New York’s Secret Subway
To ALFRED ELY BEACH, THE BEST WAY TO MOVE PEOPLE from one place to another underground was to put them in capsules and shoot them through tubes by means of air pressure from huge fans. The year was 1870, New York City’s need for a subway was becoming desperate, and many rapid-transit proposals were being put forward. Beach insisted that his was the best. “A tube, a car, a revolving fan!” he cried. “Little more is required. The ponderous locomotive, with its various appurtenances, is dispensed with, and the light aerial fluid that we breathe is the substituted motor.”
Unfortunately, New York’s officialdom failed to grasp, or chose not to grasp, Beach’s logic. For the city’s government at this time was dominated by the formidable figure of Boss William M. Tweed, who had other ideas—ones that would just happen to line his own pockets. So Beach, undeterred, decided to build a part of his subway anyway, on the sly, and trust public opinion to win him approval. He almost brought it off. So impressive was his effort, in fact, that he could claim to have built the nation’s first subway line.
Alfred Beach was no crackpot. His father, Moses Yale Beach, was an inventor who in 1838 had purchased the New York Sun , the city’s first penny daily, from the paper’s founder, Benjamin Day, who was his brother-in-law. Alfred, born in 1826, worked at the Sun as a youth and then in 1846 teamed up with a friend named Orson Munn to purchase the journal Scientific American . In due course he became its editor. A slight, delicate-looking man, he was the soul of diligence and is said never to have taken a vacation in his entire life. Early on, he and Munn set up an agency to represent inventors in their dealings with the U.S. Patent Office. Among its customers over the years were Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and John Ericsson. Beach customarily traveled to Washington every two weeks to look after his clients’ affairs. Soon he had also established himself as an inventor, patenting a working typewriter in 1847 and in 1856 improving on it with a complex machine that would emboss letters for the use of the blind. He also patented a cable railway system in 1864. None of these innovations got very far.
BEACH RESERVED HIS GREAT est enthusiasm for what he called pneumatic research. It was not his idea. The notion of using air pressure to propel people or goods had been hatched around 1800 by a Danish engineer. It was spelled out in more meaningful detail after 1805 by a British manufacturer named George Medhurst, who proposed mounting wooden boards on the end of a railway car to block the flow of air around it, making it into a kind of piston that could be blown through a brick-lined tunnel using wind from a large pumping apparatus. Steam locomotives were still two decades in the future when Medhurst made his proposal. Medhurst was convinced that society would clamor for his scheme, that it “will form a new epoch in the history of mankind, will stamp a new value upon all the productions of art and nature, and add immensely to the riches, the splendour, the freedom, the happiness, the science, and the civilization of the whole world.” But he was ahead of his time. A pump strong enough to generate the necessary air pressure had not yet been developed, and anyway, as one writer noted, people had “a natural antipathy to the idea of being placed within a tube, dark and cheerless, and blown to their destination.”
As the nineteenth century progressed, the world’s cities grew rapidly. Steam railroads, with their soot and smoke, began to present major difficulties. London inaugurated an underground transportation system in 1863 using cokeburning steam locomotives that supposedly condensed their own exhaust in special tanks mounted under the boiler. Plenty of smoke escaped nonetheless, and as a historian put it, “The fumes were thus left to be consumed by the passengers.” And the problem would be worse elsewhere, for most of London’s tunnels were fairly short, separated from one another by open cuts in which the locomotives could blow off steam. The arrangement was not considered feasible in heavily built-up New York. Yet something was sorely needed to speed the movement of goods and people.
For the delivery of mail and small parcels, London achieved a breakthrough in the early 1860s with the construction of a quarter-mile tube not quite three feet high linking a railway station with a post office. Small pistonequipped cars could be blown from one end to the other in sixty-five seconds. A second line, whose tube was four and a half feet high and two miles long, was inaugurated in 1866, and during trials the Duke of Buckingham (chairman of the Pneumatic Dispatch Company) and some associates got into the car and, assuming “the recumbent posture enforced by circumstances,” were wafted to their destination in five minutes.
Beach heard about all this through his professional contacts and was convinced it was the answer. Just enlarge the whole thing, he said, and New York’s rapid-transit problems would vanish. In 1867 he demonstrated his concept at the American Institute fair in the Fourteenth Street Armory. A laminated wood tube six feet in diameter, suspended from the ceiling, enclosed a car seating ten that could zip from Fourteenth Street to Fifteenth Street and back in no time at all, powered by a screw-propeller fan making two hundred revolutions per minute. The ride was a hit. Several thousand people enjoyed the breezy excursion after being cautioned not to stick their arms out of the car while in the tube. The New York Times reported Beach’s prediction that passengers using such a “through city tube” could go from City Hall to Central Park in eight minutes, to Washington Heights (at the northern end of Manhattan) in twenty, and under the East River to Brooklyn’s City Hall in just two. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper said that “actual experiment proves there is no difficulty in driving the car at the rate of one hundred miles an hour.” Meanwhile, in his own magazine, Beach was describing refinements of the pneumatic postal-dispatch idea. He talked about mounting his pneumatic passenger tubes not only underground but on the sides of buildings and even over rooftops.
Late in 1867 Scientific American announced: “It is probable that a pneumatic railway of considerable length for regular traffic will soon be laid down near New-York, under the auspices of the Pneumatic Dispatch Company of New Jersey, of which Mr. Beach has lately been elected President.” By “near New-York” Beach presumably meant in the city itself, but while he had investors lined up and was ready to start digging, the necessary charter was not forthcoming. Boss Tweed, who had vast influence over the state legislature and controlled Gov. John T. Huffman, had ideas of his own, specifically an elevated railroad traveling on a massive viaduct cleaving Manhattan. As he was hoping to invest in the scheme personally, he did not wish to encourage competition. He stymied Beach.
All right then, Beach would build his line, or at least part of it, without Tweed’s knowledge. First he would need a legal cover. He applied to the state legislature for permission to construct an underground mail-dispatch line—on the London model—under Broadway between Warren and Cedar streets, roughly half a mile. The line would comprise two tubes, each four and a half feet in diameter, clearly too small for a railroad car. Tweed had no objection, and the charter was issued. Then Beach quietly asked for an amendment. To simplify the project, he would like to build one large tube instead of the two small ones. No one picked up on this change, and the amendment passed.
Beach rented a store at the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, across from City Hall, and began by enlarging the basement. Then, on the sly, he started digging a tunnel eight feet in diameter, deep enough beneath the surface to pass under the city’s water and sewer lines. To die it, he used a barrel-like device he had invented called the Beach Shield, which chewed away the earth in sixteen-inch segments by means of hydraulic rams connected to a water pump. To change direction he merely adjusted the pump. And change direction he did, the tunnel proceeding eastward under Warren Street and then turning downtown under Broadway until it had gone one block (about a hundred yards), ending at Murray Street. All the scraping and scouring went on so far below Broadway that the crowds hurrying above had not an inkling. Bags of soil were smuggled out at night.
THE PROJECT COST $350,000, OF WHICH BEACH himself contributed about $70,000, and took a year to complete. It was unveiled in February 1870. Visitors descended from the rented store to find a handsomely furnished 120-foot-long waiting room complete with a fountain stocked with goldfish, pictures on the walls, damask curtains framing imitation windows, and a grand piano.
Off to the side in a separate room was the Great Aeolor (named after Aeolos, the Greek god of wind), a handsomely decorated steam-driven hundred-horsepower air pump 21½ feet high on which was emblazoned the name “The Western Tornado.” It contained two large interlocking metal wings geared together with cogwheels and was virtually noiseless but could discharge a hundred thousand cubic feet of air every minute to propel Beach’s subway car. It also supplied air pressure for a separate demonstration that Beach had provided to fulfill the terms of his state charter: a thousand feet of eight-inch tubing that snaked around his station and blew batches of letters and papers back and forth at sixty miles per hour.
Descending farther, visitors arrived at the loading platform and beheld the entrance to the tunnel, which was whitewashed and flanked by twin statues of Mercury, symbolizing the speed of the wind. Above the entrance the words PNEUMATIC (1870) TRANSIT were engraved, and beyond them awaited the tubular car itself, which was furnished with cushioned seats and gaslights. When all were seated and the door closed, a rush of air suddenly pushed the car into the tunnel and sped it down toward Murray Street, “carried along” (in the words of one observer) “just like a sail-boat before the wind.” As it neared its destination, its wheels touched a telegraph wire that rang a bell back by the Great Aeolor. This prompted an engineer to shift the valves and convert the air pump from a pusher into a puller, so that the car slowed to a gentle stop and then was swiftly sucked back to its point of origin. Sometimes when the car reached its downtown destination, the conductor would open the door and call out, “Murray Street!,” which invariably elicited a laugh.
The line was first unveiled to city dignitaries, who had received formal invitations from Beach and were treated to what one of them called “a first-class subterranean lunch.” Then the public was given a look. The whole affair was an immediate success; passengers could hardly bear to leave the car. Beach allowed himself to think he had triumphed. The New York Herald felt confident enough to state, “As soon as the Legislature grant the necessary powers, the tunnel will be completed to Cedar Street, then to every part of the city, and a more agreeable mode of traveling can scarcely be conceived.”
Emboldened, Beach submitted a bill to the legislature that would permit him to extend his line all the way uptown to Central Park, some five miles distant. Both houses, seeing the public’s support of the measure, passed it by wide margins. But Boss Tweed, once he had recovered from his shock at Beach’s insolence, ordered Governor Hoffman to veto the measure. Beach waited until the next session of the legislature and resubmitted his proposal, with the same result. Still he persevered, and in 1873, with Tweed having been toppled from power, he made one last attempt. This time, after the legislature had approved the bill, Gov. John A. Dix signed it into law. Then fate dealt Alfred Beach a cruel blow. Only a few weeks after his seeming victory, the Panic of 1873 set in, and New York’s interest in building a subway line disappeared. The project was dead. For the next quarter of a century mass transit in New York City would be the province of horsecars and elevated railroads. Beach allowed his tunnel to be used as a shooting gallery and then as a wine cellar, but it never earned enough to cover costs, so he closed it down and had it sealed.
In retrospect one can hazard that Beach’s fundamental notion was faulty. His Great Aeolor weighed fifty tons—as much as a conventional locomotive—but could hard—ly have been expected to push or pull more than one train at a time. Operating more than one train would have required many such blowers, resulting in multifarious costs and complications. A system of independently powered cars or trains was essential. The solution, not long in the offing, was electric power, and after a strong enough electric motor was developed toward the end of the century, New York got its subway. (London’s Underground had mostly converted to electricity by that time.)
ALFRED ELY BEACH died in 1896. In 1912, eight years after New York’s first subway line opened, workers excavating the new branch that would become the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) came upon Beach’s old brick-lined tunnel under Broadway. The well-preserved car was still on the tracks, and the waiting room hardly looked as if it had been closed for a week; the fountain was still there, though dry. At the lower end of the tunnel Beach’s circular shield was still in place, ready to dig farther if needed. The tunnel itself became the nucleus of the present City Hall BMT station. For years a plaque there commemorated the great experiment, but today it is nowhere to be seen—merely a memory, like Beach’s dream.
Pneumatic dispatch lives on, in postal systems here and there, in large libraries, and in a few department stores where it is still used to transmit cash. But the tubes are too small for people to fit in.
