Alfred Ely Beach And His Wonderful Pneumatic Underground Railway (June 1961 | Volume: 12, Issue: 4)

Alfred Ely Beach And His Wonderful Pneumatic Underground Railway

AH article image

Authors: Robert Daley

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

June 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 4


As the Civil War ended, all of New York City was wedged into the lower third of Manhattan Island. The city was compact, teeming, jammed with more than 700,000 people. Thousands more poured in every day as immigrants and refugees. The streets were clogged with horse-drawn vehicles and traffic moved an inch at a time. Public transportation consisted of overloaded streetcars and omnibuses dragged along by ponderous six-horse teams. Axles broke, horses shied, harnesses became snarled, and competing drivers got into fist fights. Silks and broadcloths were ruined in the crush inside the cars. Watches and breastpins vanished into the hands of pickpockets. The air was poisonous; it was said that a healthy person could not ride a dozen blocks without a headache. Traffic was so dense that it might take an hour to move a few yards. “Modern martyrdom,” one critic summed it up, “may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.”

The situation was desperate. What could be done to speed up public transportation?

Suddenly, one fine morning, New York woke tip and found that it had a subway.

It was all a little crazy, brilliant, and unbelievable.

The time was February, 1870. New Yorkers read about it in their morning papers.

“A FASHIONABLE RECEPTION HELD IN THE DOWELS OF THE EARTH!” read a headline in the incredulous Herald .

“The waiting room is a large and elegantly furnished apartment, cheerful and attractive throughout,” announced the Sun . “This,” added the Scientific American “means the end of street dust of which uptown residents get not only their fill, but more than their fill, so that it runs over and collects on their hair, their beards, their eyebrows and floats in their dress like the vapor on a frosty morning. Such discomforts will never be found in the tunnel!”

The subway’s waiting room alone astonished reporters. Its frescoed walls, elegant paintings, grand piano, bubbling fountain, and goldfish tank—all were ecstatically described. Then there was the single small car, called “spacious” (it seated twenty-two) and “richly upholstered.” But most of all the press was overwhelmed by the great blowing machine that propelled the car, that sent it “skimming along the track like a sail before the wind” and, once the car had reached the end of the track, calmly drew it back again!

This was the Beach Pneumatic Subway. Its only power was air.

What the journalists were shown, and what 400,000 gawking tourists were to see during the next year, was a cylindrical tube nine feet in diameter, fitting almost as snugly around the single car as a gun barrel around a bullet. A track was laid along the bottom of the tube for 312 feet under the center of Broadway. When the giant fan, called the “Roots Patent Force Blast Blower,” was turned on,