by Tom Wheeler
The railroads even encroached on what many considered a force of God: the determination of the time of day. In mid-nineteenth-century America there were approximately 100 local “sun time” variations across the country. Time of day was typically determined by a mutually acknowledged reading of the position of the sun against a local landmark (often the church steeple), to which local clocks were set. Illinois had twenty-seven different time settings, Indiana twenty-three, and Wisconsin a whopping thirty-eight. When travel ran four miles an hour, the time required to cover any distance mitigated local differences. As rails vanquished distance, however, the resulting mayhem was “no way to run a railroad.” The Buffalo train station, for instance, had three different clocks, each giving a different time based on destination variations.67
Finally, in 1872, the superintendents of the various railroads convened in a General Time Convention to try to find a solution. The issue was so heated it took eleven years before even its proponents could reach agreement. On November 18, 1883, Railroad Standard Time went into effect, dividing the continent into five time zones (including one for Canada). The railroads, however, had no ability to impose the measurement on others.
In New York City and Boston, local time became Railroad Time. That counted for little in other parts of the country, however. In Columbus, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, the time convention was ignored as a burden on the honest worker. The Indianapolis Sentinel editorialized, “The sun is no longer boss of the job…. It is a revolt, a rebellion…. People will have to marry by railroad time and die by railroad time…. We presume the sun, moon, and stars will make an attempt to ignore the orders of the Railroad Convention, but they, too, will have to give in at last.”68
The federal government concurred with the rebellion against standard time. The attorney general of the United States forbade government offices from changing their time unless Congress passed a law pursuant to the convention. The people’s representatives, fully aware of the political dynamite they were handling, took thirty-five years before finally enacting legislation on the issue in 1918.
Steam locomotives, however, waited for no one. Railroad schedules began to influence the timing of local activities. Instead of being determined by the pace of local life, the schedules of towns along the rail line were set by a remote power. Many of a community’s activities were paced by the comings and goings of the town’s most important network connection—a schedule determined not by local preference but by what was required to arrive at a time convenient for a distant destination.
That schedule and the new importance of timeliness created an opportunity for Richard W. Sears, the twenty-two-year-old North Rosewood, Minnesota, station agent for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad. When in 1886 a local jewelry store refused a consignment of watches, Sears stepped in, agreeing to pay the watchmaker $12.00 for every watch he sold. Sears correctly recognized that the railroad’s schedule made his passengers especially sensitive to timeliness, thus making them an ideal target audience for the products. For his sales force, Sears turned to his fellow station agents, who were already interconnected by a means of distribution. Within six months, Sears had netted $5,000, quit his job, and started the R. W. Sears Watch Company. The following year he hired his first employee, a watch repairman named Alvah Curtis Roebuck.
The rails, which had first opened the plains, and then transported salesmen and peddlers to the new market, also enabled the postal system’s expansion. This expansion in turn made possible the placing of orders and the delivery of goods—the mail-order catalog business. Sears and Roebuck, along with other pioneers like Montgomery Ward, were only too happy to seize upon the new opportunity. Chicago, the rail hub of the nation, became the center of the mail-order business.
Pushback
Not surprisingly, as the railroad steamed over tradition, it was met by a countervailing force. Those opposed to the change warned that the racing passage of a steam locomotive would cause cows to stop grazing and hens to cease laying. Birds would drop from the sky from the smokestack’s exhaust of poisoned air. And horses, replaced by engines, would become extinct, with the result that farmers of hay and oats would go bankrupt.69
“All conceptions will be exaggerated by the magnificent notions of distance.—Only a hundred miles off!,” warned the Vincennes, Indiana, newspaper in 1830. “Why, you will not be able to keep an apprentice boy at his work! Every Saturday evening he must have a trip to Ohio to spend a Sunday with his sweetheart. Grave plodding citizens will be flying about like comets. All local attachments will be at an end.”70 An Ohio school board condemned railroads as “a device of Satan to lead immortal souls to hell.”71
Stirring this pot of confusion and concern were those whose business would be negatively affected by the new network. In Great Britain, surveyors scouting pathways for rail lines were attacked by thugs hired by local businesses.72 In the United States, local vigilantes, organized by those whose business would be affected by the railroad, emerged under the cover of darkness to tear up tracks laid that day.
The opposition didn’t always resort to thuggery, however. In a precursor of the battles occasioned by subsequent network revolutions, public relations campaigns and legal and political challenges were mounted. “Every ploy known to shrewd local lawyers was used to keep things nice and cozy for local carting companies, freight forwarders, hack drivers, hotel and restaurant owners, local wholesale merchants, and anyone else who found a foothold in an environment of what might be called ‘enlightened backwardness,’ ” observed railroad historian Albro Martin.73
As Philadelphia considered connecting two hitherto separate rail lines in 1839, for instance, a poster went up throughout the city. The sign said nothing about its sponsors, or their desire to protect their businesses of hauling people and freight between the two disconnected lines and selling food and sundries to those in transit. Instead, the placard portrayed the linkage as a dire threat to public safety—especially to women and children. The dominant image of the poster portrayed a carriage being upended by a racing locomotive as ladies and children scurried to safety. “MOTHERS LOOK OUT FOR YOUR CHILDREN!” the poster blared. As if the threat to physical safety weren’t bad enough, in slightly larger type was an appeal to local pride with the warning that the connection would turn Philadelphia into a “SUBURB OF NEW YORK!!”
One of the classic efforts to stop the expansion of railroads came from the steamboat companies that had previously dominated western transportation. Because the superiority of the rails ended abruptly at the river’s edge, the steamboat companies did all they could to prevent the erection of bridges across those barriers. Like any good anticompetitive strategy, however, the effort was cloaked in an assertion of the public interest. This time that interest was the safety of water navigation.
Anti-railroad poster produced in 1839 by Philadelphia merchants.
Source: National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Two weeks after the completion of the first bridge across the Mississippi, on May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton crashed into the bridge. An engineering marvel that took three years to build, the structure between Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa, was rendered inoperable as one section was engulfed in flames from the burning boat.
The next boat behind the Effie Afton bore a banner that proclaimed “Mississippi Bridge Destroyed, Let All Rejoice.” The banner, coupled with the nearby vessels’ celebratory whistles and horns, suggested that, far from being an “accident,” the crash was an escalation of the ongoing conflict between the watermen whose business was threatened and the railroaders (and through them a battle between the water city of St. Louis and the rail town of Chicago).74
The owners of the Effie Afton sued the owners of the Rock Island bridge, claiming a hazard to navigation. They sought $200,000 in damages, hoping the high cost of the damages would make bridges unprofitable and force railroads to continue to unload their freight on one bank, deposit it on the watermen’s boats, and ferry it to
the other side.75 The bridge owners hired Abraham Lincoln as their lead attorney.
The trial before a local jury lasted two weeks. Lincoln’s summation took two days. At the heart of Lincoln’s reasoning was that a person had as much right to move across a river as he did to move up and down it.76 “This [east-west] current of travel has its rights as well as that of north and south,” Lincoln argued, “This bridge must be treated with respect in this court and is not to be kicked about with contempt.”77
Lincoln’s rationale may seem logically persuasive to us today, but the matter was such a revolutionary and emotional change, affecting such a major local institution, that the jury deadlocked. The nine jurors voting for the bridge and the three against it were a microcosm of the difficulties the new network was rapidly imposing on the stability and security of traditional lifestyles. Fortunately for Lincoln and the railroad, the deadlock allowed the bridge to remain. It was, the Chicago Tribune proclaimed, “virtually a triumph for the bridge.”78
The railroads’ assault on tradition was not lost on the congressional representatives from the southern states. The doctrine of states’ rights, built on the protection of local institutions, kept southern rail lines short and sparse. Where there were railroads in the South they served their state, not the greater region. Most southern railroads stopped at the state line and did not connect with the lines of the adjoining state. As a result, at the start of the Civil War two thirds of the nation’s rail mileage was north of the Mason-Dixon Line.79
When war broke out—a struggle between the interconnected industrial North and a southern system that clung to isolated independence, including the “peculiar institution” of slavery—the South’s earlier unwillingness to embrace the new technology had military consequences that helped resolve the issue.80 As the Union army used the North’s vast rail network to its advantage, the South’s inability to move men and equipment along interconnected routes proved such a disadvantage that Confederate general Robert E. Lee called for a program to connect the lines and thus improve the ability to shift troops from one area to another. His request fell on deaf states’-rights ears. The doctrine that had helped provoke the war helped to settle its outcome.81
In the North, however, the wartime absence from Congress of southern representatives had the benefit of eliminating the opposition that had prevented federal aid to expand the railroad westward. At the very depths of the fight to save the Union, Abraham Lincoln seized on this political opportunity to champion railroad expansion. On July 1, 1862, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing a government program to enable the Union Pacific Railroad to build west from the Missouri River and the Central Pacific Railroad to build east from Sacramento to create the first transcontinental railroad.
Lasting Legacies
The golden spike that united the ribbons of steel from the east and west in 1869 was a capstone on distance as the defining factor in mankind’s destiny. Steam-powered speed meant that geography ruled no more. It had been a scant forty-four years between the first steam railroad linking Stockton and Darlington and the golden spike in the Utah wilderness. Never in human experience had such a transformational force been so rapidly imposed.
The transcontinental railroad was the final blow to the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation built on agricultural economics. A nation that was interconnected was also a nation that was industrialized, even on the farm, where production for newly broadened markets expanded landholdings and introduced mechanization. The ideal of agrarian independence yielded to industrial interdependence. That revolution, in turn, changed the nature of the limited government Jefferson and his colleagues had created, while at the same time demonstrating the genius of the flexibility built into their Constitution.
Government, which had enabled railroad growth with land grants and other policies, soon was forced to confront the need to balance the railroad’s economic power. The first great grassroots political uprising grew out of the 1867 founding of the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry. In the following decades the Grange championed regulation of the railroads, particularly of their rates.
Because small agricultural communities rarely had more than one rail line, that company could extract what economists call “monopoly rents,” rates that were as high as the traffic—and the market—would bear. A short haul from the farmers’ small towns to an entrepôt such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, or Omaha might cost twice as much per unit of weight as would a longer haul across a route with competitive carriers.
Through the Grange, farmers organized to offset the might of the railroads. Individually, a farmer was no match for the political heft of the railroads. Collectively, however, farmers could take on the big companies. Banding together, the users of the railroads harnessed their aggregate strength to counter corporate size. The Grange’s early successes were in state legislatures, but those results were limited to specific states. In 1887, pressure from the Grange convinced Congress to pass the Interstate Commerce Act, creating the first federal independent regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. This was the beginning of big government as a countervailing force to big business.82
At around the same time as farmers were banding together, workers were following a similar path to assert their rights as labor increasingly became a depersonalized input for corporate budgets. Working on the railroad was a “brutally dangerous occupation” that wore down workers as surely as it wore down rails, ties, and rolling stock.83
When in 1877 most eastern railroads cut wages (some more than once), workers responded collectively. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 spread throughout the nation before being put down by federal troops. The die had been cast, however. The only way to get The Man’s attention and respect was to act together, and Big Labor was born. To protect themselves against corporate behemoths, railroad men sought strength in numbers and common cause. They organized into four brotherhoods: engineers (1863), conductors (1868), firemen (1873), and trainmen (1883).
Following World War I, during which the rails were nationalized to preclude labor unrest, Congress passed a series of railway labor acts dealing with the rights of workers. Such legislation, which included the introduction of the eight-hour workday, became models for similar legislation affecting other industries’ work environments.
The railroad companies, those whose goods they hauled, and the men who made up their workforce had ushered in a new era of big business, big labor, and big government.
As he launched the construction of the B&O Railroad, Charles Carroll compared his signature on the Declaration of Independence with the future he was inaugurating: “I consider what I have just now done to be among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if indeed it be even second to that.”84 Carroll’s signature in 1776 had ushered in a new nation; his shovel fifty-two years later began a process that transformed that nation into the breadbasket of the world, the center of industrial expansion and innovation, and an economy shaping and shaped by a growing government.
We continue to live in the world the railroads made.85 How we organize our cities to provide the necessities of public health, public safety, and public education all are an outgrowth of railroad-driven urbanization. The role of a centralized, corporate national government mimics that of the institutions it was expanded to oversee. The traditions and institutions that began with the railroad in the nineteenth century continue to hold sway over our existence almost 200 years later.
Connections
Just as the effects of railroad-driven changes continue today, the steam engines that drove that transformation can be found at the root of the computing engines driving even more rapid contemporary change.
“I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,” a British mathematician declared in frustration at about the same time as the Stockton and Darlington Railway made its first run.86 This was a vision that would dominate Charles Babbage’s life and produc
e the precursor to today’s computing engine.
Babbage was an acquaintance of the early railway pioneers and had been involved in many of the early debates about steam locomotion, including the appropriate spacing between tracks (the gauge). On hand for the inaugural run of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, he proposed that the engines be fitted with what would become known as a cowcatcher to sweep obstructions off the line.87 But it was Babbage’s idea to harness steam power to a mechanical computing process that links him to today’s networks.
In the summer of 1821, Babbage and a colleague were reviewing a set of mathematical tables being prepared for the Royal Astronomical Society. The calculations had been performed by “computers,” individuals who did each calculation by hand. Because of the potential for error, it was common practice to have two different computers work on a project and to compare the results as a cross-check. Inconsistencies were flagged for recalculation.
Reviewing the tables was mind-numbing. One reviewer would read to the other a list of numbers as his partner compared them with the set he was studying. The intense concentration and repetitious boredom would cause the reviewers to stumble and have to go back and start again. It also caused Babbage to call for an automated solution.88
By the following June, Babbage had completed a small working model of a mechanical calculator that he called a “difference engine.” A collection of vertical rods, each of which stored a single digit that was the result of the interaction of nine cogged wheels on the rod representing the numbers zero to nine, the difference engine was a monument to both mathematics and precision machining. Whereas the crude calculators of the time required human intervention (and thus the introduction of errors) to deal with the “carry” issue of moving a number from the units to the tens, from the tens to the hundreds, and so forth, Babbage’s difference engine automated the “carry.”89 Charles Babbage had mechanized mathematics.
