Today, a secret subway. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
Alfred Ely
Beach was upper-crust. He was educated at Yale and
given management of the New York Sun
newspaper by his father in 1848. He was only 22
when he took over the Sun's offices in the
Wall Street area. By then, Manhattan was just
becoming a high-population-density nightmare. But
Beach was a young man with ideas. Already, two
years before, he'd bought the one-year-old
Scientific American magazine. He also opened
a major patent agency that would deal with clients
like Morse, Edison, Bell, and Ericcson.
All the while, Beach watched Manhattan's streets
growing hopelessly dirty and dangerous as four or
five horse-drawn omnibuses rattled by each minute.
He turned his attention to urban rail service. The
British had just built a small experimental subway
line in London, but it'd be another thirty years
before regular subway service was finally
established in America.
In 1866, Beach petitioned the City for something
called a postal dispatch charter. That was actually
a smokescreen -- a way to get authorization to
build a subway system without letting the city of
New York know what he was doing. He meant to start
with a small 300-foot demonstration line under
Broadway. He had to keep it secret from the corrupt
Boss Tweed (of Tammany Hall infamy) because he knew
Tweed would extort extra money before he'd let him
dig.
To cut the tunnel, Beach improved on Marc Brunel's
hydraulic shield design. (Later, the English turned
around and used Beach's design in their tunneling.)
Brunel had begun the
first tunnel under the Thames River in London, and
his son Isambard finished it. Like Brunel, Beach
put his own son in charge of cutting their
nine-foot-diameter hole. Father and son worked in
secret at night, trucking dirt off in wagons with
muffled wheels.
The finished system had a single
pneumatically-driven car that shuttled people
between two sumptuous stations with paintings,
frescoes, and fine furniture. It cost Beach
$350,000.
When the subway opened, Boss Tweed was first
flabbergasted, then enraged. Tweed managed to close
Beach down within a year, but, not long after that,
he fell victim to the great political cartoonist,
Thomas Nast. He was
indicted for graft, and Beach's charter was
reinstated. But then a stock-market collapse put
Beach out of business for good. His subway was
sealed up and forgotten.
Then, in 1912, a remarkable event: Workers digging
an extension of the BMT subway line suddenly broke
through into the old tunnel. It could've been King
Tut's tomb with all that sealed-up elegance -- the
old rail car, the décor, and Beach's
hydraulic shield.
Today Beach's tube is a part of the BMT line. Of
course, his legacy is much larger than a fragment
of the BMT. He pioneered the art of tunneling. He
helped establish the century-and-a-half-year-old
Scientific American magazine. But,
primarily, he was a dreamer ahead of his time. And
no great technology has ever been established
without dreamers like Alfred Ely Beach pointing the
way.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Allen, O. E., New York's Secret Subway. American
Heritage of Invention & Technology, Winter
1997, pp. 44-48.
Bobrick, B., Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in
History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War. New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1981, 1986, Chapter
6, The Lamp and the Ring.
This is a greatly revised version of Episode 83.
Old magazine illustration of Beach's subway
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1999 by John H.
Lienhard.
