railroad men of necessity be maimed and killed.”

The public was not, he found, easily aroused. Coffin appeared in railroad offices, only to be thrown out. In an age when railroads could buy senators, they had little time to spare for a scrawny, bearded do-gooder. Coffin wrote to newspapers, but his stories were rarely printed. Religious and farming periodicals were the only platforms he could find, and there his vivid harangues appeared, in between essays on sheep dipping and accounts of parish goings on.

Coffin kept on the move, traveling around the state, telling horror stories. In 1883 he managed to get himself appointed Iowa’s first railroad commissioner. The commissioner wrote thousands of letters, and attended every gathering of railroad officials that did not forcibly eject him. The railroad managers knew him as the “Air-Brake Fanatic” by now; he had at least attracted enough attention to get his arguments answered. Too expensive to install, a Chicago and Alton official told him once. “But I note,” Coffin yelled back, “that the Chicago & Alton and most other lines continue to pay their eight per cent dividends regularly.”

Changing his tactics slightly, Coffin started badgering the Master Car-Builders Association to test the air brakes on a freight train. Finally, in 1886, the trials were held—and were a total failure. On the second day, Coffin was the only state railroad commissioner left watching. By dint of astonishing persistence and energy, Coffin got another series of tests scheduled the next spring, and George Westinghouse himself came out from Pittsburgh to be on hand. It turned out to be another fiasco, but Westinghouse saw what was wrong with his brakes, and improved them. Soon he announced that he was ready to stop a fifty-car train.

So yet another series of trials was scheduled late that summer. If these failed, they almost certainly would be the last. Again, Westinghouse was there, and Coffin stood next to him on a long grade outside Burlington. A Chicago, Burlington & Quincy locomotive started downgrade with fifty cars swaying behind it. When the train hit forty miles an hour, the engineer put on the air. The freight shuddered to a dead stop with scarcely a jar, and within five hundred feet.

The gaunt old fighter stood watching it with tears on his face. “I am the happiest man in all Creation,” he said.

Coffin’s battle wasn’t over, though. He drafted the first railroad safety appliance act, saw it become state law, and , saw it universally ignored. He kept up the pressure, wrote and spoke, campaigned throughout the country. At last, in March of 1893, a bill requiring all American railroads to adopt air brakes and automatic couplers came before President Benjamin Harrison. The President signed it into law and gave the pen to Coffin.

The next year, casualties among trainmen dropped 60 per cent. 5

The long struggle behind him, Coffin found a new cause in Prohibition, and worked

for it with all his old energy until his death in 1915. His farm, Willowedge, is still there, though the barn collapsed a few years ago, and the fields have gone back to weeds and wildflowers. But the graves of Coffin and his family are well looked after; they have been neatly fenced in and are carefully tended by the railroad brotherhoods.