The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (2 page)

He loved working with his father. But he dreamed of striking out on his own. In 1845, another young man from Massachusetts named Rufus Porter presented him with that chance. Porter had just published the very first issue of a weekly magazine he created, called
Scientific American
. Four pages long, it sold for a subscription rate of two dollars a year. The first edition included a note from Porter explaining how useful he believed his publication could be. “As a family newspaper,” Porter wrote, “it will convey more useful intelligence to children and young people, than five times its cost in school instruction.”

Scientific American
was published every Thursday morning and was filled with original engravings of new inventions, improvements, or ideas, along with scientific essays, poems, and even things completely unrelated to science, like moral and religious musings. But Porter saw himself as more than an inventor or editor. He was also an artist who enjoyed painting portraits. Not surprisingly, he quickly lost interest in a magazine devoted to science, and, barely ten months after he founded
Scientific American,
Porter went looking for a buyer.

Beach was twenty years old and because of his father’s newspaper saw the value of the printed word. But he didn’t have the money to go it alone. He needed a partner. Thinking back to his days at his private school in Massachusetts, he reached out to a good friend that he thought might make the perfect business partner. Orson Desaix Munn moved to New York, and in July 1846 the two of them paid $800 for the tiny, obscure technical magazine and its subscription list of two hundred names. It marked the beginning of a friendship and partnership that would last nearly fifty years.

Scientific American
had only a few hundred subscribers under Rufus Porter. But as Alfred Beach and Orson Munn learned once they took it over, inventors of the day saw real value in the magazine. The inventors wanted help from like-minded dreamers who saw the potential in their ideas. Beach and Munn had barely settled into their offices in 1846 when they were besieged with letters from inventors, or sometimes with unannounced visits. The requests were always the same: Help me apply for a patent and secure it, and I’ll pay whatever it takes. Beach and Munn realized that
Scientific American
was more than a magazine. It was a trusted brand.

Late in 1846, the two launched a new business. If an inventor had an idea, the owners of the Scientific American Patent Agency would happily take their money, help them write the perfect patent application, and track the progress of it once it reached the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. There was no other business like it in the country, and before long Beach was traveling to Washington every two weeks to monitor the hundreds of patents he or Munn helped write. Eventually the business was filing three thousand patents a year and Beach was forced to split his time between New York and a branch office in Washington, directly across the street from the patent office. The patent business earned Beach a fortune and some measure of fame. He became a pied piper of sorts for the American inventor, the one they all sought out for advice, opinions, or help with a patent. Thomas Edison walked in one day to show Beach a device he called the phonograph. Beach turned a crank on Edison’s small machine and a voice piped up, “Good morning, sir. How are you? How do you like the talking box?” He liked it, and he helped Edison file a patent. He also would help Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel F. B. Morse, and thousands more.

But it was
Scientific American
that gave Beach the platform he craved to promote his own personal interests and inventions. Beach and Munn were able to quickly resurrect the magazine by focusing its content less on the highly technical science stories and more on what they knew best: curious inventions and practical, interesting patents. Simply by printing a weekly list of patents given to them directly from the U.S. Patent Office, Beach and Munn increased the number of subscriptions to
Scientific American,
and it took off: by 1848, not even two years after they bought it, the circulation exceeded ten thousand readers.

Beach was becoming a man of real importance. When his father decided in 1848 to hand over management of his newspaper to his two sons, Moses and Alfred, Alfred’s prominence reached even greater heights. He owned the most respected and lucrative science magazine in the country. He had the attention of every serious and not-so-serious inventor across the land. And now he was running a daily newspaper with more than fifty thousand readers in the nation’s largest city. He had a vast and growing audience riveted on his every opinion. And he was only twenty-two years old.

*   *   *

THE MID–NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS
a magical time for anybody who loved to tinker and had good ideas and good hands. Inventors were changing the way people lived their lives and ran their businesses. Elias Howe, not yet thirty years old, introduced his sewing machine in 1846, and within a few years the garment-making industry was revolutionized and clothes became more affordable. In 1847, a middle-aged inventor from Charlestown, Massachusetts, named Samuel Morse, who had been working for more than a decade to perfect his idea of speeding up long-distance, person-to-person communications, received a patent for an invention called the telegraph. A year later, a blacksmith from New Bedford, Massachusetts, changed the whaling industry with a new type of harpoon. And farming was in the midst of huge change. The American economy relied heavily on the success of the farmer, who might spend an entire day doing backbreaking work in the fields to plow or harvest only a single acre. But as 1850 approached, each passing year brought farmers more relief. A grain elevator invented in Buffalo dramatically sped up the hoisting of grain from ships into bins. The production of artificial manure to help crops grow began to take off, and the artificial-fertilizer industry was born. New inventions allowed farmers who were previously able to manage only a dozen acres to handle a hundred or more. Amid all this upheaval, no industry underwent more dramatic change than the transportation industry.

In 1825, most commuters who lived in cities got to work the same way. They walked. Only the rich could afford to own or hire a private carriage, and the idea of multiple people riding together in the same vehicle seemed farfetched. New York City had nearly two hundred thousand residents, most of whom were crowded into a small portion of the island. Only as more immigrants arrived and the population grew did the footprint of the livable parts of New York expand. That’s when Abraham Brower saw an opportunity.

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.