an Edison apprentice.

“You will surely understand me when I say that I desire to identify myself with the successful solution to this problem,” Sprague wrote to Edison on April 24, 1884. He said he wanted to pursue electric traction with the “same spirit with which you attacked the electric light, with the result of making yourself world-famous.”

It was not a resignation letter, but it may as well have been. “As your subordinate, I cannot work with the same freedom as if I take the future into my own hands,” Sprague wrote. In the letter Sprague told Edison that he was willing to continue working together, but only if their arrangement changed, and he said if Edison wanted him to resign, he would. If not, he asked to work on his own projects predominantly, and consult on Edison’s as needed. He assumed Edison would never accept those conditions, and he was right. On the same day he received his employee’s letter, Edison replied. “Sprague, as we are about to close out our construction dept.,” he wrote back, “I think the best way is for you to resign on the 1st for the reason that your position would be so curious as to be untenable.”

The following day, Sprague submitted his resignation letter. “Trusting that the reasons given in my letter of yester-date meet with your approval, I am, very truly yours, Frank J. Sprague.”

Not even a full year after one of the world’s brightest young engineers reported to work for, and to learn from, one of the world’s most famously accomplished engineers, their professional relationship was over. Six months after leaving Edison’s employment, at just twenty-seven years old, Sprague took his first step toward independence. He began to devise the electric motor, which was needed to give cities hope that a more enjoyable subway experience was possible than the London Underground.

*   *   *

IN NOVEMBER 1884, WITH A
measly budget of $100,000, Sprague gave himself a salary of $2,500 and incorporated the Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company. At the time he launched his company, Sprague was still a single man who enjoyed burying himself in his work for months, sometimes years, before taking a break. But somehow in the spring of 1885, he found the time and the desire to visit New Orleans. There, he met a younger, beautiful, dark-haired woman whose marriage had recently failed, whose father had long ago died, and whose mother was a famous doctor in the South. Twenty-one-year-old Mary Keatinge and Frank Sprague fell in love in no time, and on April 21, 1885, at Trinity Church in New Orleans, they were married.
The Daily Picayune
’s society column sounded almost mournful at the loss of a woman it described as one of the city’s “loveliest and most charming girls.”

She would need her charm to make new friends, because back in New York after their honeymoon, her husband once again lost himself in his work. A motor that Sprague had displayed a few months earlier at the International Electrical Exhibition in Philadelphia had been widely praised for several features that others had struggled with. It produced no sparks. And it could operate at a constant speed for long stretches, whether it was pulling twenty pounds, two hundred pounds, or more. Even Edison, who came to Philadelphia for the exhibition, was impressed. “His is the only true motor,” Edison told a reporter one day. Edison believed not only that Sprague’s invention could run streetcars but also that it was the future of the subway.

In January 1886, Edison gave an interview to
The Boston Daily Globe
. Only a few weeks earlier, Sprague had visited Boston to speak to the Society of Arts. In his speech, Sprague explained the blueprint for his electric streetcar system. Edison was well aware of what Sprague had said, and when
The Globe
asked him about whether an electric subway was far off, Edison said the problem was that city planners were overthinking the idea. He said it didn’t require any patents, just a very simple way to dig and to place electrical wires under the ground and insulate them. That’s it. “The peculiar device which ought to be adopted in New York and all other cities is a simple tunnel, or horizontal hole in the ground,” Edison said. “It should be as simple as possible—a plain viaduct, in which the various companies can lay their electrical contrivances and supply the means of insulation. I suppose they are bound to hear everybody, but, having heard, they should cast aside all newfangled inventions and throw the companies on their resources; else they will be in constant trouble.”

Edison’s words came at the same time Sprague’s electric motor was being snapped up in the United States, and across Europe, for all sorts of uses, from factory mills, where it could speed up production of clothing, to presses, where it made printing immeasurably faster, and even to the central power stations Edison needed for his lighting systems. In Boston, a furniture dealer installed an elevator powered by a Sprague motor, triggering a wave of sales in the city and across the country. Within a few months, 250 Sprague motors were being used in the States, and soon the company had a catalog listing all the various-sized motors it produced, from the biggest, one hundred horsepower, to the smallest, at half horsepower. Sales were so brisk that Sprague leased a factory space in New York for manufacturing. Quicker than even he’d imagined, he was achieving the fame that he’d hoped for by leaving Edison.

*   *   *

IN EARLY 1886, IN A
narrow alleyway between two brick buildings near the Durant Sugar Refinery off East Twenty-fourth Street, Sprague gave New Yorkers a glimpse of their future. In the alley, there was a stretch of track two hundred feet long and barely ten feet wide and generators that could supply up to six hundred volts of electricity.

His visitor on this day was a small thin man who was increasingly powerful and well on his way to becoming one of the most loathed men in the country. Jay Gould was raised poor in upstate New York and, after moving to the city, became involved first in the leather trade and then in the stock market, where he wormed his way up through lawsuits, bribes, and lies. By the mid-1880s, Gould was, despite efforts to beat him down, a powerful player in New York thanks to his controlling interest in the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, which helped him become one of the ten richest men in America, not to mention one of the most vilified. In the early 1880s, he had infuriated New Yorkers when he tried to convert Battery Park, valuable to the working-class Lower East Side families because it was the only nearby open space, into an elevated loop. Now, a few years later, he was exploring new ideas, which is how he came to meet with Sprague. If Gould could be convinced of the possibility of Sprague’s invention, he had the fortune to pour into it.

Sprague had been tinkering for years with motors on streetcars. The biggest advantage his idea offered over steam was that electricity eliminated the need for big, expensive, and powerful locomotives because each car could have its own motor. That would allow for longer trains to carry more passengers and provide greater relief from congestion. And, with a few central stations providing all the power, electric traction would be vastly cheaper than hundreds of steam locomotives or thousands of horses that lasted only a few years. Sprague recognized the potential fortune he had in electric traction, and he knew that if he ever managed to perfect a system it would be too big an idea to go alone. There was too much demand for electric streetcars from around the world. He needed a capitalist, someone willing to gamble on the future with him, someone with a whole lot of money who was willing to take an enormous risk. After more than a year of making speeches and presentations to any gathering that would listen about the benefits of electric power, he found a group of wealthy railroad owners and potential investors, Gould among them, who were not only interested in his invention but also ready if he could prove to them it worked.

Sprague could only get a railroad flatcar, not a streetcar, to run his experiment at the sugar refinery. It was so wide that it barely fit on the tracks in the alley. But it would have to do. Underneath Sprague’s flatcar was his breakthrough, a way to effectively link traction motors to the wheels in a secure fashion. The motors were mounted in what he called the wheelbarrow fashion. A part of the gear-drive motors was attached around the axle of the car, and a part was mounted with a spring onto the frame. This allowed the motor to bounce on the tracks without losing the gear it was in, a problem that plagued other innovators who’d been experimenting with the same idea. Another tweak that Sprague introduced on his flatcar was a braking system in which the motors acted as generators during braking, actually delivering electricity into the car’s system even while helping it slow down.

Nervous and determined to make sure his experiment went as planned for Gould, Sprague decided to drive the car himself rather than rely on an assistant. When Gould arrived at the sugar refinery, he was at first reluctant to climb aboard the funny-looking flatcar, unsure about this new technology and wary of this young engineer he hardly knew. But Sprague convinced Gould to come up, and he positioned Gould to stand at the front. Sprague thought having Gould at the front would make the quick ride more exciting for him, and for the first few seconds everything went fine as the flatcar pulled away smoothly and the group relaxed. Then disaster.

“Desiring to make an impressive demonstration of how readily the car could be controlled and braked in the short distance available for movement, I handled the controller rather abruptly,” Sprague recalled later. He tried to impress Gould with the motor’s ability to accelerate the streetcar, but instead he pushed the motor too hard and caused a fuse to blow, which triggered a bright yellow flash, a loud explosion, and then a storm of sparks, right where Gould stood. It so surprised Gould that he tried to jump off the moving car in a panic and had to be restrained. Gould was more embarrassed than hurt, but it didn’t matter. Sprague tried to reassure his visitor that “this young volcano was only a safety device,” but Gould was having none of it. There was no way he would trust the invention after that, and he left, never to return. Sprague’s golden opportunity was gone.

The Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, which controlled the Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenue elevated lines, and which was Sprague’s ticket into Gotham, would not be investing in electricity anytime soon. As for Sprague, he continued to run successful, impressive, and speedy demonstrations of his invention for more than a year, moving from the sugar-refinery alley to the long, straight stretch of elevated tracks at Thirty-fourth Street. But at the end of 1886, running out of money to fund his test runs and unable to line up a contract to run his electric cars, Sprague finally picked up his life and prepared to leave New York.

*   *   *

SPRAGUE HAD FIRST REVEALED DETAILS
about his innovation in Boston, at a meeting of the Society of Arts a few weeks before his embarrassing gaffe with Gould. In Boston he revealed that he had discovered a way to return electric current from the train to a third rail on the tracks while braking, which allowed for safer slowing and stopping, especially down hills. This mechanism also essentially turned every motor on every car into a generator that would feed power back into the system for every car to be able to use. That would save enormous amounts of money, by Sprague’s calculations 71 percent on the Third Avenue elevated line of the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company. But Sprague knew that a New York example was of little interest to Bostonians and might even turn them off. And so, toward the end of his speech before the members of the Society of Arts, he addressed their city’s woes and revealed just how closely he had been studying Boston, even while he was experimenting in New York.

“I have presented these facts about the present and future of the elevated roads of New York for your serious consideration,” Sprague said, “not because you are particularly interested in New York, but because the problem of rapid transit in Boston has become one of the urgent needs of the present. As the elevated roads in the former city met with great opposition, so has the project of reaching the suburbs of Boston aroused a host of objectors.”

He was correct. Bostonians were in the midst of a furious debate over how to extend their streetcar lines to the growing suburbs. Sprague was well aware of Boston’s objections to elevated trains, mainly that the streets were too narrow and twisting to accommodate a massive network of overhead rails. But he tried to assure his audience that they should reconsider. “Such roads can be built,” he said, “the structures of which will not take up as much room in the streets, will not obstruct the air and light much over one-half as much as the New York roads, and I feel confident that they can be built for less money.”

And, he said, with trains powered by electricity rather than steam, the conditions plaguing New York would never be experienced in Boston. “Dust, smoke, cinders, oil and water will disappear,” he said. “Power will cost less. Trains can run at shorter intervals and under more perfect control. The energy of the train will become available for the purpose of braking. Repairs of the superstructure will be less. In short, electric propulsion, more than any other thing, will make practicable for Boston what it has so long and so sadly needed, rapid transit to its suburbs. I need hardly point out to you the increase in the value of this property, which will more than pay the cost of the roads.”

Frank Sprague was no fool. By talking about street railways in Boston and how they would increase property values in the suburbs, he had to know that one man in particular would be paying rapt attention. Henry Whitney owned not only the largest street railway system in the world but also valuable property in Brookline that he envisioned as an ideal stretch for electrified tracks. Sprague had successfully launched tests of his electric railway in small towns like Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware; and St. Joseph, Missouri, but he also knew that those were tiny experiments that garnered little attention. He needed a metropolis to win the credibility that he craved. He had hoped it would be New York. But that was history now. He set off to find another investor in another city, someone who, unlike Jay Gould, didn’t scare so easily.