Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  The long rifle was ineffective in European-style battles because it was slow to reload and was not designed to hold a bayonet. But it was perfect for the American style of warfare: raids, wilderness fighting, and sniping at the enemy.

  Minuteman Statue at Lexington Battle Green

  Pennsylvania Kentucky Flintlock Long Rifle

  COAL

  The nineteenth century was powered by steam—the greatest increase in power since our ancestors learned to control fire. The steam engine drove factories, ships, and trains. It pumped water from mines. Factories no longer had to be built next to water supplies. Transportation no longer depended on draft animals and the wind.

  What made it all possible was a miracle material from deep underground—coal.

  Three hundred million years ago, Earth was covered by a dense, tropical rain forest. Giant ferns, horsetails, coniferous trees, and mosses grew in vast stretches of boggy land. When they died, the lush, green plants fell and accumulated in the warm, shallow water of the bogs, slowing their decay. Over the millennia, the layers of slowly decaying plants grew deeper. New layers buried the older layers of vegetation and pushed them deeper, turning them first to peat and then, as they heated up, to coal. The longer the exposure to heat, the harder and darker coal became. The harder and darker the coal, the more efficient it is as fuel.

  The steam engine is gone, but coal is still essential to twenty-first-century life. It remains one of our most important energy sources, fueling almost 40 percent of the world’s electricity and 64 percent of modern iron and steel production.

  Steam locomotives caught the American imagination as well. Stephenson had launched the Stockton and Darlington the same year the Erie Canal had gone into operation. The timing was perfect for introducing the new steam locomotive to America. Baltimore businesspeople, worried that the new canal would give New York a major advantage in trading with the Western states, had already begun to look for faster ways to move people and goods over the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio River Valley. Wagon shipments to the West took forever. There was no natural East-West river system. And the mountains that outlined Maryland’s western border meant that a canal was simply not practical. A railroad appeared to be the perfect solution.

  In February 1827 a group of Baltimore businessmen organized themselves to construct the first American railroad. It was a daring leap of faith. The only railroad in operation was the two-year-old Stockton and Darlington: twenty-six miles of straight track on a flat surface. The new Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, or B&O, would travel through almost four hundred miles of rough terrain, requiring engineering marvels in the form of bridges and tunnels.

  NELLIE BLY

  In 1889, American journalist Nellie Bly made headlines by traveling around the world in fewer than eighty days—seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes, to be exact. Without the global rail network, her journey would have taken four times longer.

  The transcontinental Union-Pacific Railroad connected the coasts for the first time.

  The new railroad lines would change the face of American—and world—transportation forever. The first mile and a half of track for the Baltimore and Ohio was in place by January 1830; the company offered rides to curious members of the public for a nominal fare. By 1840, America had more miles of track than Great Britain; by 1860, it had more miles of track than the rest of the world combined and was still laying more. The first transcontinental railroad was completed on May 10, 1869, only thirty-nine years after the first excursion ride on the B&O.

  The railroads connected town to town, city to city, region to region. Towns on the railroad line grew; those off the line dwindled. Chicago became a major hub for railways from both the East and the West. Western farmers could send their produce east. Southern cotton producers could ship raw material to the textile factories of the North or to the ports, where British ships waited to take it back to England. Eastern manufacturers, importers, and the new catalog retailers could reach a greater market than ever before. Diets became more diverse as people ate food from other climates. The number of people someone could meet in a lifetime quadrupled as travel, not just to the next town, but to the town beyond that, became easier.

  THE KINGWOOD TUNNEL

  JANUARY 16, 1852. WEST VIRGINIA. THE BALTIMORE and Ohio Railroad is one of the biggest construction projects in North America. Once complete, 379 miles of track will link Baltimore to the Ohio River Valley. The Kingwood Tunnel is the biggest challenge on the B&O: carved forty-one hundred feet through a mountain of slate and limestone. The man in charge is self-taught engineer Benjamin Latrobe Jr., son of the architect who designed the United States Capitol building. To speed up construction, Latrobe has decided to take a daring risk and dig the tunnel from both ends at once.

  For three years now, three hundred men have worked around the clock, shifting two hundred thousand cubic yards of earth and rock using hammers, drills, and black powder. They’ve worked through labor riots, machinery failures, cave-ins, and bad weather. It is dangerous, highly specialized work. Injuries and death are common. But the workers are almost done.

  Teams on opposite sides of the last stretch of rock have a bet on who will get through first. In their hurry to win, one team rushes to blow through the last heading—but fails to give the customary blasting signal. The explosion blows out through the other side, connecting the two ends of the tunnel. One laborer is killed and several others are wounded.

  Many more workers will die on the job as the railroads expand across the United States.

  American Express Train, 1854

  locomotive and passenger car in New York City, 1880s

  lightning steam press, electric telegraph, locomotive, and steamboat, 1876

  1882 poster for the Illinois Central Railroad

  The railroads generated thousands of new jobs, new mines, new steel mills, new towns, new markets. Rails, engines, and cars had to be manufactured. Coal had to be mined. Timetables had to be printed. Whole new classes of workers manned the trains themselves: engineers, firemen, porters, conductors, and stationmasters.

  Railroads opened new lands in Canada, Australia, Siberia, and Argentina. They brought rubber out of the Belgian Congo and carried tea from the highland plantations of Assam to ports in western India. In Europe, they leaped across borders, creating connections that had never existed before. By 1889, two hundred thousand miles of track were in operation throughout the world. By 1900, the number of miles of track had doubled again. People could travel farther and faster than ever before.

  LIKE THE PLAGUE BEFORE IT, cholera traveled from Asia to Europe along the old trade routes, moving from India, where the disease had been endemic for at least two thousand years, through Afghanistan, Turkey, and Persia to Russia and across Europe. The dirty, overcrowded cities of the Industrial Revolution were the perfect place for cholera to thrive. Drinking water became laced with invisible amounts of human waste carrying the cholera bacteria. Once limited to the South Asian subcontinent, cholera became the first global pandemic.

  In 1854, London was the richest city on earth—and one of the most crowded. The city’s population had doubled in fifty years. Two and a half million people were crammed into a thirty-mile circle. More than half of them lived in dark, filthy, undrained slums. Sanitation systems consisting of cesspools and “night soil men” (workers employed to remove human excrement from the cesspools and transport it outside of the city), dating from the Elizabethan period, were unable to cope with the human waste of a teeming, modern city.

  HORSEPOWER

  For most of human history, the horse was unmatched as a source of speed and power. A traveler on horseback could travel faster and farther than a traveler on foot. A warrior on horseback was the ultimate fighting machine. Horses were as essential to the spread of civilization as iron. They were used to clear forests, plow fields, and pull wagons.

  It’s not surprising that when our forefathers built the first mechanical engines, we measured their pow
er against that of nature’s locomotion, the horse.

  Scottish engineer James Watt coined the term “horsepower” in the eighteenth century. He wanted a way to compare the power of his new steam engine to that of the horses that pulled coal wagons out of the mines. (Coal, steam, and railroads are linked at every point.) He calculated that, on average, a horse could pull 22,000 foot-pounds in a minute. For reasons best known to Watt, he arbitrarily increased that number by 50 percent, making one horsepower the equivalent of 33,000 footpounds per minute. That means a horse, or an engine, exerting one horsepower could raise 330 pounds of coal 100 feet in one minute.

  In 1808, London crowds happily paid to watch Richard Trevithick’s little steam engine, named Catch Me Who Can (above), race against a horse.

  THE CHOLERA EPIDEMIC

  AUGUST 18, 1854. 40 BROAD STREET, LONDON. Two-year-old Frances Lewis is desperately ill. At six that morning, she had begun to vomit. Her stools are green and watery, their smell vile even by the standards of a London neighborhood that reeks of slaughterhouses, manufacturing plants, tripe boilers, and the overflowing cesspools that collect human waste. Her mother, Sarah, has sent for the doctor. As she waits, she changes her daughter’s diaper one more time and soaks the morning’s dirty diapers in a bucket of water. When the little girl falls asleep, Sarah takes the bucket downstairs and empties it in the cesspool that lies in the basement of the house where they rent a room.

  She has no idea that, in the coming weeks, thousands will die because of her actions.

  Crevices and breaks in the cesspool leak infected sewage into the Broad Street well that provides the drinking water for Sarah’s neighbors and her family. Someone takes the first drink; someone else, the second, and so on.

  Another epidemic has begun.

  A few hours pass, and to Sarah’s sorrow, her baby dies. Thomas Lewis tries to comfort his wife, but he is feverish and has to sit down to rest. Sarah’s husband soon shows the same terrifying symptoms that led to their daughter’s death: coughing, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. Within a short time, he, too, will be dead.

  ORPHAN TRAINS

  Orphans have always been among the most vulnerable members of human society. Left without adult protectors, they are dependent on society as a whole to care for them. Cultures have met the challenge with different degrees of humanity. In ancient Middle Eastern cultures, orphans were protected; in other civilizations, such as the Roman Empire or the Mayan cultures, orphans became slaves or were offered as human sacrifices.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the number of orphans in American cities became a social problem of immense proportions as a result of the Civil War and the rise in immigration. Orphanages and aid societies were overwhelmed. One organization used modern technology to address an ancient problem. Between 1854 and 1929, “orphan trains” carried more than one hundred thousand homeless children from the slums of New York to new homes in rural America.

  The orphan trains were an ambitious effort by the Children’s Aid Society to help the thousands of homeless children who roamed the streets of New York in the 1850s. The program’s founder, minister Charles Loring Brace, hoped that farmers in need of labor would welcome the children into their homes and treat them as their own. Many did. Others saw the children only as a source of cheap labor.

  Two street boys who found their way west on the orphan trains, Andrew Burke and John Brady, fared better than most. They grew up to be the governors of North Dakota and Alaska, respectively.

  Broad Street, where the Lewis family lived, was by no means a slum by Victorian standards. A mixture of the working poor and middle-class tradespeople lived there. Unlike many neighborhood water supplies, the Broad Street well had a reputation for clean, pleasant-tasting water.

  In the three days after the death of Frances Lewis, 127 people died in the neighborhood of the Broad Street well. Three-quarters of the residents fled the neighborhood. Within two weeks, 616 people were dead.

  In the early 1850s, most doctors believed that cholera was spread through the poisoned air, or “miasma” of unsanitary places. One man began to doubt that theory.

  John Snow lived and practiced medicine just around the corner, on Firth Street. Snow was one of the new breed of men who believed that measurement and careful scientific inquiry held the keys to understanding not only disease, but the universe. At the time of the Broad Street cholera epidemic, he had already earned a national reputation for his study and practice of anesthesia.

  With a new cholera epidemic on the rise, Snow began to make a map of the dead, systematically looking for a link between the victims. He soon came to believe that the water pump on Broad Street was the source of the outbreak. But he needed proof if he wanted to persuade the parish council to shut off the water supply.

  CHOLERA

  Bacteria are the oldest and most successful life form on Earth. Born in the thermal and chemical soup of a still-forming planet, they have evolved into a diversity of single-celled organisms that thrive by the millions in environments that could not support more complex life. Some extract nitrogen from the air. Others live on sulfur or other elements. Still others, like cholera, live in and on the human body.

  The only way you can catch cholera is to ingest the bacteria that cause it, usually by drinking water contaminated by the violent diarrhea that is the disease’s most noticeable symptom.

  At first it seems unlikely that the disease would spread. For the most part, people don’t willingly drink water that is obviously tainted by human waste. But in fact, a glass of seemingly clean water can contain two hundred million invisible cholera bacteria—enough to kill you in hours.

  The crowded working class districts of nineteenth century London had open sewers, inadequate water supplies and unpaved streets.

  The proof came from the one death that didn’t seem to fit the pattern. An elderly woman had died of cholera in Hampstead, six miles away from Broad Street: the only reported case of the disease in that neighborhood. At first Snow thought her death disproved his carefully drawn conclusions. Then he noticed the victim’s name, Susannah Eley. The Eley brothers owned a percussion-cap factory on Broad Street. Seventy of their workers had died of cholera. Snow quickly discovered that Susannah had been the Eley brothers’ mother. She had moved to Hampstead several years earlier, but she preferred the taste of the water from her old home. The Eley brothers were good sons and good employers. They took their mother several gallons of water from the Broad Street pump every Sunday. They also made sure their workers had plenty of clean water to drink during the day. Their generosity had been deadly.

  Snow had found the link.

  ON SEPTEMBER 7, EIGHT DAYS after the first case of cholera on Broad Street, Snow presented his evidence to the parish council. Later that day, they removed the handle from the Broad Street pump and stopped the cholera outbreak.

  Twenty years before the medical establishment accepted the germ theory of disease, John Snow’s detective work solved the mystery of a deadly threat to the industrialized city—and pioneered the methods that epidemiologists still use today to track outbreaks of disease. Snow’s findings led to the creation of one of humanity’s greatest engineering marvels, the first modern sewer system. Engineer Joseph Bazalgette designed a system of more than two thousand miles of low-level underground brick tunnels to carry effluent away from people’s homes. By 1866, most of London was connected to the new sewer network.

  The template would be copied in major cities around the world, virtually eliminating diseases like cholera and typhoid fever from Western cities.

  A SHOWDOWN BETWEEN AN illegal drug cartel and a nation attempting to defend its people against the dual threats of addiction and drug violence isn’t new. In 1838, in a dark chapter of British and Chinese history, the world’s oldest and youngest trading empires went to war over the opium trade.

  In the late eighteenth-century, opium was the center of a thriving three-way trade orchestrated by the British East India Company. The British grew o
pium in India and sold it at auction to specially licensed traders. The traders sold the opium in China, using the proceeds to buy teas, silks, and porcelain to ship back for sale in Britain.

  By the 1820s, twelve million Chinese were addicted—fifteen times the number of heroin addicts in the United States today. The growing number of addicts caused problems familiar to anyone who pays attention to the news. Opium smoking destroyed users and their families. The high price of the drug led to violence and corruption. The drain of silver payments to foreign drug merchants threatened the economy.

  CLEAN WATER

  People have always known that clean water is better for you than dirty water. As early as 2000 BCE, ancient Sanskrit texts describe boiling and straining water to remove impurities. Around 500 BCE, Greek physician Hippocrates invented the first domestic water filter, known as the “Hippocratic sleeve,” for the same purpose. But until Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope in 1676, one could only determine whether water was clean by the way it smelled and tasted.

  Today, water treatment plants are a standard part of modern cities, but we still haven’t conquered the problem of contaminated water supplies:

  •One-sixth of the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water.

  •In the past ten years, diarrhea has killed more children than all the people lost to armed conflict since World War II.

  •Some 6,000 children die every day from diseases associated with lack of safe drinking water and inadequate sanitation.