by Tom Wheeler
Two separate events on July 4, 1828, three years after the completion of the Erie Canal, symbolized the transformational change under way. In Washington, D.C., President John Quincy Adams broke ground for the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Canal. In Baltimore, forty miles to the north, Charles Carroll, the sole surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, used a silver spade to turn the ground and launch construction of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad.
Both the canal and the railroad were designed to do for their city’s commerce what the Erie Canal had done for New York. The ways in which they sought to accomplish this goal, however, were from two different eras. The C&O Canal was a continuation of nature’s network. The railroad, in stark contrast, was mankind asserting dominion over nature.
While Baltimore’s rail line first stumbled with multiple approaches to the new idea—trying horse-drawn railcars, cars propelled by horses on treadmills, and even sail power (Baltimore was, after all, a sailing town)—the B&O ultimately embraced the new English invention of steam locomotion. In 1830 the B&O became the first American railroad to haul both freight and passengers by steam on a regular schedule.
Laying tracks atop the land was faster and more practical than excavating a canal. By the time the C&O Canal had reached its terminus at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1850, the B&O Railroad had been there for eight years. Not only could railroads be constructed more quickly, they also moved their contents infinitely faster. Whereas canal boats crept along at around four miles per hour, the early locomotives sped over the rails at blazing speeds of up to twenty miles per hour (and they kept getting faster).
Moving people and products faster meant moving them farther. It was the perfect marriage—the seemingly endless land mass of the United States and the virtually boundless energy of the steam locomotive. The result was the beginning of national integration. The miles that had previously segregated populations melted away. The railroad became the domestic melting pot for both individuals and commerce.
Thanks to the railroad, American agriculture changed from a subsistence or local market activity to a commercial enterprise. Farm produce’s low value relative to its high bulk had always limited its transportation over any distance. The cost of carting a sixty-pound bushel of wheat constrained consumption to within close proximity of where it was grown.7 The railroad changed that equation by making it possible to haul bulky products to a distant market at a rational cost. One observer described railroads as a centrifugal pump drawing harvests further from their fields.8
The railroad did the same for the bulky raw materials necessary for manufacturing. The United States was late to the Industrial Revolution because it lacked the necessary power sources (other than the water power of the Atlantic fall line). The railroad solved that problem by inexpensively hauling coal from the mines to fire the furnaces and fabricate other rail-delivered natural resources into products. Then the railroad distributed the finished products to an interconnected national market.
The printing networks had sped the transformation of Western thought. Now the rail networks were rapidly transforming commerce and the patterns of everyday life. Every town the railroad touched was forever altered by it, and every town it bypassed was disadvantaged. Nowhere is the power of such network connectivity more evident than in the story of how the railroad determined the divergent courses of two western cities: St. Louis, the Gateway to the West, and the small Illinois village the Indians called “Chicagou,” meaning “the wild garlic place.”9
On October 25, 1848, the inauguration of the first railroad into and out of Chicago set off a string of events that “would change not merely the nation, but the world.”10 On that day the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad celebrated construction of its first eight miles of track at the Oak Ridge (now Oak Park) end of the line. As the name suggested, the plan was to link Galena—in northwestern Illinois on the Mississippi-feeding Galena River—with Chicago on Lake Michigan. The role of the railroad, it was assumed, was to facilitate the movement of products to and from those waterways. What occurred, however, was the beginning of a process in which the new network replaced the old.
The directors of the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad and other VIPs rode behind the steam locomotive The Pioneer to the inaugural celebration in Oak Ridge. After appropriate remarks and other festivities, the company directors prepared to reboard their coach for the return to the city. One of the directors, however, had noticed a farmer in the assembled group of onlookers sitting atop an ox-drawn wagon piled with sacks of wheat and hides. When asked, the farmer indicated he was headed to Chicago to sell his products. The director purchased the man’s produce and the train hauled it back to Chicago.11 The cargo was the first revenue for the railroad. Far more significant, it was the beginning of a pattern of economic activity. Within a week there were thirty carloads of wheat at the end of the line awaiting shipment to Chicago.12 The railroad was profitable from its first day of operation.13
The Chicago Daily Journal observed of the opening of the Galena & Chicago line, “The ‘Iron Horse’ is now fairly harnessed in the Prairie Land, and the freedom with which he travels, betokens his satisfaction with the bounteous and almost unlimited pasture field.”14 By expanding into that “bounteous and almost unlimited pasture,” the railroad opened up markets for the products of that land and transformed agriculture from an activity of self-sufficient survival, or at best one of local markets, into a far-reaching commercial enterprise.
Soon forests were felled and sod busted for railroad-induced agricultural production. Chicago became the great hub that linked the products of the plains with the tables of eastern consumers. Within four years of the run from Oak Ridge to Chicago there would be more grain reaching Chicago over steel rails than by wagon and canal combined.15
The flow of commerce, which had previously been forced into the north-to-south path of the region’s waterways, changed direction to west-to-east. Previously, if the bulky product of western farms was to move eastward, it had to move down the Mississippi to New Orleans for subsequent ocean shipment to eastern markets. As railroad networks expanded, however, the products of the bounteous pasture moved to Chicago for onward shipment due east.
While the railroad created commercial centers such as Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Toledo, and Detroit, it also shaped small towns. Feeder lines reached into the hinterland like ganglia spreading out of the network hubs.16 Whereas waterways commanded commercial activity to come to them, railroads went anywhere, including directly to the fields and mines that produced the bounty of the western lands. Many of the heartland towns of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois owe their existence to the arrival of the railroad.17 Similarly, railroads diminished the role of the cities built along nature’s networks. Nowhere was this truer than for the Gateway to the West, St. Louis.
Located on the western side of the Mississippi River, St. Louis was the center of waterborne commerce along the Father of Waters. At the time of the Galena railroad inauguration, Chicago was a small town with a few thousand inhabitants, while St. Louis was the principal city of the West.
Unfortunately for St. Louis, however, the “Big Muddy” stood between the city’s perch on the river’s western bank and the expanding rail lines connecting to eastern markets. A city controlled by watermen saw nothing illogical with bringing a load of cargo from the west, placing it on barges to the eastern shore, and then putting it on railcars. The city fathers of St. Louis refused to even consider a bridge to connect the city to the lines from the east.18
Chicago’s leaders, on the other hand, aggressively pushed for rail connections, even flouting the law to assure their connection to the east. When in 1851 it appeared as though the rails from the east might pass south of Chicago, the locals swung into action.19 Mass protests were organized. The Common Council (city council) appropriated the sizable sum of $10,000 to fight the plan. The mayor and U.S. senator Stephen A. Douglas journeyed to the financial markets of New York to discourage funding of the bypass projec
t.20
The matter was ultimately resolved when one group simply started laying down track without the necessary permission of the state. For six and a half miles, with questionable legal authority, the tracks crossed the countryside to meet the rails from the east and bring them to Chicago.21 A look at the railroad map of the time shows a curious dogleg northward to Chicago rather than a straight shot that could have connected the line from the east with the southern end of the canal leading to Chicago and Lake Michigan before proceeding straight on to the west.
Chicago’s vision was transformative. By 1854, six years after the first run of the Galena & Chicago Union Railway, Chicago was the railroad center of the west. By 1860, there were fifteen railroads converging on the city with a hundred trains coming and going daily.22
Chicago, not St. Louis, had become America’s junction. “St. Louis was soon ‘eating Chicago’s dust’ as a grain entrepôt,” one railroad historian colorfully explained, “and would spend the next fifty years attributing its neglect to almost anything save the truth, which was its backwardness in providing handling facilities and a railroad bridge across the Mississippi to make a through rail route to the East.”23
By ending geography’s stranglehold on the affairs of civilization, the steam locomotive had begun a new network revolution. There could be no more graphic example of how speeding locomotives were accelerating change than the tale of how, in the space of a decade, the rails opened the prairie and made the sleepy, swampy village on the banks of Lake Michigan the nation’s Second City.
Old Concepts, New Results
Like the printing press and every one of the network technologies that would follow, the steam railroad was the result of a convergence of preexisting technologies. In this instance, it was the flanged wheel and the steam engine.
Evidence suggests that as far back as biblical times, wagons rolled on tracks to carry cargo.24 By the seventeenth century, probably beginning in the coal mines of the Ruhr valley, flanges were added to one side of the wheel to help hold it on the rail.25 By the mid-eighteenth century iron rails were replacing wooden ones. Not only did the iron rails have increased durability, but since a metal wheel rolling on a metal rail has the lowest coefficient of friction of any form of carriage, the new rails allowed an animal to pull a greater load. Throughout the coal-producing regions of Europe, horse-pulled rail wagonways proliferated to bring heavy loads out of the mines as well as to haul the mined product to rivers and canals.
The challenge at these coal mines was that the deeper they went, the more groundwater seeped into the shafts. Often miners would stand knee-deep as they hacked at the coalface. It was therefore a breakthrough when in 1698 the Englishman Thomas Savery developed an “engine to raise water by fire.” Savery’s pump was based on the physical reality that steam occupies 1,600 times the volume of the water from which it is produced.26 Thus a small amount of water could generate a tremendous volume of steam, and cooling that steam back to water created a vacuum. Savery conceived the pump to use that vacuum to suck water from the mines. Because the suction dissipated with distance, however, Savery’s solution was effective only to a depth of sixty or seventy feet.27
Thomas Newcomen solved the suction problem in 1712 by harnessing another set of established concepts. Like the “engine by fire,” Newcomen’s engine created a vacuum by condensing steam. Instead of using the vacuum to suck water, however, Newcomen used it to drive a piston.
The revolution in steam was yet another residual effect of Johannes Gutenberg’s discovery. Like almost all of those who developed new techniques to harness steam, Thomas Newcomen had little formal education, but he had access to books on vacuums and pistons, from which he taught himself. Based on that reading, Newcomen knew that turning water to steam within a closed container creates pressure and that cooling that steam back into water produces the opposite effect, a vacuum. He harnessed that action to a piston within a cylindrical chamber with an open top. The production of steam pushed the piston up the cylinder; then, when the steam condensed and created a vacuum, the atmospheric pressure brought it back down. To this piston Newcomen attached a seesaw-like beam that connected to reciprocating-force pumps down in the mine. As the steam pushed the piston upward, the pump handle descended; then, as the atmospheric pressure drove the piston downward, the seesaw would draw the pump lever upward.
Newcomen’s engine, while a boon to coal mining, was inherently inefficient. Since the piston cylinder was also the condenser, it had to be reheated after each cooling. As the cold cylinder needed to climb back to at least 212 degrees Fahrenheit to produce the necessary steam to push the piston back up, the engine suffered from long cycle times.28 As a result of this inefficiency, the Newcomen engine’s fuel consumption was considerable. Fortunately, the engine’s principal use was at the mouth of the mine that produced the fuel it required.
Half a century passed before the spring of 1765, when James Watt solved the Newcomen inefficiency and became the “father of steam.” Watt’s idea was to separate the heating and cooling functions, enclose the piston cylinder, and reverse the principal force acting on the piston. In Newcomen’s engine the power came from the pressure of the atmosphere forcing the piston back down the cylinder. The power from Watt’s steam engine came in the other direction: the force of the steam being introduced into the chamber to drive the piston upward.
To accomplish this, Watt bled the steam into a separate piston-driving chamber surrounded by cool water, where the steam would rapidly condense. The hot part of the engine stayed hot to continually produce the steam to drive the piston, while in the chamber with the piston that steam rapidly condensed, to allow another blast of steam to drive the piston again. This process was more powerful and more reliable than the Newcomen engine, and as the approach did not necessitate a continual heat-cool-reheat-recool process, the Watt steam engine used only about a third of the fuel its predecessor used.
While Thomas Newcomen harnessed steam, and James Watt made it the engine of a new era, two realities constrained the future of the steam engine.
The first constraint was the inability to increase its power. Increasing the pressure within the engine in order to increase the power of the piston was deemed suicidal. The father of steam himself argued vociferously against the safety of a high-pressure engine.29
The second constraint on steam engines was their immobility. At several tons, they were simply too big and heavy to transport. The power the engine produced was insufficient to overcome the friction of a rolling wheel.
One man tackled both constraints. In 1800, a Cornish inventor named Richard Trevithick accomplished what James Watt said only a looney would try. At the Wheel Hope copper mine in western Cornwall, Trevithick constructed an engine of “strong steam” in which greater pressure produced greater power. Trevithick’s success prompted the owner of a Welsh ironworks to lure the inventor from Cornwall to Wales.
Then came the wager.
Sometime in 1803, outside the Welsh town of Fetidsty (a name that conjures the town’s reported ten-pigs-to-one-person ratio), the owner of the ironworks stood with a group of friends and watched a horse pull wagons along a tramway. They debated whether the horse could ever be replaced with steam power. The boss saw an opportunity. He bet 500 guineas that his new employee, Trevithick, could build a steam engine capable of hauling ten tons of iron ore the nine and a half miles of the tramway. It was no idle wager: at the time, the average worker earned fifty guineas per year.30
On February 21, 1804, a “strong steam” engine built by Richard Trevithick did what had never been done before. “Yesterday we proceeded on our journey with the engine,” Trevithick wrote, “and we carried ten tons of iron in five wagons, and seventy men riding on them the whole of the journey … the engine, while working, went nearly five miles an hour.”31
Unfortunately, the inventor’s “while working” aside spoke to the trial’s ignominious end. On the return journey a bolt broke in the engine and the boiler leaked
. The fire was dropped, and the now steamless engine was drawn by horses the last couple of miles back to the starting point. The impact this had on the wager is unknown. The results of the bet, however, were monumental. A self-propelled engine, riding on rails, had pulled a collection of connected cars containing both people and product.
By pulling ten tons over a track for multiple miles, Richard Trevithick had proved that the tremendous weight of a steam engine could be reduced to a manageable amount while still generating power sufficient to draw a heavy load. It was a profound event rooted in a simple concept: increasing the heat of the boiler.32
Trevithick’s breakthrough was to eliminate altogether Watt’s breakthrough, the condenser. He built his strong steam engines to allow the steam to escape directly into the outside air rather than into a condenser. Instead of cooling the steam to produce a vacuum, he simply purged it, to the same effect. Observers of the escaping steam nicknamed his engines “puffers.”
Allowing the steam to escape meant a loss of pressure in the cylinder.33 The challenge became to increase the pressure to replace—and exceed—the loss. Trevithick’s solution was to increase the heat. “My predecessors put their boiler in the fire,” Trevithick explained. “I have put my fire in the boiler.”34
Newcomen, Watt, and others had envisioned the steam-engine boiler as a giant teakettle sitting atop a source of heat. Some of the heat energy was captured by the boiler, but a huge amount simply escaped around it. By moving to an internal boiler surrounded by water Trevithick captured more heat energy and turned it into steam. It was estimated that for every thirty degrees of increased heat, the steam power would double.
It was a huge breakthrough: using fuel to produce an incremental increase in heat resulted in an exponential increase in power. And the elimination of the condenser provided the additional benefit of eliminating weight.35 Trevithick’s final breakthrough was the smokestack. By forcing the escaping steam into a chimney, he created a vacuum behind it that pulled more air into the fire, giving it more oxygen, making it burn even hotter, thus feeding his heat-to-power conversion.
