The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (12 page)

Despite his age, Sprague was already a peer of the more experienced engineers who were exhibiting inventions at Crystal Palace. He was working on a small electric motor that would one day, he hoped, be able to power elevators, printing presses, and clothing manufacturers around the world. And so his presence in London did not go unnoticed. He was offered a chance to be a member of the Jury of Awards and the secretary of the prestigious scientific group. He eagerly accepted both positions.

Sprague was born on July 25, 1857, and he was a studious boy growing up. His mother, a schoolteacher, died when he was just eight, but in those few years she left a stern impression on him about the importance of his studies. His father sent him off to New York to live with an aunt, and in school he became intensely focused, one of the smartest boys in his classes. His favorite subjects were math and science, and his high school principal thought he might excel by attending either West Point or the United States Naval Academy. Sprague’s interests seemed perfectly suited for either of them. After graduating from high school, Sprague traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts, on a June morning to take the entrance examination for West Point. By accident, he found himself staring at a four-day exam for the Naval Academy. He didn’t panic, and he scored the highest among the thirteen candidates. “A career afloat was far from my ambition,” Sprague would say later, “but having won out I decided to at least try it.”

First, he needed the money. Sprague borrowed four thousand dollars from a local contractor and a bank, and in September 1874 he left for Annapolis. He graduated four years later; after that, he spent two years out at sea followed by one year ashore that included a brief tour at the Newport, Rhode Island, torpedo station. While he was at sea, Sprague seemed amazed at the journey life had thrown him and unsure what to do with his spare time. He wrote stories that he filed for
The Boston Herald
while in Asia. And he looked for any opportunity to tinker with wires and contraptions.

Two years later, Sprague filed his first patent, on October 4, 1881. His idea was called a dynamoelectric machine, and he applied to show it at the Paris Electrical Exhibition. But when his request was denied, Sprague found himself instead on a naval ship that was departing New York to join up with the American naval fleet in the Mediterranean. When his ship was delayed, he landed in Europe in the spring of 1882, took a three-month leave, and made his way to London. It was there, while at London’s Crystal Palace, that Sprague had the meeting that would change the course of his life.

Edward Hibbard Johnson had an eye for talent. He was the one who had hired Thomas Edison in the early 1870s to work for a new company called Automatic Telegraph, which its founders saw as a competitor to Western Union. Johnson and Edison worked closely over the next decade, and in fact Johnson was in London to promote Edison’s progress with electricity, specifically his incandescent lightbulb. Like Sprague, Edison believed the potential uses for electricity were endless. A few years earlier, Edison had left New Jersey for a trip out west. He was already using small electric motors he’d invented to power a sewing machine and a water pump at his home, and he was beginning to wonder if that same idea could be applied to transportation. In his trip to the Great Plains, Edison saw farmers making long and costly trips just to get their produce and grains to the steam railroads. It occurred to him that if the farmers had a lighter, cheaper, narrower railroad, powered not by steam but by electricity, it could serve as a much more efficient link to the transcontinental railroad. Farmers could then spend more time harvesting their land and would be more productive. Edison returned to New Jersey and set to work, excited about the idea of applying electricity to transportation. He hired a crew to build a track one-third of a mile long and a mechanical engineer to work with him on an electric locomotive.

In 1879, before he had invested much time in electric transit, Edison was, at thirty-one years old, already one of America’s most famous and prolific inventors. That year, after a brief period when he took time to finish inventing his phonograph, he was determined to perfect electric lighting. On October 21, 1879, he successfully tested the first incandescent electric light, and two months later he demonstrated it publicly to hundreds of witnesses at his research laboratory in New Jersey. He lit up his lab, the town’s streets, and a few nearby homes.

Edison and Johnson employed a number of bright engineers to help with Edison’s electricity experiments, and in 1882, when Johnson began talking electricity with Sprague at Crystal Palace, it became obvious to Johnson that this was a young man they should employ. In March 1883, after Sprague resigned from the navy, Johnson nudged Edison to hire him. When Edison didn’t act immediately, Johnson grew frustrated because he knew Sprague was turning down other offers for the chance to work with Edison.

“I hear nothing from you as to young Sprague,” Johnson wrote Edison in April 1883. “An ensign in the U.S. Navy doesn’t have enough surplus pocket money to allow him to loaf long. Beside, he is not one who can endure it long. He is very anxious to get to work.”

Finally, Edison wrote back. “I received your favor of the 11th this morning and at once called you ‘Send Sprague.’”

Johnson, it turned out, was not the only one nudging Edison.

Electrical World,
a publication that closely monitored the progress in electricity, made a boast in 1883 that seemed like a pointed attack on the wizard from Menlo Park.
Electrical World
said that while Edison’s incandescent light was impressive, it was time to move on and discover other ways the power of electricity could be applied. “The electric light has long ceased to be a curiosity or even a novelty,” the publication proclaimed. “It has become a common, every-day affair. To the scientist, to the electrician, it looms up even as a thing of the past. The question to which he now turns is: What shall we do next?”

*   *   *

SPRAGUE SPENT THREE MONTHS
in London, and by the time he came home he not only understood the problem with the subway but also had begun to design a solution in his head and on paper. He looked at London’s tracks and believed they could serve as one conductor of electricity. But he also came to believe that a second conductor that ran overhead along the tracks and was connected by wire to a moving train could be the missing piece. If electricity could move a single train, could it one day power an entire transit system like the Underground? After leaving the navy, Sprague took the job to work with Edison expecting to be given time to turn his track drawings into experiments. Edison had other plans for him.

When Sprague returned to America in 1883, twenty years had passed since London’s subway opened. But no other city had bothered to replicate it since then. Urban transit had become the single biggest civic headache. Traffic was an outright obsession of newspapers and their readers. Day after day, the drawings in any major city newspaper showed overcrowded streets that portrayed the country as bordering on outright panic. Streets were filled with so many moving pieces, of all shapes and sizes, it was a miracle anybody got anywhere. Chairs on wheels, covered wagons, omnibuses, trolleys on tracks, and more, all of them pulled by horses, created an almost deafening wall of sound.

It remained a stubborn problem for which no city had found the perfect solution. London had come closest. It had proved not only that a tunnel could be dug safely underneath a city’s streets but also that trains could be run on tracks through those tunnels. The key to the Underground was a centrally located steam engine, powered by coal. When the engine produced mechanical energy, a machine called a dynamo converted it into electric current, which was passed immediately through a rail to the street railway cars. The dynamo (the word comes from the Greek
dunamis,
which means “power”) was the earliest form of what is known today as an electrical generator, and it would soon prove critical to the future of the electric railway, as well as to all industries that relied on power to make and move goods. A motor on the cars then converted the dynamo’s electric current back into mechanical energy, which powered the wheels to turn and move the streetcars. It was, to say the least, quite complicated. But the complicated technology was not the only reason that no other city besides London had built a subway yet. The giant steam locomotives also scared cities away. They pumped out black smoke and pungent gas and rained down hot steam and showers of soot and sparks into the enclosed tunnels, making the experience of riding the Underground filthy, dangerous, and unpleasant.

An English journalist named Fred T. Jane captured the experience after taking a ride one summer morning aboard locomotive number 18 around the Circle Line of the Underground. For the
English Illustrated Magazine,
Jane wrote of “visions of accidents, collisions and crumbling tunnels” floating through his mind. Sarcastically titled “The Romance of Modern London,” Jane’s article told a riveting account of how uncomfortable a ride on the Underground could be.

“No time is wasted at stations on the Underground and a minute later the train was off, off into a black wall ahead with the shrieking of ten thousand demons rising above the thunder of the wheels,” he wrote. “The sensation altogether was much like the inhalation of gas preparatory to having a tooth drawn. I would have given a good deal to have waited a minute or so longer. Visions of accidents, collisions and crumbling tunnels floated through my mind; a fierce wind took away my breath.” The average speed, as Jane described it, was twenty-five miles per hour, but there were a few spots where the train reached forty miles per hour. As his train reached the Gower Street station, Jane described the air as growing more foul until he was coughing “like a boy with his first cigar.” At that point, the driver turned to Jane. “It is a little unpleasant when you ain’t used to it,” he said. “But you ought to come on a hot summer day to get the real thing.”

The author’s trip lasted a little more than an hour and covered thirteen miles of track and included twenty-seven stops. When his ride was over, the engineer said to him, “This finishes our journey, unless you’d like to go round again.” Jane politely declined.

*   *   *

MAY 24, 1883, WAS A
sunny day in New York City and one of America’s brightest days in history. But as Sprague, now a twenty-six-year-old former U.S. Navy ensign, stepped off his steamship in New York’s harbor after journeying across from England, he paid little attention to the crowd of excited people making their way east through the city’s streets. He was thinking only about the job that was waiting for him across the Hudson River in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with Thomas Edison.

There was a marching band and police escorts on horses, followed by twenty-five carriages, all moving down Fifth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, where they turned east and made their way down to City Hall. The festivities were all part of a celebration New Yorkers had been anticipating for more than a decade, much as they’d been waiting for a subway. After fourteen years of construction, and two dozen deaths, President Chester A. Arthur and New York’s portly governor, Grover Cleveland, who would soon be the next president, were in town to celebrate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. Shortly before two in the afternoon, the long procession lined up and headed on foot for the historic march across the East River. As the president, the governor, the mayor, and other dignitaries walked across the 1,595-foot span, behind the band and soldiers from the Seventh Regiment, the sun reflecting off their bayonets, loud applause followed their every step. The promenade where they walked had been open to ticket holders for hours, who lined both sides of the bridge. An estimated 250,000 people followed in the next twenty-four hours. But it was the presence of President Arthur that
The New York Sun
could not ignore the following day in its report. It described the bridge’s opening as a climax that ended fourteen years of suspense, “since the president of the United States of America had walked dry shod to Brooklyn from New York.”

In speeches that day, it was hailed as “a wonder of science,” a monument to “enterprise, skill, faith, endurance.” To build the bridge, workers used compressed air to go deep into the river and sink two enormous granite foundations into the river bottom, forty-four feet down on the Brooklyn side, and seventy-eight feet on the Manhattan side. Any engineer could surely have appreciated the challenges overcome to build what many called the Eighth Wonder of the World. But years later Sprague recollected his thoughts that day. “I arrived home on the day the Brooklyn Bridge opened,” he would write, “and promptly reported to my employer, who seemed to think that a salary of $2,500 was per year unduly munificent.”

If Edison had shown even half the interest in applying electricity to transportation as he did in his work with incandescent lighting, he might have solved the street railway riddle as well. During a visit to Boston, Edison witnessed firsthand the shortcomings of relying on horses for urban transportation. He rode one of Boston’s street trolleys into the city’s North End, but when the horses struggled to climb a hill near the top of Hanover Street, it seemed as if they might slide dangerously downhill. In his diary, Edison recounted the experience: “The executive department of my body was about to issue an order of ejectment when some of the passengers jumped out and stopped the car.”

That should have been enough to steer Edison toward solving the problem of the electric motor. But it didn’t. Motors bored him. The phonograph and the lightbulb filled most of his days. He left the worry of electric motors to others on his team, like his newest member, Sprague.

Aside from feeling underpaid by Edison, Sprague was troubled even more by his assignment. E. H. Johnson had told Edison that Sprague’s interest was in electric motors and recommended Edison use Sprague to research them. But Edison’s interest remained in lighting, and he wanted his newest employee to help run his construction department in the cities that were installing central stations for Edison’s lighting system. Sprague had little interest in lighting, but he followed his instructions and went off to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, and then Brockton, Massachusetts, to get their plants up and running. His displeasure at the assignment was evident in his work. In Sunbury one day, he forgot to oil a new electric dynamo, causing its bearings to burn out hours before the plant was to be unveiled and leading to one very long night for himself and Edison in making the repairs. In general, however, it was only late at night that Sprague was able to focus on what he wanted: building an electric motor.