The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway (15 page)

The next day’s
Dispatch
gushed with enthusiasm, unaware of the glitch at the end of the journey.

“It is a success! It is a revolution! It travels over more than two miles of track in Richmond!”

But Sprague knew the truth. Getting a single car carrying a handful of passengers to climb one steep hill was not an achievement worth celebrating. His contract demanded he build an entire system that allowed multiple cars, carrying hundreds or thousands of people, to move at the same time up and down those hills. “My own reputation and future career, as well as that of my associates, seemed blasted if failure marked the Richmond road,” he wrote later. The test was nothing but a signal that they were getting close and heading in the right direction.

The next few weeks were exhausting for Sprague and his team, as they made adjustments to the motors, the wires, the tracks, all to improve on what had been a successful, if flawed, trial run. One innovation that was born during this period was a uniquely designed pole connecting the car and the overhead wire that was easily reversed when the car reached the end of its line. By January 1888, Sprague could not delay opening the line any longer. City officials and the owners of the Richmond Union Passenger Railway, which was on the brink of bankruptcy, were demanding results from him. The telephones in Richmond, only a recent addition to the city, had stopped working with so much electricity directed toward Sprague’s work. Picking up a phone greeted a caller with only a hissing noise and nothing else. Sprague had to convince the city all of the troubles were worth their patience.

He achieved a greater success on January 7, 1888, when they were able to run nine cars and carry several thousand passengers around the city. And two days after that, a passenger named William A. Boswell stepped onto car number 28, which traveled along Church Hill; handed the five-cent fare to the conductor; and became the system’s first paying passenger, even though it wasn’t officially in operation yet. By this point, Sprague was exhausted, but he knew there could be no resting. He was bleeding cash so badly that he was forced to take out a $45,000 loan just to avoid personal bankruptcy. Worried about creditors, he ordered his bookkeepers to save dollars wherever they could and to put off paying any bills that could be delayed. “Don’t pay a bill that you can help until after April 1st,” he ordered. One day in mid-January, feeling particularly low, he wrote to a friend, “I am completely overwhelmed with work, so much so that I hardly know whether I stand on my head or on my heels at times.”

Finally, three weeks later, on February 8, in a cold, drizzling rain, Sprague opened the Richmond line for service to the general public. The crowds flocked on board in the early days, but repeated fits and hiccups on the trolleys almost doomed the effort from the start. Cars would creep forward and then stop suddenly in the street, unable to budge. Workers would climb underneath to see if they could determine the problem, and if they could not, to avoid grinding the entire system to a standstill, they would pull the stalled car off the tracks so another could pass by. At first Sprague was convinced the problem was mechanical, something to do with the gears not being cut correctly. It was his Irish mechanic, Pat O’Shaughnessy, who discovered it was something more simple. The gears needed more oil, and by day’s end the cars were running smoothly.

But then one winter morning a new problem greeted Sprague. He looked out the window of his rooming house downtown and saw that his overhead wires were coated with ice from the sleeting rain that had fallen overnight. Passengers were waiting as usual for streetcars to carry them, but no streetcars were moving, until, to Sprague’s astonishment, one appeared from around the corner, and then another, and then another. At first Sprague didn’t understand what had changed, until he looked more closely and saw that on the roof of the lead car, O’Shaughnessy, his trusty mechanic, was balanced precariously while swinging a broom at the overhead wires. Each whack of the broom brought down a shower of ice and snow, but it worked. It was clearly not a long-term solution, but for one day, at least, winter would not beat Sprague’s electric trolley.

The next few months were not much better. A few consecutive days of consistent service would be interrupted by a few days of broken-down trolleys, burned-out motors, and worn-out gears. Passengers got used to the failures. They even assisted when needed. If a car derailed, all the passengers would step off, and the sturdiest ones would lean a shoulder into the car and hoist it back onto the rails. But when it was a problem with a motor, there was little they could do. Old motors were being shipped up to Sprague’s New York factory by train, and repaired ones were returned. It may have been the only large-trolley, big-city electric railway system in the world, but it was hardly a booming success. “Greene,” Sprague said one day to his trusty assistant, “this is hell.” It grew so desperate that Sprague looked to save a dollar wherever he could, cutting workers and holding off making any payments that could wait.

But then, when no one seemed to notice, it wasn’t hell anymore. The new motors coming back from New York worked better than the old ones. The gears stopped breaking down. The trolleys derailed less frequently. The central power plant proved capable of powering the operation. And a system that for weeks was using only ten or fifteen cars was, by the spring of 1888, using twenty. And then thirty. And then, with no fanfare at all, the magic number written into the contract, forty, was reached. Soon, Sprague’s electric railroad cars were averaging eighty miles per day and forty thousand paying passengers per week. Cash was coming in, and relief was in sight. It was a good thing, too. Sprague had 140 men working for him who needed to be paid.

When the Richmond Union Passenger Railway Company told Sprague he had fulfilled his contract on Tuesday, May 15, 1888, the news, which he would later call a “supreme moment” in his life, could not be celebrated as he hoped. The railroad syndicate that hired him for the Richmond job went bankrupt. Banks took over for the syndicate, but Sprague had lost more than $75,000 making Richmond’s trolley system work.

It would have been disastrous, except that Sprague, a great engineer, was equally adept at marketing. The day after receiving the news about his contract, on Wednesday, May 16, 1888, Sprague sat down and wrote a letter to Henry Whitney in Boston. Whitney and Sprague were not friends, but they were hardly strangers. Sprague’s electric motors were being used in Boston more than in any city in the world, and Whitney was well aware of it. One of Boston’s biggest printers, C. A. Heyer & Son, went so far as to print business cards that said they used Sprague motors and invited customers to come see them.

Sprague knew that Whitney was exploring options for his enormous streetcar system, and he wanted to be sure no decision was made before the two men talked. In two weeks, the first horsecar would ride over Whitney’s new Beacon Street route in Brookline, and Whitney knew that could not last. He wanted it electrified. Sprague’s letter had to give him hope. “We are ready to run commercially,” Sprague wrote. “Kindly suspend order of renewal until I come there Friday.”

As word of his achievement spread north and into the Midwest, Sprague was suddenly very much in demand. Cities big and small that had or were considering trolley lines sent officials to Richmond to witness what he had built and explore whether it could work on their streets. With his tracks, motors, and overhead wires, Sprague had single-handedly transformed an entire technology and at long last found a reliable replacement for the horse-pulled trolley.

When Sprague had started work in Richmond in 1887, there were fewer than ten electric railways running in the United States, all of them small systems of just a few cars operating over a couple of miles of track. By the end of the decade, more than two hundred electric railways would be operating or be under construction across the country. In New Orleans, a cry for electric trolleys rang out, and signs around the city appeared with a testament to how frustrated city residents had become. “Lincoln set the negroes free! Sprague has set the mule free! The long-eared mule no more shall adorn our streets.” In truth, Frank Sprague had only set the mule free in Richmond. What he needed now was an even bigger customer to take a chance on his system and prove to the world that it worked.

*   *   *

HENRY WHITNEY AND SPRAGUE BY
now had traded cordial letters and met in person, and each was well aware of how important they could be to each other. Sprague could make Whitney a fortune. And for Sprague, Whitney represented opportunity. If the owner of the biggest streetcar system in the world embraced and purchased his new technology, cities everywhere would line up to follow. Whitney could make Sprague a hero.

Sprague was eager to receive his visitors from the north in the summer of 1888, because he’d learned in advance that it was Longstreet, not Whitney, who would need the most convincing. Longstreet’s fear, which he was repeatedly telling Whitney, was that big cities like Boston would be disastrous for electric streetcars. As soon as traffic jammed up and a long line of cars formed, Longstreet argued that it would put a huge strain on a dynamo when the cause of the traffic cleared and all the cars started up at once. Dynamos would constantly be breaking down under the burden of city traffic, at an enormous expense, in Longstreet’s opinion. Longstreet argued that a cable road made the most sense for Boston. Cable-pulled cars were cheaper and cleaner than horses and easy to maintain. As further evidence, Longstreet pointed out to Whitney that New York City was investing in cable as the future of its street railways. But even as Boston began making its own plans to install cables, Whitney was skeptical. It was, he told Longstreet, too important a decision to get wrong.

Boston’s streets were narrower than New York’s and had far more turns, unlike New York’s long and wide boulevards. Additionally, no one had figured out how to get a cable system across a drawbridge, and Boston had several of those. Would routes merely end at a bridge? That seemed wholly unfair and unrealistic to passengers on the other side. Just because New York was chasing cable didn’t mean Whitney had to follow. What if they were wrong in New York about the future? Or what if cable was right for New York, but wrong for Boston?

Sprague decided the only way he could convince both men was if he set up the precise situation that Longstreet was most worried about and then proved it was a baseless concern. He knew there was risk to overtaxing his system, for if his experiment failed, surely Whitney and Longstreet would depart on the next locomotive back to Boston and turn to cable instead of electricity to power the Boston streetcars. He dreaded a repeat of what happened with Jay Gould. But Sprague believed he had no choice.

*   *   *

ON A WARM NIGHT
in early July 1888, after service for the day had ended and Whitney and Longstreet had retired to their downtown hotel, Sprague had his men park twenty-two streetcars at the base of Church Hill, inches apart from one another, in a straight line. He told his central-station engineer to build up as much steam as the boilers could hold and to keep the fires hot. It took almost five hours for all of the preparations, and it was almost midnight when Sprague was ready.

He had one of his men rouse Whitney and Longstreet from bed. They were part of a group of a half dozen who had come down from Boston. Most of the others were members of the Boston Board of Railroad Commissioners, but two of them had financial interests in the trip. Samuel Little was the president of the Rockland Bank, and Asa Potter was a longtime friend of Whitney’s and president of the Maverick Bank. All the men had ventured to Richmond for the same reason Whitney did, to see if Sprague’s electric railway really worked. If it did, Whitney, a rich man in his own right, knew he would need the help of other capitalists to invest in it.

All the men were staying at the five-story Exchange Hotel, at the corner of Franklin and Fourteenth streets. Whitney was sleeping when there was a knock at his door. He was told a test run had been arranged that would surely quash Longstreet’s cynicism and that it had to be seen at once. “On receiving word about midnight that we were willing to make such an experiment, he immediately arose and we were soon on our way to the eastern sheds, two miles from the station,” Sprague recalled years later.

The entire group of men walked the few blocks to the central station in the dark, and then they were taken by horse-drawn carriage two miles away to Church Hill. When they arrived at the corner of Twenty-eighth and P streets, Sprague explained to his audience that he had lined up twenty-two cars in tight formation in a place normally designed to power only four cars, spaced well apart. But tonight, he said, they would see much more than that. Before his guests’ arrival, he had ordered his engineer back at the central power station to raise the pressure of the maximum voltage in the system from 400 to 500 volts and to hold it there no matter how much strain was put on the system.

*   *   *

AT 12:20
A.M. ON
July 8, 1888, with his groggy visitors from Boston looking on, Sprague waved a lantern in the air, and the motorman inside the first of the twenty-two cars started to inch his car forward, and as soon as they had room in front of them, the motormen behind followed. The system had never had to endure such a huge strain, and a few seconds after the convoy began, the lamps inside the cars dimmed almost completely out, until only a faint orange glow appeared. Back at the central power station, the engineer strained as the voltage dropped to 200 volts per car. But it didn’t matter. Gradually the lights inside the trolleys brightened again, and the cars picked up momentum with every foot. No fuses blew. No motors stalled. All twenty-two cars climbed the hill successfully and soon disappeared over the hill and out of sight.

“This was an experiment that had never before been made in any part of the world,”
The Richmond Daily Times
reported. “And it was perfectly successful.” Whitney, Longstreet, and the rest of the Boston contingent headed for home the next day, their questions answered, and their city’s future decided.