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

by Most, Doug

  Whitney laughed at the irony in the conductor’s words. If anyone sued the company, Whitney would be the one faced with the consequences. As the owner of the largest streetcar company in the world, Whitney was an immensely popular boss. He visited his car stables frequently, chatting up his workers about their personal lives, riding in the front of cars with drivers or the rear with the conductors, and, most important to them, reducing their hours and raising their wages from two dollars to two dollars and twenty-five cents a day. Even when a grievance arose, the workers were encouraged to simply go see the president, and he would hear them out and resolve the issue then and there. When he would bump into one of his men on the street, he acted as if they were friends, greeting them with a bright smile and firm handshake.

  But there were always times when he believed it best to avoid interacting with his workers, and so when Whitney was asked a second time to step up onto the platform, he did so without ever identifying himself so as to avoid embarrassing his conductor. As the car rolled into Boston’s congested business district, Whitney discreetly hopped off near the Arlington Street stop, stepping right into a muddy puddle that splattered his dark pants before vanishing into the sea of people. As the trolley pulled away, a passenger on board who had witnessed and overheard the exchange approached the conductor.

  “Do you know who that was?” he asked.

  “No, and I didn’t give a damn,” the conductor said.

  “That’s President Whitney,” the passenger said, before bursting out laughing and getting off the car himself a few stops later.

  A look of fear crossed the conductor’s face. He had just chastised his boss without recognizing him. Was this to be his last day working for the company? Hardly. The company president never mentioned the incident, and the conductor gained a special appreciation for how genuine Henry Whitney was.

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 26, 1888, Whitney hired Daniel Longstreet from Providence as his new general manager. Getting Longstreet was a coup. One of Rhode Island’s most respected public figures, he had joined a Rhode Island Civil War regiment when he was just fifteen and earned great respect for taking such risk so young. Three years later, he took his first job as a conductor in Providence on a Union Railway Company horsecar, and very quickly he rose up the ranks into a clerk’s position and soon treasurer, which put him in charge of the finances of over six hundred men, and of fifty miles of routes. He was seen as a prince of a man, and when it was announced he was joining Whitney in Boston, the papers described it as a devastating blow for the city he was leaving. “How the company can spare the services of Mr. Longstreet is the puzzle of Providence,” The Globe wrote when his hiring was announced.

  Whitney knew what he was getting in Longstreet, an experienced manager with strong opinions. They would not always agree, and Whitney was better for it. He was no longer the impetuous, risk-taking businessman. He was thorough, patient, and smart. And he knew of some interesting trolley experiments taking place in Pennsylvania and in Richmond, Virginia, where he had already made one trip to meet with a promising young engineer. With his consolidation complete and his eyes set on tunneling under the Common, Whitney forged a new course for Boston. He told Longstreet to pack his bags. He had reached a conclusion. The experimental battery wasn’t the future of transit. And neither was the cable streetcar that had gained popularity out west in San Francisco but had quickly proved to be prone to breakdown. Steam was too dirty. And the horse was too slow.

  On a mild spring day in 1888, the two men boarded a steam train in Boston. A young man down south had something he wanted to show them.

  4

  HISTORY MADE IN RICHMOND

  IN THE THIRTY YEARS AFTER the Civil War, Richmond, Virginia, was one of America’s fastest-growing cities. Between 1860 and 1890, its population more than doubled, to 81,388. By the mid-1880s, some of the city streets were paved and the Richmond City Railway was running steam trains through much of the downtown, along with horsecars. Three suburban districts had been swallowed up by the city, and there was a desperate need to expand transportation out to the people in those parts. The owners of the horsecar companies, however, had no desire to go there. Too far, too expensive. Only when the Richmond city council gave its approval in March 1887 to build the Richmond Union Passenger Railway did the owners realize they could be replaced. They agreed to expand. But they were too late. The West End Ward and the Clay Ward were both too far removed from downtown, and getting to them required going over a stretch of land that was rugged, hilly, and unpaved. Horses couldn’t make it. And cable would be too expensive. Richmond’s city officials prepared to build a new railway to reach its outlying areas. And they wanted to operate the railway with electric power. All they needed was the right engineer for the job.

  The quest to find something faster than the horse, cleaner than the steam locomotive, more reliable than cable cars, and capable of powering entire transit systems would take nearly a decade and become one of man’s great pursuits of the second half of the nineteenth century. For some of the world’s most brilliant engineering minds, it was an outright obsession. Their names were Charles Van Depoele, Walter Knight, Edward Bentley, Thomas Edison, Werner Siemens, Leo Daft, and, one of the last and the youngest entrants into the field, Frank Sprague. The solution was obvious to all of them: electricity. But discovering the best way to harness it, to turn it into a source of power that could move not just one but multiple trains over rolling hills at the same time, that was the real challenge. In what evolved into a fierce competition, these men followed each other’s progress closely in designing an electric street railway system. Sometimes they teamed up with one another. Sometimes they sold out to one another. At other times they complained that their valuable ideas had been stolen. Yet if they shared one belief, it was that while the London Underground was an impressive achievement and the cable streetcar was a sight to behold, rolling through the streets as if it were being pulled along by some invisible magical force, neither of them were the long-term solution for cities.

  * * *

  IN THE SPRING OF 1882, a skinny young American naval officer with round glasses and a slight lean to his walk stepped off the Lancaster, a naval ship that was docking in Gibraltar near the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. He was a long way from his hometown of Milford, Connecticut, a city on Long Island Sound about ten miles southwest of New Haven. But while he was only twenty-five years old, Frank Julian Sprague was fast on his way to becoming one of the most promising engineers in the world. After making his way north to London, he walked down a steep staircase to ride the Underground for the first time, and he made his way over to the Crystal Palace Electrical Exhibition, where the latest breakthroughs from around the world in the field of electricity were on display.

  Despite his age, Sprague was already a peer of the more experienced engineers who were exhibiting inventions at Crystal Palace. He was working on a small electric motor that would one day, he hoped, be able to power elevators, printing presses, and clothing manufacturers around the world. And so his presence in London did not go unnoticed. He was offered a chance to be a member of the Jury of Awards and the secretary of the prestigious scientific group. He eagerly accepted both positions.

  Sprague was born on July 25, 1857, and he was a studious boy growing up. His mother, a schoolteacher, died when he was just eight, but in those few years she left a stern impression on him about the importance of his studies. His father sent him off to New York to live with an aunt, and in school he became intensely focused, one of the smartest boys in his classes. His favorite subjects were math and science, and his high school principal thought he might excel by attending either West Point or the United States Naval Academy. Sprague’s interests seemed perfectly suited for either of them. After graduating from high school, Sprague traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts, on a June morning to take the entrance examination for West Point. By accident, he found himself staring at a four-day exam for the Naval Academy. He didn�
�t panic, and he scored the highest among the thirteen candidates. “A career afloat was far from my ambition,” Sprague would say later, “but having won out I decided to at least try it.”

  First, he needed the money. Sprague borrowed four thousand dollars from a local contractor and a bank, and in September 1874 he left for Annapolis. He graduated four years later; after that, he spent two years out at sea followed by one year ashore that included a brief tour at the Newport, Rhode Island, torpedo station. While he was at sea, Sprague seemed amazed at the journey life had thrown him and unsure what to do with his spare time. He wrote stories that he filed for The Boston Herald while in Asia. And he looked for any opportunity to tinker with wires and contraptions.

  Two years later, Sprague filed his first patent, on October 4, 1881. His idea was called a dynamoelectric machine, and he applied to show it at the Paris Electrical Exhibition. But when his request was denied, Sprague found himself instead on a naval ship that was departing New York to join up with the American naval fleet in the Mediterranean. When his ship was delayed, he landed in Europe in the spring of 1882, took a three-month leave, and made his way to London. It was there, while at London’s Crystal Palace, that Sprague had the meeting that would change the course of his life.

  Edward Hibbard Johnson had an eye for talent. He was the one who had hired Thomas Edison in the early 1870s to work for a new company called Automatic Telegraph, which its founders saw as a competitor to Western Union. Johnson and Edison worked closely over the next decade, and in fact Johnson was in London to promote Edison’s progress with electricity, specifically his incandescent lightbulb. Like Sprague, Edison believed the potential uses for electricity were endless. A few years earlier, Edison had left New Jersey for a trip out west. He was already using small electric motors he’d invented to power a sewing machine and a water pump at his home, and he was beginning to wonder if that same idea could be applied to transportation. In his trip to the Great Plains, Edison saw farmers making long and costly trips just to get their produce and grains to the steam railroads. It occurred to him that if the farmers had a lighter, cheaper, narrower railroad, powered not by steam but by electricity, it could serve as a much more efficient link to the transcontinental railroad. Farmers could then spend more time harvesting their land and would be more productive. Edison returned to New Jersey and set to work, excited about the idea of applying electricity to transportation. He hired a crew to build a track one-third of a mile long and a mechanical engineer to work with him on an electric locomotive.

  In 1879, before he had invested much time in electric transit, Edison was, at thirty-one years old, already one of America’s most famous and prolific inventors. That year, after a brief period when he took time to finish inventing his phonograph, he was determined to perfect electric lighting. On October 21, 1879, he successfully tested the first incandescent electric light, and two months later he demonstrated it publicly to hundreds of witnesses at his research laboratory in New Jersey. He lit up his lab, the town’s streets, and a few nearby homes.

  Edison and Johnson employed a number of bright engineers to help with Edison’s electricity experiments, and in 1882, when Johnson began talking electricity with Sprague at Crystal Palace, it became obvious to Johnson that this was a young man they should employ. In March 1883, after Sprague resigned from the navy, Johnson nudged Edison to hire him. When Edison didn’t act immediately, Johnson grew frustrated because he knew Sprague was turning down other offers for the chance to work with Edison.

  “I hear nothing from you as to young Sprague,” Johnson wrote Edison in April 1883. “An ensign in the U.S. Navy doesn’t have enough surplus pocket money to allow him to loaf long. Beside, he is not one who can endure it long. He is very anxious to get to work.”

  Finally, Edison wrote back. “I received your favor of the 11th this morning and at once called you ‘Send Sprague.’”

  Johnson, it turned out, was not the only one nudging Edison.

  Electrical World, a publication that closely monitored the progress in electricity, made a boast in 1883 that seemed like a pointed attack on the wizard from Menlo Park. Electrical World said that while Edison’s incandescent light was impressive, it was time to move on and discover other ways the power of electricity could be applied. “The electric light has long ceased to be a curiosity or even a novelty,” the publication proclaimed. “It has become a common, every-day affair. To the scientist, to the electrician, it looms up even as a thing of the past. The question to which he now turns is: What shall we do next?”

  * * *

  SPRAGUE SPENT THREE MONTHS in London, and by the time he came home he not only understood the problem with the subway but also had begun to design a solution in his head and on paper. He looked at London’s tracks and believed they could serve as one conductor of electricity. But he also came to believe that a second conductor that ran overhead along the tracks and was connected by wire to a moving train could be the missing piece. If electricity could move a single train, could it one day power an entire transit system like the Underground? After leaving the navy, Sprague took the job to work with Edison expecting to be given time to turn his track drawings into experiments. Edison had other plans for him.

  When Sprague returned to America in 1883, twenty years had passed since London’s subway opened. But no other city had bothered to replicate it since then. Urban transit had become the single biggest civic headache. Traffic was an outright obsession of newspapers and their readers. Day after day, the drawings in any major city newspaper showed overcrowded streets that portrayed the country as bordering on outright panic. Streets were filled with so many moving pieces, of all shapes and sizes, it was a miracle anybody got anywhere. Chairs on wheels, covered wagons, omnibuses, trolleys on tracks, and more, all of them pulled by horses, created an almost deafening wall of sound.

  It remained a stubborn problem for which no city had found the perfect solution. London had come closest. It had proved not only that a tunnel could be dug safely underneath a city’s streets but also that trains could be run on tracks through those tunnels. The key to the Underground was a centrally located steam engine, powered by coal. When the engine produced mechanical energy, a machine called a dynamo converted it into electric current, which was passed immediately through a rail to the street railway cars. The dynamo (the word comes from the Greek dunamis, which means “power”) was the earliest form of what is known today as an electrical generator, and it would soon prove critical to the future of the electric railway, as well as to all industries that relied on power to make and move goods. A motor on the cars then converted the dynamo’s electric current back into mechanical energy, which powered the wheels to turn and move the streetcars. It was, to say the least, quite complicated. But the complicated technology was not the only reason that no other city besides London had built a subway yet. The giant steam locomotives also scared cities away. They pumped out black smoke and pungent gas and rained down hot steam and showers of soot and sparks into the enclosed tunnels, making the experience of riding the Underground filthy, dangerous, and unpleasant.

  An English journalist named Fred T. Jane captured the experience after taking a ride one summer morning aboard locomotive number 18 around the Circle Line of the Underground. For the English Illustrated Magazine, Jane wrote of “visions of accidents, collisions and crumbling tunnels” floating through his mind. Sarcastically titled “The Romance of Modern London,” Jane’s article told a riveting account of how uncomfortable a ride on the Underground could be.

  “No time is wasted at stations on the Underground and a minute later the train was off, off into a black wall ahead with the shrieking of ten thousand demons rising above the thunder of the wheels,” he wrote. “The sensation altogether was much like the inhalation of gas preparatory to having a tooth drawn. I would have given a good deal to have waited a minute or so longer. Visions of accidents, collisions and crumbling tunnels floated through my mind; a fierce wind took away my breath.
” The average speed, as Jane described it, was twenty-five miles per hour, but there were a few spots where the train reached forty miles per hour. As his train reached the Gower Street station, Jane described the air as growing more foul until he was coughing “like a boy with his first cigar.” At that point, the driver turned to Jane. “It is a little unpleasant when you ain’t used to it,” he said. “But you ought to come on a hot summer day to get the real thing.”

  The author’s trip lasted a little more than an hour and covered thirteen miles of track and included twenty-seven stops. When his ride was over, the engineer said to him, “This finishes our journey, unless you’d like to go round again.” Jane politely declined.

  * * *

  MAY 24, 1883, WAS A sunny day in New York City and one of America’s brightest days in history. But as Sprague, now a twenty-six-year-old former U.S. Navy ensign, stepped off his steamship in New York’s harbor after journeying across from England, he paid little attention to the crowd of excited people making their way east through the city’s streets. He was thinking only about the job that was waiting for him across the Hudson River in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with Thomas Edison.

  There was a marching band and police escorts on horses, followed by twenty-five carriages, all moving down Fifth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, where they turned east and made their way down to City Hall. The festivities were all part of a celebration New Yorkers had been anticipating for more than a decade, much as they’d been waiting for a subway. After fourteen years of construction, and two dozen deaths, President Chester A. Arthur and New York’s portly governor, Grover Cleveland, who would soon be the next president, were in town to celebrate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Shortly before two in the afternoon, the long procession lined up and headed on foot for the historic march across the East River. As the president, the governor, the mayor, and other dignitaries walked across the 1,595-foot span, behind the band and soldiers from the Seventh Regiment, the sun reflecting off their bayonets, loud applause followed their every step. The promenade where they walked had been open to ticket holders for hours, who lined both sides of the bridge. An estimated 250,000 people followed in the next twenty-four hours. But it was the presence of President Arthur that The New York Sun could not ignore the following day in its report. It described the bridge’s opening as a climax that ended fourteen years of suspense, “since the president of the United States of America had walked dry shod to Brooklyn from New York.”