by Tom Wheeler
The Trevithick engine, after so brilliantly demonstrating strong steam and the commercial application of a self-propulsion apparatus, suffered an ignoble fate. It was grounded, its wheels were removed, and it was reduced to powering a winch that pulled a cable attached to the ore cars.36 Though the steam engine had worked, the rails on which the engine traveled had not. To ensure the horses that typically hauled the ore carts would not stumble, there were no crossties between the rails. Instead, each rail was anchored atop a block that was independent of the block anchoring the opposite rail. As the five and a half tons of the Trevithick engine rolled down the tramway, the lateral force cracked the rails from their moorings. The heroic achievement of steam locomotion was inhibited by the limitations of the rails on which it rode.
Steam may have been harnessed to ride on rails, but the manner in which the rails were constructed slowed its application for more than a decade. Finally, in 1816, another self-taught engineer, George Stephenson, solved the problem by patenting the idea of crossties that connected one track to the other.37 The outward pressure of weight on the rails would be constrained by tying the rails crosswise with each other.
Shortly thereafter, Stephenson, who had also been building strong steam engines, was hired by a group that wanted to build a public tramway over the twenty-five miles between the towns of Stockton and Darlington in northeastern England.38
On September 27, 1825, Stephenson’s creation, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, began operations. The new railroad moved several hundred people twelve miles in cars that resembled coal wagons with benches. It was the first commercial undertaking to harness the speed and endurance of the steam locomotive to carry both goods and passengers. “The adaptation of rail-ways to speed was never, we believe, thought of till the opening … of the celebrated Stockton & Darlington rail-road,” an English newspaper observed in retrospect five years later.39 That speed was provided by Stephenson’s steam engine Locomotion No. 1, from which the term “locomotive” is derived.
Five years later, another Stephenson creation linked the Port of Liverpool, the busiest in the world, with the cotton capital of the world, Manchester, thirty-one miles away.40 The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was an instant financial success. Beyond its initial application, the line was a harbinger of things to come. Built principally to haul cotton and coal, it soon became a magnet for other products. Families’ dinner plates in towns along its path, for instance, began to include the perishable foods that had once been too bulky to transport and thus too expensive for the typical family to buy. Newspapers began to circulate freely between the two cities.41
The second great network transformation was under way. Steam rolling on steel recast commerce and redefined the patterns of life.42 It was, as one commenter observed, “The completest change in human experience since the nomadic tribes became rooted in one spot to grow grain and raise cattle.”43
Transformation’s Tumult
Such a change in the human experience was bound to bring with it turbulence and scrutiny. In 1829, the year before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, steam locomotion leapt the Atlantic. Its result was to shape—not just connect—geographies. Unlike Europe, with its older, well-established cities, the railroad’s path across the American emptiness would turn crossroads into cities, convert empty prairies into productive farms, and usher in a new industrial era—all to varying degrees of consternation.
Much as with the British experience, the American railroad began on a horse tramway. A northeastern Pennsylvania canal company had built a tramway between its ditch and some anthracite mines nine miles away. Hoping that the new technology of steam locomotion might help overcome the tramway’s steep grades, the chief engineer sent an assistant to England to observe what George Stephenson was developing. Two locomotives were purchased for shipment across the Atlantic.
The Stourbridge Lion (named after the English town where it was constructed) pulled the first load over the tramway on August 8, 1829. Unfortunately, it suffered the same fate as Trevithick’s locomotive. The rails could not support the engine’s weight. It went into a storage shed and never emerged.44
A year later, the B&O Railroad, which had tried everything from horses to sails as a means of propulsion, finally tried steam locomotion. On August 28, 1830, a small steam engine named for P. T. Barnum’s diminutive star Tom Thumb hauled thirty-six people at speeds of up to eighteen miles an hour.45 The engine’s builder, Peter Cooper, had learned from the Stourbridge Lion’s failure and built an engine light enough for the rails over which it would travel.46
Tom Thumb introduced speed to North America. Racing at four and a half times the speed of any other conveyance, Tom Thumb was both a marvel and a mystery. The train’s owners and occupants first questioned whether the human body could endure such speed. Many of the passengers on Tom Thumb’s first run were human guinea pigs who brought along paper and pencil to test whether cogent thought was possible at such speed.47
In a foretelling of challenges to come, the incumbent stagecoach operators tried to nip the puffing competitor in the bud, arranging a race between a horse-drawn carriage and the locomotive. The horse shot out of the blocks as the engine built up steam. Once fully under way, however, Tom Thumb closed the gap and surged ahead. The puffer held a comfortable lead until a blower belt slipped and the horse galloped past. The locomotive had lost the race, but not the contest. The leadership of the B&O redirected its efforts into becoming an all-steam railroad.48
Charleston was the other Atlantic city racing to railways as an alternative to New York’s canal. On Christmas Day 1830, behind the American-built Best Friend of Charleston, a chain of cars carried dignitaries for six miles over the new Charleston and Hamburg Railroad.49 As in Baltimore, the experience of speed was surreal. The Charleston Courier wrote of the event, “The one hundred and forty-one persons flew on the wings of the wind at the speed of fifteen to twenty-five miles per hour, annihilating time and space … leaving the world behind.”50
For a civilization whose land speed had forever been limited to the pace of an animal, the concept of a speeding locomotive was often too much to grasp. “What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches!” Great Britain’s Quarterly Review exclaimed about the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. “We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.”51
Indeed, members of Parliament were skeptical of speed. When John Stephenson, son of the designer of the Liverpool and Manchester line, appeared before the legislature seeking a charter for a new railroad, the following colloquy took place with one MP:
“Well, Mr. Stephenson, perhaps you could go 17 miles an hour?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps 20 miles an hour?”
“Certainly.”
“Twenty-five, I dare say. You do not think that impossible?”
“Not at all impossible.”
“Dangerous though?”
“Certainly not.”
“Now, tell me, Mr. Stephenson, will you say that you can go 30 miles an hour?”
“Certainly.”
At which, it is reported, “they all leaned back in their chairs and roared with laughter.”52
On the American side of the ocean the speed of the steam locomotive was increasingly inescapable; the locomotive was an instrument of constantly increasing velocity. From the Tom Thumb’s eighteen miles per hour in 1830, the speed of steam locomotives steadily accelerated. Each increase in speed set a new record, until by 1893 the New York Central’s Empire Express was the fastest moving thing on Earth at 112.5 miles per hour.53
And it wasn’t just the locomotives that were speeding along. With great speed a nation defined by great distances embraced the network. It was the death of distance.54 Just ten years after Tom Thumb and the Best Friend of Charleston, the total rail mileage in the United States exceeded that of canals.55
By the mid-1850s, the nation with less than 5 percent of the world’s population had track mileage that nearly equaled the combined mileage of the rest of the world. By 1860, only thirty years after Tom Thumb, there were 30,000 miles of railroad track in the United States.56
As speed recast everyday life, the change was not always welcome. The first recorded use of the phrase “Oh, for the good old days” was a lament about steam locomotion. Writing in 1844, Philip Hone, the former mayor of New York, complained, “Railroads, steamers, packets, race against time and beat it hollow…. Oh for the good old days of heavy post coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!”57 As we have previously seen, one journalist warned that the speed of steam locomotives “will give an unnatural impetus to society, destroy all the relations that exist between man and man, overthrow all mercantile regulation, and create, at the peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress.”58 He was right.
Like the Renaissance, which would have remained a local phenomenon if not for the printing press, the American Industrial Revolution would have continued to lag behind European advances—maintaining the United States as a “lesser-developed country”—without the widespread adoption of the railroad.
The United States was late to the Industrial Revolution for two principal reasons: the lack of adequate power and the absence of an adequate market.59 The fall line that ran along the East Coast provided power from cascading water but geographically constrained early industrialization. The poor connections among cities and regions created a balkanized marketplace that further constrained both the stimulation and the sustaining of scope and scale production. The spread of railroads created a synergy that vanquished those restraints.
By bringing coal to fire stationary steam engines, the railroad liberated industrial production from the Atlantic fall line. Then, by distributing the finished product to an ever-expanding and increasingly interconnected market, the railroad both created and serviced demand for industrial output.
The railroad was an industrial perpetual-motion machine. Created at first to haul the products of mines, railroads soon became the largest consumer of one of those mines’ extracts: coal. In a similar manner, railroad construction drove demand for the high-volume production of other manufactured goods. Steam-powered mills were required to produce the lumber used for ties and trestles. Likewise, iron and steel production expanded to meet the demand for engines and rails. These and other products were, of course, delivered by rail.
Beyond the demand for raw materials, railroads required an unprecedented industrial support apparatus to keep the trains rolling. The maintenance of engines and rolling stock, and the production of the necessary industrial equipment for the task, fed the growth of mechanical industries and the spread of mechanical skills. By 1870, railroads were consuming 20 percent of all the machinery produced in the United States and 40 percent of all the rolled steel.60
Railway demand for industrial production created a slipstream behind which other industries could grow by taking advantage of the railroad’s market momentum. The tooling up of various production activities to supply the railroads created techniques and capacity that could be applied elsewhere. Machine tools necessary for producing and servicing engines and rolling stock were adapted to the production of new equipment for farm and factory. Strong, low-cost girders like those that spanned rivers soon rose upward into ever-taller buildings. The production of lumber and steel mills or the fabrication of industrial equipment for the railroads created a long tail of baseline capabilities on which other commercial activities could build. And the use of the railroad itself was available at low marginal cost after the high fixed costs of infrastructure development, as its economic base had been addressed by hauling extracted commodities. Both raw and finished products, including newspapers and the mail, began to hop a ride on the train whose pathway and profit had been directed by high-bulk cargo.61
The railroads were the first business to operate at scale. At a time when almost every business was a family affair run out of one place, the railroad was massive and complex. As it became the nation’s largest employer, the demands of managing railroad operations birthed bureaucracy. The construction of rail lines alone was the greatest management challenge ever undertaken. The delivery of large caches of supplies and materials across great distances had to be coordinated with the activity of tens of thousands of workers who likewise were spread across the country.
Once the railroads were constructed, operations over the rails created new managerial challenges to keep the trains staffed, serviced, supplied, loaded, and running on schedule. Not surprisingly, the management ranks of the railroads were filled by men with experience in the nation’s only other large institution, the U.S. Army. Approximately 120 graduates of West Point became senior railroad executives while the subordinate ranks were filled by countless others who had previously served under them.62
Such a large undertaking required systemization and discipline. Managerial concepts common today had their origin in railroading. In 1846, the B&O Railroad issued its Proposed New System of Management, which established functional chains of command. The Erie Railroad went so far as to define the responsibilities and authority of each of its 4,000 employees, along with establishing both standards of efficiency and common disciplinary procedures.63 The result of these and other efforts created a common process with a hierarchical structure that, not surprisingly, resembled that of the military.
The railroad’s new management model was soon embraced by other businesses. As the new scope and scale of industrial production for national markets harnessed masses of workers to a common process, corporate bureaucracy provided supervision and structure. This hierarchical organization also created a new path for individual development. Back on the farm there was little chance to move up the ladder, but in industrial institutions the promise of advancement into the middle class beckoned.
As railroads brought nature’s bounty to central points for fabrication, they also transported the masses of workers necessary to operate the factories and provide support. At the start of the railroad era in 1830, there were ninety towns in America with a population of 2,000 or more. By 1860 the number had grown to 392.64 The draw of these new urban hubs of economic activity remade the national map. Railroads created new urban centers, transporting workers from the fields and immigrants from the docks to the new urban America. By the time of the 1890 census, more Americans were living in cities than in rural areas.65
The growth patterns of the railroad and urban centers were duplicates of each other. And as crowds congregated in growing cities, individuals surrendered a portion of their independence. Urban life imposed a new social order built around corporate collectivism. Wide-open fields yielded to tenements and individual interdependence, spawning a host of new societal problems. Masses of people produced prodigious amounts of waste, which necessitated the development of public sanitation practices and disposal systems. Safe freshwater systems were required to keep the scourge of yellow fever from ripping through a city. As urbanites experienced illness en masse, the town physician was replaced by institutional hospitals that applied mass-production-like solutions to health-care delivery. And the need for an educated workforce saw the one-room school replaced by public education factories in which youthful raw material went in one end and emerged several years later sufficiently educated to become cogs in the industrial machine.
Increasingly, the technology that had successfully asserted its superiority over nature began to assert new authority over the affairs of man. Many of the things we today consider as bedrock traditions were, in their time, railroad-induced upheavals.
Railroading changed the law. It began with the sacred right of property ownership. English common law had recognized the authority of the state to take private land for public good (eminent domain). As the growth of the railroad required ever-increasing amounts of land across a specific trajectory, the railroad companies assumed this confiscatory right as inherent
in their state-granted operating charter. Starched-shirt lawyers and accountants from faceless corporations descended to confiscate land that had been cleared and cultivated by the strength of the owner’s back and the sweat of his brow.
The new network also brought with it a new potential for harm to both individuals and property. Again, the law changed to benefit the new technology. The legal concept of strict liability (that is, if you caused it you were responsible for recompense) began to erode. A new legal paradigm based on negligence took its place. No longer did determination of guilt revolve around who caused the problem; the circumstances of the event and whether the defendant had taken appropriate precautions determined culpability. Thus, if hot cinders from a passing locomotive set fire to your barn, the legal issue wasn’t the source of the fire but whether the railroad had attempted to mitigate the flying cinders, such as by placing a screen across the opening of the smokestack.
Bending the laws of man to the will of the railroad was one thing. Soon, however, the railroads were bending the “laws of God.” Even the sacred Sabbath succumbed to steam locomotion. Railroads originally refused to operate on the Sabbath, but the profit potential of moving people and products on Sunday soon began to erode such piety.
Exhortations from the pulpit and mass demonstrations to stop Sunday trains proved insufficient to halt the sacrilege. Rebuffed in their civil actions, the God-fearing turned to Lady Justice. Once again, however, the courts sided with the new over the traditional. A decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania illustrates the emotional and political complexity of the issue: by twisting logic into a pretzel, the court authorized Sunday rail operation as an essential means for the poor to get to church.66
