American Experience (1988–…): Season 29, Episode 5 - The Race Underground - full transcript
Engineers overcome challenges to construct America's first subway system in Boston.
On the morning
of Monday, March 12, 1888,
the east coast of the United
States from Virginia to Maine
awoke to the most severe
blizzard in American history.
Four feet of snow
fell from the skies,
and fierce winds
created snowdrifts
up to 50 feet high.
The Blizzard of 1888
crippled the entire northeast
and shut down all of the streets
and all of the transportation
in the cities.
It forced a lot
of soul searching
and thinking about
how cities moved, and lived,
and breathed, and operated.
With over 400 dead and citizens
left scared and angry,
the blizzard underlined
a transportation crisis
that had been escalating
for decades.
In a booming economy,
cities were flooded with
thousands of immigrants
and rural Americans seeking
opportunity
in a newly mechanized world.
The problem is that
everybody's crowded
into a fairly small area.
The available
modes of transportation are slow
and cumbersome.
The city is growing,
but the transit system
isn't growing with it.
America was in danger of choking
on its own progress.
In no place was the problem
more overwhelming
than the nation's
most congested city, Boston,
where nearly 400,000 people
packed into a downtown
of less than a square mile.
There are almost 8,000 horses
in Boston
pulling the trolley railways
around the city.
It is a cacophony of noise,
dust, horse manure, smells,
in the downtown area,
extremely congested.
As America struggled to address
its transportation crisis,
leaders in Boston pursued
a radical solution.
But their race to build
the nation's first subway
would clash against political
gridlock, selfish businessmen,
and a terrified citizenry.
The idea of a subway in Boston
was an enormous risk.
It was a breathtaking jump
into the unknown
and that can't be
underestimated.
This was a jump
into the unknown.
In early 1882, a young American
naval officer on leave
walked the crowded streets
of London.
Frank Sprague,
just 24 years old,
had heard of the world's
first subway,
the London Underground.
Hailed as an engineering marvel,
he wanted to see it for himself.
As he descended from the street
down the steps into darkness,
he could hear the roar
of the trains thundering
through the tunnels below.
In 1863, when the
London Underground opened
it was a coal-powered steam
engine running underground.
The subway coming through
London's tubes
was spewing dark soot, and
smoke, and sparks into the air.
One journalist who rode
on the London subway
compared it to standing next to
someone blowing cigar smoke
in your face
for the entire time.
It was just a miserable
riding experience.
Sprague, an aspiring inventor,
thought there had to be
a better way.
It was the age
of electrical invention...
The light bulb, the telephone,
the dynamo...
And Sprague,
having studied electricity
at the Naval Academy,
was full of ideas.
Frank Julian Sprague
is a driven person.
A colleague once said
of Frank Sprague,
"It seems as though he had wires
coiling and uncoiling
inside of him."
He was constantly in motion.
Sprague had spent a year at sea
with the navy,
inventing in his head.
It's very cerebral.
He keeps a notebook.
And in the notebook he draws
all these schematics,
all these blueprints,
all these drawings;
he sketches out these ideas.
There are armatures.
There are new, improved versions
of arc lighting.
There are electric motors.
And the notebook is...
you can almost feel the energy...
It vibrates, it really does.
He senses that this new force,
electricity,
it seems almost limitless
in its potential.
And above all he senses
that electricity can move things
if people can learn how
to harness it and put it to work
in the form of electric motors.
With his frequent trips
underground while in London,
Sprague came up
with a revolutionary plan:
He sketched out a subway system
where electricity
would supply the power.
It would be conducted to the
trains from an overhead source,
through a motor, and then
back to the rails below.
Sprague was so confident
in his idea
that he immediately applied
for a patent.
In this era, late 19th century,
electricity is magic
and it has a magical
set of effects.
But also there's a great deal
of anxiety that went
with the magic of it.
It's invisible,
it's very powerful,
it can kill you
but you can't see it,
so there's all sorts of...
of anxieties.
You've got potency
and invisibility.
You can argue the science,
but the fear is there.
As cities across America were
being wired for electricity,
newspapers reported
on horrific accidents.
Sprague's vision for a subway in
America depended on the public
overcoming its fear of this
unsettling power source.
Convincing Americans
that traveling underground
was a good idea would be
an even more daunting challenge.
There was an enormous
fear of going underground
in this restricted environment.
One of the health considerations
at the turn of the century
was tuberculosis
and pulmonary disease.
And people were just concerned
that living, traveling in this
underground environment
could be very detrimental
to health.
The underground is scary
for two reasons.
One is the association
with death.
We just know that
in the underworld
we are getting closer
to another realm.
But the underworld is also scary
because it's not friendly
to human life...
Never was, never will be.
Everything you do down there
has to be done with engineering
to enable humans to survive.
You put those two together
and you can see why people
are afraid of the underworld.
By 1883, Frank Sprague
had landed what he thought
was his dream job
when he was recruited
by the celebrated inventor
Thomas Edison.
At Edison's lab in New Jersey,
Sprague hoped to begin work
on electric motors and railways.
Edison had other plans,
assigning him to his
construction department
to work on
central power stations
for his vast lighting systems.
What Sprague would often do is
he would go on these assignments
for Thomas Edison,
but at night, and on weekends,
and in any waking moment he had
when he was not doing something
for Edison, he was working
on his motor.
Eventually,
Edison did ask Sprague
to work on motors
for his company.
But the young engineer knew
that anything he designed
would have Edison's name on it.
In April of 1884,
less than a year
after joining Edison's team,
Sprague was forced to decide
between staying on with Edison
and risk giving up ownership
of his motor ideas,
or venturing out on his own.
Sprague knows that if he
develops a motor at Menlo Park,
even if Edison has been
only peripherally involved,
the result will be hailed
as Edison's latest,
greatest invention.
That's not what Sprague
wants at all.
Sprague resigned.
Within months he was displaying
a variety of his groundbreaking
electric motors
at the International Electrical
Exhibition in Philadelphia.
Sprague's motor's different
from any other electric motor
at the time because it was
what Sprague called
a self-regulated motor.
And what that meant was
it was able to bear different
size loads at the same speed.
So it could carry ten pounds,
or 20 pounds, or 30 pounds
and lift it at the same speed.
It made Sprague's
electric motors
much more attractive
for potential users,
particularly in fields
like industry
where you're powering
crude elevators,
or you're powering railways.
Even his former boss
was impressed.
"His is the only true motor,"
Edison told a reporter.
Such high praise
from the world-famous inventor
was invaluable in giving Sprague
an edge over his competitors.
One month after
the Philadelphia exhibition,
he launched the Sprague Electric
Railway & Motor Company
and began promoting his ideas
across the country.
His potential customers
included transit moguls
in America's largest
and most congested cities.
Frank Sprague knew that
in order for a motor to succeed,
in order for his business
to succeed,
he was going to need
a big client.
He was going to need someone
to take a chance on him.
In 1886, in a narrow alleyway
between two brick buildings
off East 24th Street
in Manhattan,
Sprague nervously attached
his electric motors
to a railroad flat car.
Sprague's potential investor
that day
was one of the top ten
richest men in America.
Jay Gould owned more railroad
track and telegraph lines
than anyone in the country.
He also had a controlling
interest
in the Manhattan Elevated
Railway Company,
and was in a search of a new way
to power his trains.
If Sprague could convince Gould
that his electric motor
was the answer,
it would change
the young engineer's life.
One of the ways you made money
in the United States
in the Gilded Age,
was to invest in new technology.
That's true of steel.
It's true of oil.
And it's also true
of mass transit.
So who's making decisions about
where the transit lines go,
when they're built, what kind of
technology they have?
By and large,
it's private industrialists.
It's capitalists.
It's the people who have
a lot of money.
Sprague positioned Gould
at the front of the flatbed car,
hoping the vantage point would
give him a more thrilling ride.
Sprague pushed the lever
to move the car forward.
In his zeal and confidence
to show Gould just how smooth
his motor could power
this train car,
he probably became
a little overzealous
and pushed his motor too hard.
And what happened was
as Jay Gould was standing
on this streetcar,
a burst of sparks shot out
right by Gould's legs.
And Jay Gould went running off
and said, "Never on my railway
will we use this crazy
new form of energy."
Here's Gould,
who would be perfectly willing
to take million dollar risks
in building railways
across the United States,
but electricity
was such a new thing
that when there was an explosion
and a flash on the streetcar,
it scared Gould to death.
And Gould wanted nothing
to do with Sprague.
By the end of 1886,
Frank Sprague was running
out of money
to conduct his tests
and had to face the reality
that no one was interested
in his electric motor.
What he didn't know,
was that 200 miles to the north
his ideas had caught
the attention of one
of the biggest transportation
kings in the country.
On March 4, 1887 Henry Whitney,
president of the newly formed
West End Street Railway Company,
arrived at the Massachusetts
State House in Boston.
Years earlier,
Whitney began purchasing
tracts of land
along Beacon Street,
a carriage road in the
wealthy suburb of Brookline
that led straight
into the downtown.
Whitney had invested his fortune
in real estate
and owned almost four million
square feet of land.
If transit lines could reach
the desirable suburb,
his property values
would skyrocket.
The development of Boston,
as in most other cities,
was largely in private hands.
And these developers of large
tracts of property recognized
that their profitability
depends upon making these areas
accessible to the downtown area.
And so there is a direct
and crucial link
between development
and transportation.
Boston was bursting
at the seams.
Its population had more than
doubled since the Civil War,
to nearly 450,000.
The city's horse-drawn street
railways were overwhelmed,
carrying more than 91 million
passengers a year.
The streets were
absolutely packed every day
with all these hundreds
of thousands of people
pouring into the downtown.
So you really had just this
incredible mass of people
in a very small area.
Seven street railway companies
aggressively competed
for passengers
in Boston's downtown.
Each of them has their own
routes and fares.
And it was this crazy,
convoluted system.
If you wanted a streetcar in
1887 you would raise your hand
and all these different cars
might race to pick you up.
The term "transit system"
implies that there's
a coherence.
I think it implies that there
is a kind of public service.
And I don't think that's how
most transit operators
view this.
It's the profit motive
that determines the quality
and the amount of service.
At the State House,
Whitney boldly proposed
the consolidation of all seven
street railway companies
into one large transit system,
which he would control.
His argument was for efficiency,
but he knew that
by controlling all the lines,
he would be positioned
to do as he pleased
with his suburban expansion.
I think there was actually
a lot of support in many ways
from the larger public.
You might think,
"Oh, a monopoly.
People aren't going to like
this," but there was a sense
that it was actually
very inefficient
to have so many different
street railway companies
that they were competing
for passengers.
Whitney suggested that to rid
the congestion
strangling the streets,
it was necessary to construct
tunnels beneath the city.
It caught everyone by surprise
this idea of a tunnel.
It was exciting, it was scary,
it was a big deal
for Henry Whitney
to suggest that.
But he threw out a third thing,
which really caught
people's attention,
which was acknowledging
that the horse had seen its day
and that perhaps
the electric motor was, in fact,
the future of urban transit
and the way that Boston
needed to go.
And he put himself on the line
with this idea
that the electric motor,
which until that point
still was not
a really proven technology,
but something that he had seen,
and believed in,
and felt like it could work.
The Massachusetts General Court
granted Whitney the right
to consolidate Boston's
streetcars and the permission
to build a subway if he desired.
His West End Street
Railway Company now controlled
1,700 street railway cars
and 200 miles of track,
making it the largest transit
system in the world...
Bigger than anything in London,
Chicago, or New York.
But Whitney's biggest challenge
remained:
finding a way to replace
the 8,400 horses
that were grinding
Boston's streets to a halt.
In the summer of 1887,
Frank Sprague was desperate.
He needed to find a place to
demonstrate his electric railway
on a large scale.
He found it
in an unlikely place.
The Richmond Union Passenger
Railway Company in Virginia
asked Sprague to build
a complete electric railway
system.
12 miles of track, a
375-horsepower electrical plant,
and overhead lines to carry
electric current to 40 cars
and 80 motors.
He had just 90 days to construct
it and wouldn't get paid a dime
until the system was up
and running.
Experts said it couldn't
be done:
the Richmond hills
were too steep
and Sprague's motor wasn't
powerful enough.
People have tried to set up
a railway system
using the existing technologies
of the period...
Horse-drawn railways.
But Richmond is a horse killer.
That's an awful way to put it
but, the topography,
the landscape, it's just brutal
to try and make this thing work
using horses.
It was a massive risk.
But Sprague was forced
to bet his company
on the near impossible project.
"Failure in Richmond,"
Sprague said,
"meant blasted hopes
and financial ruin."
It was a contract that no one
in their right mind
would ever sign,
essentially being asked
to build this on spec.
But Sprague at that point
was close to desperate.
He needed money.
His experiment with Jay Gould
had failed.
He did not have an investor.
He needed his project to succeed
and he needed it
to succeed soon.
Unfortunately, shortly after
he signs the contract
he is stricken
with typhoid fever.
And it takes over a month
of convalescence
to really bring himself
back into working shape.
When he does visit Richmond
he is profoundly discouraged.
The conditions
are much more challenging
than he had imagined.
The first set of rails
that's laid down
is completely unsuitable.
The whole thing looks
like a disaster.
Sprague's crew spent weeks
rebuilding the entire system
of tracks.
To help prevent the motors
from disengaging
over the bumpy terrain,
Sprague would test out
his innovative wheelbarrow
mount,
a design he had been
working on for years.
What was unique to Sprague
was his ability
to design a mounting,
so that the motor could move
up and down while it remained
meshed with the gear
on the axle.
It was a significant
breakthrough.
He was confident the motors
would stay on the streetcars,
but he didn't know
if they could scale
Richmond's steep hills.
Sprague set up a trial run
at night, hoping no one
would see a potentially
embarrassing failure.
The car scales the hill
and comes down the other side,
makes a turn,
climbs another hill
that's even steeper.
Sprague has no idea
what's going to happen.
The car makes it to the top.
And as it does
the motor locks up.
Sprague realizes
what's happened.
He's actually burned out
the motor.
Sprague needed more power.
With the 90-day deadline
looming,
he scrambled to re-design
the motors with larger gears
and have them fabricated
by a machinist in Rhode Island.
When they finally arrived,
Sprague got the streetcars
running without any burnouts.
As the weeks slipped away,
Sprague and his engineers
worked round the clock,
tackling one technical problem
after another.
"I am completely overwhelmed
with work,"
Sprague wrote to a friend,
"so much so
that I hardly know whether I
stand on my head or my heels."
Finally, on May 15, 1888, after
investing $75,000 of his own,
the Richmond system
was up and running.
Richmond is a real
turning point.
Sprague was able, on the basis
of Richmond's performance,
to show people real data.
This is what the railway system
in Richmond earned
before it was electrified.
This is what it earned after.
This is how much money
you can make.
The day after the Richmond
contract terms were satisfied,
Frank Sprague wrote
to Henry Whitney in Boston.
"We are ready to run
commercially,"
reported the young engineer,
hoping to convince
the world's largest streetcar
owner to buy in.
Whitney agreed to travel
to Richmond,
his head full of questions
and doubt.
Whitney had misgivings
when he got to Richmond.
This is a rural Southern city
without the concentration
of business,
without the narrow streets
that Boston had.
At about midnight,
Whitney's brought to the bottom
of a steep hill.
And at the bottom of this hill
Frank Sprague has lined up
22 streetcars.
He's never tried this before.
He talks to the electrician
at the power plant and he says,
"Give her all you've got
and don't let up."
The lights actually get lower
because the strain on the system
is so... is so intense.
And slowly each one started up,
one right after the other.
The power station
didn't blow out.
Fuses didn't blow.
The cars could all run
at the same time.
Sprague's brash demonstration
and risk had paid off.
Whitney was impressed,
and headed back to Boston
with the intention of
electrifying his entire system
of streetcars.
There's certainly no doubt
that his demonstration
to Whitney and its success
was an important turning point
in the history of mass transit
in America,
and in the history
of mass transit in the world.
There's a search for a practical
mechanical mode
of transportation.
And what Frank Sprague's
invention means is that
we've ended that search,
that we've found it.
It's a big distance from
this little railway in Virginia
to the Boston subway,
but you can envision
going there now.
Upon his return from Richmond,
Henry Whitney immediately
contracted Sprague to supply
30 electric cars to his West End
Street Railway Company.
Whitney envisioned passengers
gliding smoothly
along Beacon Street
into and out of downtown Boston,
but it would not happen easily.
Key to Sprague's innovation
were the overhead wires
supplying power
to the street cars.
Boston's city leaders, however,
would not allow them
to be installed.
Electricity was seen as a very,
very dangerous
form of energy,
particularly when wires
would break
and they'd fall to the ground,
people would touch them
and be electrocuted.
So people had to be convinced
that electric-powered streetcars
were a safe way to travel.
To persuade city officials,
Whitney arranged
for a test ride.
With Sprague driving,
the electric streetcar sped up
to 25 miles per hour,
propelling the lawmakers faster
than they had ever
traveled before.
Exhilarated by the ride,
Boston leaders granted Whitney
permission
to install the overhead wires.
He then moved forward with plans
to build a central power station
in Boston's South End that would
be the largest in the world.
With its chimney 250 feet high,
it was the tallest structure
in Boston,
30 feet higher
than the Bunker Hill monument.
Just like Frank Sprague
was a big thinker,
Henry Whitney had this vision
and this passion.
He really believed he could be
a change agent for how people
moved about and how
the transit system operated.
He made people re-think
how their city could look
and could function.
Electrification commenced
rapidly and profits were soon
rolling in for the West End
Street Railway Company.
In just five years,
more than 80% of the system
was electrified,
and overhead,
wires lined the city streets.
Despite the monetary success
of the West End,
the electric trolleys
proved so popular,
the streets were clogged
worse than ever.
When Whitney signed a contract
with Sprague,
to electrify
the West End Street Railway,
it wasn't the end of a problem.
It made a problem worse.
And as the cars made their way
into downtown Boston,
down Boylston Street,
turned onto Tremont Street,
it just got more crowded, and
more crowded, and more crowded.
Streetcars were pouring
into downtown Boston.
Electrification made it easier
to continue to expand
the streetcar system
farther and farther out,
but there were a lot
of safety concerns.
These electric streetcars
are more dangerous
than the older horse-drawn ones,
and more pedestrians
are getting killed by
streetcars.
Despite the chaos
on the streets,
Henry Whitney's bold subway idea
had been languishing
for the past four years.
That changed on the evening
of January 5, 1891.
That night,
Henry Whitney hosted a banquet
for influential real estate
developers
at the exclusive Algonquin Club.
Also in attendance was Boston's
newest mayor, Nathan Matthews.
In his inaugural address
earlier that day,
Matthews pledged
to deal aggressively
with the rapid transit needs
of the city.
"I believe the city government
should grapple
with this problem," he said,
"rather than leave the matter
entirely to the interested
action of private corporations."
Mayor Matthews was genuinely
trying to improve the efficiency
of the way the city government
worked.
And he very much is an example
of the good government
reform movement,
arguing that we need to make
government
more in the public interest.
It should not be the system
of patronage,
people trading favors.
Nathan Matthews looked at Henry
Whitney and started to wonder,
"Maybe he's never
going to build a subway."
And that's when I think Matthews
started to get frustrated
and really dig his heels in
to try to take back
the streets of Boston
from Henry Whitney and say,
"These are city streets,
"and I'm going to be the one
to make the big decisions about
what we do, and how we do it,
and when we do it, not you."
In speeches, Whitney explained
that it was simply too expensive
for the West End
to build a subway.
"I have, personally,
no desire for anything
"that I can make out of the
underground road," he said.
"It is so full of dangers,
I am free to say to you
that I shrink from the task."
This is an era in which cities
and states are prepared
to make significant investments
in infrastructure.
Matthews recognizes
that in some respects,
the very well-being and
future of the city is at stake
in terms of its
transportation needs.
And that it may go against
his grain to embark upon
such a project as this,
which offers the possibility of
tremendous waste and corruption
but, nonetheless, is so
essential to the city's future
that it must be undertaken.
By June, Matthews had followed
through with his promise
to take back the streets,
and convinced lawmakers
to form the Rapid Transit
Commission.
Its objective was simple:
study the problem of congestion
and offer a solution.
After 50 public hearings
and ten months of study,
the commission published
a massive report.
All options were on the table,
including something
many deemed unthinkable:
a subway through the heart
of the city,
and beneath the Boston Common.
♪♪
The Boston Common is considered
almost a sacred place
to Bostonians,
and has been since the city
was essentially founded in 1630.
And it has been used
throughout Boston's history
as a community gathering spot.
There was sort of
a pledge made by city fathers
at the time
that the Boston Common area
would be kept free
of any roadways,
free of any development,
and would be open space.
Its very name,
the Boston Common,
means it's for the common
wealth, for the common good.
It is a place for all Bostonians
to be able to gather.
"You're going to dig up
the Boston Common to build
some sort of a silly thing that
we've never heard of before?"
People were horrified.
There was a lot
of opposition to it.
"Save the Common" became the
battle cry of outraged citizens.
Letters poured in
from across the country.
Americans demanded
not a single shovel disturb
the sacred soil
of the Boston Common.
Protests were so passionate
that an exasperated Matthews
brought in two former
park commissioners to defend
the urgent need of a subway.
The young mayor
also fought off plans
for an elevated train system
downtown,
like the one running
in New York.
Elevated railways
block the sun.
And so you've got entire avenues
that are perpetually
in a kind of twilight.
The other thing is elevated
trains were filthy.
They're run with
steam locomotives
and they vent cinders, smoke,
black soot,
and that settles on the city.
One of the little tricks...
A PR trick you might say...
Is that someone superimposed
photographs of a New York
steam-powered elevated train
running down Tremont Street.
And when people saw that
they said,
"Well, that's no good either."
When the elevated plan
was voted down,
Matthews saw his chance
and intensified his advocacy
for a subway.
Armed with data from the
Rapid Transit Commission report,
he argued that a subway
would cut transit time
by two thirds to one half,
and that streetcars
traveling underground
would not be crippled
by inclement weather.
The Boston subway was not
a foregone conclusion,
not by a long shot.
There was tremendous resistance,
first by the merchants
in downtown Boston.
There was a petition at one
point where 12,000 businessmen
in Boston opposed the subway.
There was going to be streets
torn up, sewer systems affected,
water lines affected, wires,
electrical lines affected.
Secondly, folks felt
like traveling underground
was very close
to the nether world,
that you were getting closer
to the devil,
that you were taking
this great risk in God's eyes
by traveling on a subway.
The debate had dragged on for
months and Matthews was fed up.
He had done everything he could
to reassure Bostonians.
He explained that the subway
would not cut through
the Common,
it would only encroach
upon its edge,
the $5 million project would
provide desperately needed jobs,
the air underground
would be safe to breathe.
"The facts of the matter simply
are," Matthews proclaimed,
"that the streets of Boston
"are no longer highways
for public travel,
"they are simply yards
for the storage of cars.
The time has come for action."
On July 24, 1894,
Bostonians went to the polls
to vote on the city's
transportation future.
By the narrowest of margins,
the subway plan was approved.
On the morning
of March 28, 1895,
light snow dusted the hats
and overcoats of a dozen men
standing in a quiet corner
of the Boston Common.
With little ceremony, a shovel
was driven into the ground
and the transformation
of the nation's public
transportation system began.
The 1.8-mile subway route
would be built in two phases.
The first phase was L-shaped,
cutting through the heart
of the city.
Beginning at the southwest
corner of the Boston Common,
workers would dig east
to the corner of Tremont
and Boylston streets,
before tunneling beneath Tremont
to the base of the historic
Park Street Church.
The second phase would run
from Park Street along Tremont
to North Station.
Before excavation could begin,
every tree in the historic
Boston Common was accounted for,
and 130 elms relocated.
Barely a month into the project,
a worker was bending down
to pick up what he thought
was a twig.
They realized after studying it
a little more closely
that it was in fact not a twig,
and was a piece
of a human skeleton.
It was a bone.
It turns out that
this was the site
of a Revolutionary graveyard,
a burial ground,
and that the construction
had disrupted that,
and everybody is taken aback
by that.
There's real concern, "What
are we going to do about this?
We need to handle this in a...
in a reverential way."
In the coming months, city
workers identified 910 bodies
and carefully reinterred them
in a common grave.
This gave ammunition to the
opponents of the subway,
about this religious issue
that man was not meant
to travel underground.
And this was almost symbolic
of the fact
that we shouldn't be doing that,
that God had a hand in this,
in the discovery
of this graveyard
because He didn't want us
to do that.
"They have sacrificed
the Common,"
one Boston newspaper bemoaned,
"and now it seems that the dead
are not to be allowed to rest
quietly in their graves."
They were being asked to put
their faith in these engineers
and just trust them
that this would be safe.
We're going to build something
underground,
under the streets,
and the street's not going
to collapse on us,
and the subway's going
to be safe.
And it was a big leap of faith
for people to accept it,
to embrace it.
There had been
underground aqueducts.
There had been
some underground tunnels.
But this was a major
construction novelty
to build a steel and concrete
structure beneath city streets.
It was basically a work that
was done by men with picks,
and shovels, and wheelbarrows.
Hundreds of Irish and Italian
laborers
worked for 15 cents an hour.
They began to muscle their way
deep into the Earth.
First, ten feet of the trench
was excavated,
the dirt tossed into carts
and hauled away by horses.
As the trench deepened,
workers installed
eight-inch-thick wooden braces
against the walls
to prevent collapse.
Large derricks hoisted up
dirt-filled skips
and dumped the soil
onto small steam trains
that carried it away.
Steel I-beams were erected
as sidewalls
and laid across the top,
serving as the roof
of the tunnel.
Above ground, masons finished
the roof by laying brick arches
atop the beams prior to being
covered again with soil.
A concrete foundation
was poured,
and then covered with crushed
stone on which the steel tracks
and wooden ties would be laid.
But not everyone was pleased.
During construction
of the subway
there is tremendous chaos
in Boston.
There are still above ground
trolleys that are moving.
There are merchants whose...
the front of their stores
are blocked by construction
and by workers.
So there is this
enormous disruption,
as you would imagine
with any public works project,
but think of one in a core city
where you're now attempting
to go underground
for the first time ever.
That kind of heavy digging
was not typically seen
in the cities.
I think it had to have been
something of a shock
to see this degree of excavation
and also just to look down
into these holes and wonder
what's going on down there.
On the morning of March 4, 1897,
police officer Michael Whalen
detected the smell of gas
at the intersection of Tremont
and Boylston streets.
It had been lingering for months
as workers rerouted
the gas lines
beneath the streets.
This day, however, the smell was
stronger than usual.
As Whalen stood
in front of the Hotel Pelham,
three crowded streetcars
rounded the corner.
Trolley 461
caught Whalen's attention
He looked down as its wheels
screeched over the rails,
causing sparks to fly
in the air.
On board the trolley, passengers
gagged from the smell of gas.
The massive explosion
ripped through the intersection.
The shattered windows
of the Hotel Pelham
showered Officer Whalen
in glass.
It sent both of these cars,
which were filled
with probably close to
a hundred passengers in all,
straight up into the air
in a huge ball of fire.
It was a massive explosion and
those cars came crashing down
to the earth
in a ball of flames.
"A number of persons dashed up
to an electric car,"
one passenger recounted,
"and to their horror
found that the conductor
was burning alive."
In all, ten people were killed
from the blast,
and more than 50
gravely injured.
The media's coverage
of the explosion turned into
a public relations nightmare
for city officials.
They now had to scramble
to convince the public
that riding underground on
the subway's electric trolleys
was indeed safe.
Was the tunnel damaged?
Did it crack?
Was it destroyed?
Nobody knew for sure
right after the explosion.
People were reminded
of the fact that,
"We're going to be riding
on a train in a dark tunnel
surrounded by all of these
gas lines."
The city and the state
go to great lengths to explain
that it was an accident,
that a worker had mistakenly
ruptured a gas pipe,
which is what caused it, that
is was not a natural gas issue.
The subway was completely safe.
Work on the subway
proceeded apace,
but nobody knew for certain
if the city's PR campaign
registered with a public
already skittish
about traveling underground.
September 1, 1897,
it was a beautiful morning.
It was bright and clear.
And in a New England-like
fashion,
Boston was not prepared
to do a huge celebration
to announce the opening
of its subway.
There were no speeches planned.
There were no big marquees,
or giant signs,
or anything like that.
It was really just another day
in Boston.
The first streetcar,
driven by the veteran
West End motorman Jimmy Reed,
left the Allston train shed
at 6:00 a.m.
At each stop,
more and more people crowded
onto car number 1752
until it was over capacity.
Passengers excitedly waved
American flags as they rode
the first subway car
in their country's history.
It pulled up right to the crest
of Arlington Street
where it was going to go
underground and into the tunnel.
The first subway car
just clanged its gong
and just went down the ramp,
and everybody who was
on the subway car stood up,
glimpsed ahead to see
what they could see,
and in fact someone
in the back of the car yelled,
"Down in front!"
"The passengers had packed
themselves in like sardines,"
noted the Boston Globe, "And,
yelling like wild animals,
dipped down the incline
for the underground run."
The headline in many papers was,
"People Leave
the Face of the Earth."
And they left the face of the
earth and they went under it.
People would previously leave
the face of the earth
in a condition
where they wouldn't return
to the face of the earth.
They'd be buried.
Now people were traveling
beneath the ground
and emerging later.
People were just struck
by how dry it was,
and how clean the air smelled,
and how it looked.
It just looked beautiful,
and sparkling, and white.
There had been a lot of reasons
to still be skeptical,
and cynical, and fearful.
All the things that people
had been afraid of,
those fears washed away
in that moment.
They went to a lot of trouble
to light these areas.
That's bringing the sublime
into the underworld.
That's making you feel,
"I'm safe.
Nothing's going to harm me."
Despite lingering fears
and doubts,
curiosity and excitement
prevailed.
City officials were shocked
at the day's final numbers:
250,000 people rode the
underground rails of the subway
on Boston's first day.
It was like a light switch
went off once the subways
began running.
All of those
above-ground trolleys
in the downtown area are gone.
It accomplishes exactly
what it's supposed to do.
It alleviates congestion in the
city of Boston, and it creates
a transportation grid and
framework for the city
for years and years to come.
In its first year of operation,
50 million passengers
rode the Boston subway.
And the once-frightening idea
of riding a train underground
became a part of daily life
in cities across America.
Within ten years of Boston's
unceremonious opening day,
New York and Philadelphia
opened their own subways
with more American cities
soon to follow.
The decision to build a subway
is remarkable in demonstrating
how Americans were willing
to try something new
and place their bets
on the future.
That they understood
that technology was reshaping
their world and electricity,
the tremendous potential of it,
is going to be unleashed
here in the subway system.
Frank Sprague's electrification
of Richmond triggered a boon
for the young engineer
as he acquired over half
of the 200 electric railway
contracts in the country.
His company, however,
lacked the capital
to compete with larger
electrical manufacturers
that were quickly expanding.
One year after Sprague's
demonstration in Richmond
set the standard for electric
railway systems across America,
he was bought out by
Edison General Electric Company.
Shortly thereafter,
Sprague's name was removed
from all the equipment
he had developed
and replaced
with the Edison name.
Frank Julian Sprague
lived in the shadow
of one of the great inventors
of all time,
which is Thomas Edison.
And I think because of that
he never quite got the due
and recognition
that he really deserved.
But Frank Sprague played
as important a role
in the development
and growth of cities
as any person in our history.
His motor is one of the most
important contributions,
right there alongside
Henry Ford's vehicle
and the Wright brothers' plane,
as one of the most important
engineering achievements
of our time.
♪♪
of Monday, March 12, 1888,
the east coast of the United
States from Virginia to Maine
awoke to the most severe
blizzard in American history.
Four feet of snow
fell from the skies,
and fierce winds
created snowdrifts
up to 50 feet high.
The Blizzard of 1888
crippled the entire northeast
and shut down all of the streets
and all of the transportation
in the cities.
It forced a lot
of soul searching
and thinking about
how cities moved, and lived,
and breathed, and operated.
With over 400 dead and citizens
left scared and angry,
the blizzard underlined
a transportation crisis
that had been escalating
for decades.
In a booming economy,
cities were flooded with
thousands of immigrants
and rural Americans seeking
opportunity
in a newly mechanized world.
The problem is that
everybody's crowded
into a fairly small area.
The available
modes of transportation are slow
and cumbersome.
The city is growing,
but the transit system
isn't growing with it.
America was in danger of choking
on its own progress.
In no place was the problem
more overwhelming
than the nation's
most congested city, Boston,
where nearly 400,000 people
packed into a downtown
of less than a square mile.
There are almost 8,000 horses
in Boston
pulling the trolley railways
around the city.
It is a cacophony of noise,
dust, horse manure, smells,
in the downtown area,
extremely congested.
As America struggled to address
its transportation crisis,
leaders in Boston pursued
a radical solution.
But their race to build
the nation's first subway
would clash against political
gridlock, selfish businessmen,
and a terrified citizenry.
The idea of a subway in Boston
was an enormous risk.
It was a breathtaking jump
into the unknown
and that can't be
underestimated.
This was a jump
into the unknown.
In early 1882, a young American
naval officer on leave
walked the crowded streets
of London.
Frank Sprague,
just 24 years old,
had heard of the world's
first subway,
the London Underground.
Hailed as an engineering marvel,
he wanted to see it for himself.
As he descended from the street
down the steps into darkness,
he could hear the roar
of the trains thundering
through the tunnels below.
In 1863, when the
London Underground opened
it was a coal-powered steam
engine running underground.
The subway coming through
London's tubes
was spewing dark soot, and
smoke, and sparks into the air.
One journalist who rode
on the London subway
compared it to standing next to
someone blowing cigar smoke
in your face
for the entire time.
It was just a miserable
riding experience.
Sprague, an aspiring inventor,
thought there had to be
a better way.
It was the age
of electrical invention...
The light bulb, the telephone,
the dynamo...
And Sprague,
having studied electricity
at the Naval Academy,
was full of ideas.
Frank Julian Sprague
is a driven person.
A colleague once said
of Frank Sprague,
"It seems as though he had wires
coiling and uncoiling
inside of him."
He was constantly in motion.
Sprague had spent a year at sea
with the navy,
inventing in his head.
It's very cerebral.
He keeps a notebook.
And in the notebook he draws
all these schematics,
all these blueprints,
all these drawings;
he sketches out these ideas.
There are armatures.
There are new, improved versions
of arc lighting.
There are electric motors.
And the notebook is...
you can almost feel the energy...
It vibrates, it really does.
He senses that this new force,
electricity,
it seems almost limitless
in its potential.
And above all he senses
that electricity can move things
if people can learn how
to harness it and put it to work
in the form of electric motors.
With his frequent trips
underground while in London,
Sprague came up
with a revolutionary plan:
He sketched out a subway system
where electricity
would supply the power.
It would be conducted to the
trains from an overhead source,
through a motor, and then
back to the rails below.
Sprague was so confident
in his idea
that he immediately applied
for a patent.
In this era, late 19th century,
electricity is magic
and it has a magical
set of effects.
But also there's a great deal
of anxiety that went
with the magic of it.
It's invisible,
it's very powerful,
it can kill you
but you can't see it,
so there's all sorts of...
of anxieties.
You've got potency
and invisibility.
You can argue the science,
but the fear is there.
As cities across America were
being wired for electricity,
newspapers reported
on horrific accidents.
Sprague's vision for a subway in
America depended on the public
overcoming its fear of this
unsettling power source.
Convincing Americans
that traveling underground
was a good idea would be
an even more daunting challenge.
There was an enormous
fear of going underground
in this restricted environment.
One of the health considerations
at the turn of the century
was tuberculosis
and pulmonary disease.
And people were just concerned
that living, traveling in this
underground environment
could be very detrimental
to health.
The underground is scary
for two reasons.
One is the association
with death.
We just know that
in the underworld
we are getting closer
to another realm.
But the underworld is also scary
because it's not friendly
to human life...
Never was, never will be.
Everything you do down there
has to be done with engineering
to enable humans to survive.
You put those two together
and you can see why people
are afraid of the underworld.
By 1883, Frank Sprague
had landed what he thought
was his dream job
when he was recruited
by the celebrated inventor
Thomas Edison.
At Edison's lab in New Jersey,
Sprague hoped to begin work
on electric motors and railways.
Edison had other plans,
assigning him to his
construction department
to work on
central power stations
for his vast lighting systems.
What Sprague would often do is
he would go on these assignments
for Thomas Edison,
but at night, and on weekends,
and in any waking moment he had
when he was not doing something
for Edison, he was working
on his motor.
Eventually,
Edison did ask Sprague
to work on motors
for his company.
But the young engineer knew
that anything he designed
would have Edison's name on it.
In April of 1884,
less than a year
after joining Edison's team,
Sprague was forced to decide
between staying on with Edison
and risk giving up ownership
of his motor ideas,
or venturing out on his own.
Sprague knows that if he
develops a motor at Menlo Park,
even if Edison has been
only peripherally involved,
the result will be hailed
as Edison's latest,
greatest invention.
That's not what Sprague
wants at all.
Sprague resigned.
Within months he was displaying
a variety of his groundbreaking
electric motors
at the International Electrical
Exhibition in Philadelphia.
Sprague's motor's different
from any other electric motor
at the time because it was
what Sprague called
a self-regulated motor.
And what that meant was
it was able to bear different
size loads at the same speed.
So it could carry ten pounds,
or 20 pounds, or 30 pounds
and lift it at the same speed.
It made Sprague's
electric motors
much more attractive
for potential users,
particularly in fields
like industry
where you're powering
crude elevators,
or you're powering railways.
Even his former boss
was impressed.
"His is the only true motor,"
Edison told a reporter.
Such high praise
from the world-famous inventor
was invaluable in giving Sprague
an edge over his competitors.
One month after
the Philadelphia exhibition,
he launched the Sprague Electric
Railway & Motor Company
and began promoting his ideas
across the country.
His potential customers
included transit moguls
in America's largest
and most congested cities.
Frank Sprague knew that
in order for a motor to succeed,
in order for his business
to succeed,
he was going to need
a big client.
He was going to need someone
to take a chance on him.
In 1886, in a narrow alleyway
between two brick buildings
off East 24th Street
in Manhattan,
Sprague nervously attached
his electric motors
to a railroad flat car.
Sprague's potential investor
that day
was one of the top ten
richest men in America.
Jay Gould owned more railroad
track and telegraph lines
than anyone in the country.
He also had a controlling
interest
in the Manhattan Elevated
Railway Company,
and was in a search of a new way
to power his trains.
If Sprague could convince Gould
that his electric motor
was the answer,
it would change
the young engineer's life.
One of the ways you made money
in the United States
in the Gilded Age,
was to invest in new technology.
That's true of steel.
It's true of oil.
And it's also true
of mass transit.
So who's making decisions about
where the transit lines go,
when they're built, what kind of
technology they have?
By and large,
it's private industrialists.
It's capitalists.
It's the people who have
a lot of money.
Sprague positioned Gould
at the front of the flatbed car,
hoping the vantage point would
give him a more thrilling ride.
Sprague pushed the lever
to move the car forward.
In his zeal and confidence
to show Gould just how smooth
his motor could power
this train car,
he probably became
a little overzealous
and pushed his motor too hard.
And what happened was
as Jay Gould was standing
on this streetcar,
a burst of sparks shot out
right by Gould's legs.
And Jay Gould went running off
and said, "Never on my railway
will we use this crazy
new form of energy."
Here's Gould,
who would be perfectly willing
to take million dollar risks
in building railways
across the United States,
but electricity
was such a new thing
that when there was an explosion
and a flash on the streetcar,
it scared Gould to death.
And Gould wanted nothing
to do with Sprague.
By the end of 1886,
Frank Sprague was running
out of money
to conduct his tests
and had to face the reality
that no one was interested
in his electric motor.
What he didn't know,
was that 200 miles to the north
his ideas had caught
the attention of one
of the biggest transportation
kings in the country.
On March 4, 1887 Henry Whitney,
president of the newly formed
West End Street Railway Company,
arrived at the Massachusetts
State House in Boston.
Years earlier,
Whitney began purchasing
tracts of land
along Beacon Street,
a carriage road in the
wealthy suburb of Brookline
that led straight
into the downtown.
Whitney had invested his fortune
in real estate
and owned almost four million
square feet of land.
If transit lines could reach
the desirable suburb,
his property values
would skyrocket.
The development of Boston,
as in most other cities,
was largely in private hands.
And these developers of large
tracts of property recognized
that their profitability
depends upon making these areas
accessible to the downtown area.
And so there is a direct
and crucial link
between development
and transportation.
Boston was bursting
at the seams.
Its population had more than
doubled since the Civil War,
to nearly 450,000.
The city's horse-drawn street
railways were overwhelmed,
carrying more than 91 million
passengers a year.
The streets were
absolutely packed every day
with all these hundreds
of thousands of people
pouring into the downtown.
So you really had just this
incredible mass of people
in a very small area.
Seven street railway companies
aggressively competed
for passengers
in Boston's downtown.
Each of them has their own
routes and fares.
And it was this crazy,
convoluted system.
If you wanted a streetcar in
1887 you would raise your hand
and all these different cars
might race to pick you up.
The term "transit system"
implies that there's
a coherence.
I think it implies that there
is a kind of public service.
And I don't think that's how
most transit operators
view this.
It's the profit motive
that determines the quality
and the amount of service.
At the State House,
Whitney boldly proposed
the consolidation of all seven
street railway companies
into one large transit system,
which he would control.
His argument was for efficiency,
but he knew that
by controlling all the lines,
he would be positioned
to do as he pleased
with his suburban expansion.
I think there was actually
a lot of support in many ways
from the larger public.
You might think,
"Oh, a monopoly.
People aren't going to like
this," but there was a sense
that it was actually
very inefficient
to have so many different
street railway companies
that they were competing
for passengers.
Whitney suggested that to rid
the congestion
strangling the streets,
it was necessary to construct
tunnels beneath the city.
It caught everyone by surprise
this idea of a tunnel.
It was exciting, it was scary,
it was a big deal
for Henry Whitney
to suggest that.
But he threw out a third thing,
which really caught
people's attention,
which was acknowledging
that the horse had seen its day
and that perhaps
the electric motor was, in fact,
the future of urban transit
and the way that Boston
needed to go.
And he put himself on the line
with this idea
that the electric motor,
which until that point
still was not
a really proven technology,
but something that he had seen,
and believed in,
and felt like it could work.
The Massachusetts General Court
granted Whitney the right
to consolidate Boston's
streetcars and the permission
to build a subway if he desired.
His West End Street
Railway Company now controlled
1,700 street railway cars
and 200 miles of track,
making it the largest transit
system in the world...
Bigger than anything in London,
Chicago, or New York.
But Whitney's biggest challenge
remained:
finding a way to replace
the 8,400 horses
that were grinding
Boston's streets to a halt.
In the summer of 1887,
Frank Sprague was desperate.
He needed to find a place to
demonstrate his electric railway
on a large scale.
He found it
in an unlikely place.
The Richmond Union Passenger
Railway Company in Virginia
asked Sprague to build
a complete electric railway
system.
12 miles of track, a
375-horsepower electrical plant,
and overhead lines to carry
electric current to 40 cars
and 80 motors.
He had just 90 days to construct
it and wouldn't get paid a dime
until the system was up
and running.
Experts said it couldn't
be done:
the Richmond hills
were too steep
and Sprague's motor wasn't
powerful enough.
People have tried to set up
a railway system
using the existing technologies
of the period...
Horse-drawn railways.
But Richmond is a horse killer.
That's an awful way to put it
but, the topography,
the landscape, it's just brutal
to try and make this thing work
using horses.
It was a massive risk.
But Sprague was forced
to bet his company
on the near impossible project.
"Failure in Richmond,"
Sprague said,
"meant blasted hopes
and financial ruin."
It was a contract that no one
in their right mind
would ever sign,
essentially being asked
to build this on spec.
But Sprague at that point
was close to desperate.
He needed money.
His experiment with Jay Gould
had failed.
He did not have an investor.
He needed his project to succeed
and he needed it
to succeed soon.
Unfortunately, shortly after
he signs the contract
he is stricken
with typhoid fever.
And it takes over a month
of convalescence
to really bring himself
back into working shape.
When he does visit Richmond
he is profoundly discouraged.
The conditions
are much more challenging
than he had imagined.
The first set of rails
that's laid down
is completely unsuitable.
The whole thing looks
like a disaster.
Sprague's crew spent weeks
rebuilding the entire system
of tracks.
To help prevent the motors
from disengaging
over the bumpy terrain,
Sprague would test out
his innovative wheelbarrow
mount,
a design he had been
working on for years.
What was unique to Sprague
was his ability
to design a mounting,
so that the motor could move
up and down while it remained
meshed with the gear
on the axle.
It was a significant
breakthrough.
He was confident the motors
would stay on the streetcars,
but he didn't know
if they could scale
Richmond's steep hills.
Sprague set up a trial run
at night, hoping no one
would see a potentially
embarrassing failure.
The car scales the hill
and comes down the other side,
makes a turn,
climbs another hill
that's even steeper.
Sprague has no idea
what's going to happen.
The car makes it to the top.
And as it does
the motor locks up.
Sprague realizes
what's happened.
He's actually burned out
the motor.
Sprague needed more power.
With the 90-day deadline
looming,
he scrambled to re-design
the motors with larger gears
and have them fabricated
by a machinist in Rhode Island.
When they finally arrived,
Sprague got the streetcars
running without any burnouts.
As the weeks slipped away,
Sprague and his engineers
worked round the clock,
tackling one technical problem
after another.
"I am completely overwhelmed
with work,"
Sprague wrote to a friend,
"so much so
that I hardly know whether I
stand on my head or my heels."
Finally, on May 15, 1888, after
investing $75,000 of his own,
the Richmond system
was up and running.
Richmond is a real
turning point.
Sprague was able, on the basis
of Richmond's performance,
to show people real data.
This is what the railway system
in Richmond earned
before it was electrified.
This is what it earned after.
This is how much money
you can make.
The day after the Richmond
contract terms were satisfied,
Frank Sprague wrote
to Henry Whitney in Boston.
"We are ready to run
commercially,"
reported the young engineer,
hoping to convince
the world's largest streetcar
owner to buy in.
Whitney agreed to travel
to Richmond,
his head full of questions
and doubt.
Whitney had misgivings
when he got to Richmond.
This is a rural Southern city
without the concentration
of business,
without the narrow streets
that Boston had.
At about midnight,
Whitney's brought to the bottom
of a steep hill.
And at the bottom of this hill
Frank Sprague has lined up
22 streetcars.
He's never tried this before.
He talks to the electrician
at the power plant and he says,
"Give her all you've got
and don't let up."
The lights actually get lower
because the strain on the system
is so... is so intense.
And slowly each one started up,
one right after the other.
The power station
didn't blow out.
Fuses didn't blow.
The cars could all run
at the same time.
Sprague's brash demonstration
and risk had paid off.
Whitney was impressed,
and headed back to Boston
with the intention of
electrifying his entire system
of streetcars.
There's certainly no doubt
that his demonstration
to Whitney and its success
was an important turning point
in the history of mass transit
in America,
and in the history
of mass transit in the world.
There's a search for a practical
mechanical mode
of transportation.
And what Frank Sprague's
invention means is that
we've ended that search,
that we've found it.
It's a big distance from
this little railway in Virginia
to the Boston subway,
but you can envision
going there now.
Upon his return from Richmond,
Henry Whitney immediately
contracted Sprague to supply
30 electric cars to his West End
Street Railway Company.
Whitney envisioned passengers
gliding smoothly
along Beacon Street
into and out of downtown Boston,
but it would not happen easily.
Key to Sprague's innovation
were the overhead wires
supplying power
to the street cars.
Boston's city leaders, however,
would not allow them
to be installed.
Electricity was seen as a very,
very dangerous
form of energy,
particularly when wires
would break
and they'd fall to the ground,
people would touch them
and be electrocuted.
So people had to be convinced
that electric-powered streetcars
were a safe way to travel.
To persuade city officials,
Whitney arranged
for a test ride.
With Sprague driving,
the electric streetcar sped up
to 25 miles per hour,
propelling the lawmakers faster
than they had ever
traveled before.
Exhilarated by the ride,
Boston leaders granted Whitney
permission
to install the overhead wires.
He then moved forward with plans
to build a central power station
in Boston's South End that would
be the largest in the world.
With its chimney 250 feet high,
it was the tallest structure
in Boston,
30 feet higher
than the Bunker Hill monument.
Just like Frank Sprague
was a big thinker,
Henry Whitney had this vision
and this passion.
He really believed he could be
a change agent for how people
moved about and how
the transit system operated.
He made people re-think
how their city could look
and could function.
Electrification commenced
rapidly and profits were soon
rolling in for the West End
Street Railway Company.
In just five years,
more than 80% of the system
was electrified,
and overhead,
wires lined the city streets.
Despite the monetary success
of the West End,
the electric trolleys
proved so popular,
the streets were clogged
worse than ever.
When Whitney signed a contract
with Sprague,
to electrify
the West End Street Railway,
it wasn't the end of a problem.
It made a problem worse.
And as the cars made their way
into downtown Boston,
down Boylston Street,
turned onto Tremont Street,
it just got more crowded, and
more crowded, and more crowded.
Streetcars were pouring
into downtown Boston.
Electrification made it easier
to continue to expand
the streetcar system
farther and farther out,
but there were a lot
of safety concerns.
These electric streetcars
are more dangerous
than the older horse-drawn ones,
and more pedestrians
are getting killed by
streetcars.
Despite the chaos
on the streets,
Henry Whitney's bold subway idea
had been languishing
for the past four years.
That changed on the evening
of January 5, 1891.
That night,
Henry Whitney hosted a banquet
for influential real estate
developers
at the exclusive Algonquin Club.
Also in attendance was Boston's
newest mayor, Nathan Matthews.
In his inaugural address
earlier that day,
Matthews pledged
to deal aggressively
with the rapid transit needs
of the city.
"I believe the city government
should grapple
with this problem," he said,
"rather than leave the matter
entirely to the interested
action of private corporations."
Mayor Matthews was genuinely
trying to improve the efficiency
of the way the city government
worked.
And he very much is an example
of the good government
reform movement,
arguing that we need to make
government
more in the public interest.
It should not be the system
of patronage,
people trading favors.
Nathan Matthews looked at Henry
Whitney and started to wonder,
"Maybe he's never
going to build a subway."
And that's when I think Matthews
started to get frustrated
and really dig his heels in
to try to take back
the streets of Boston
from Henry Whitney and say,
"These are city streets,
"and I'm going to be the one
to make the big decisions about
what we do, and how we do it,
and when we do it, not you."
In speeches, Whitney explained
that it was simply too expensive
for the West End
to build a subway.
"I have, personally,
no desire for anything
"that I can make out of the
underground road," he said.
"It is so full of dangers,
I am free to say to you
that I shrink from the task."
This is an era in which cities
and states are prepared
to make significant investments
in infrastructure.
Matthews recognizes
that in some respects,
the very well-being and
future of the city is at stake
in terms of its
transportation needs.
And that it may go against
his grain to embark upon
such a project as this,
which offers the possibility of
tremendous waste and corruption
but, nonetheless, is so
essential to the city's future
that it must be undertaken.
By June, Matthews had followed
through with his promise
to take back the streets,
and convinced lawmakers
to form the Rapid Transit
Commission.
Its objective was simple:
study the problem of congestion
and offer a solution.
After 50 public hearings
and ten months of study,
the commission published
a massive report.
All options were on the table,
including something
many deemed unthinkable:
a subway through the heart
of the city,
and beneath the Boston Common.
♪♪
The Boston Common is considered
almost a sacred place
to Bostonians,
and has been since the city
was essentially founded in 1630.
And it has been used
throughout Boston's history
as a community gathering spot.
There was sort of
a pledge made by city fathers
at the time
that the Boston Common area
would be kept free
of any roadways,
free of any development,
and would be open space.
Its very name,
the Boston Common,
means it's for the common
wealth, for the common good.
It is a place for all Bostonians
to be able to gather.
"You're going to dig up
the Boston Common to build
some sort of a silly thing that
we've never heard of before?"
People were horrified.
There was a lot
of opposition to it.
"Save the Common" became the
battle cry of outraged citizens.
Letters poured in
from across the country.
Americans demanded
not a single shovel disturb
the sacred soil
of the Boston Common.
Protests were so passionate
that an exasperated Matthews
brought in two former
park commissioners to defend
the urgent need of a subway.
The young mayor
also fought off plans
for an elevated train system
downtown,
like the one running
in New York.
Elevated railways
block the sun.
And so you've got entire avenues
that are perpetually
in a kind of twilight.
The other thing is elevated
trains were filthy.
They're run with
steam locomotives
and they vent cinders, smoke,
black soot,
and that settles on the city.
One of the little tricks...
A PR trick you might say...
Is that someone superimposed
photographs of a New York
steam-powered elevated train
running down Tremont Street.
And when people saw that
they said,
"Well, that's no good either."
When the elevated plan
was voted down,
Matthews saw his chance
and intensified his advocacy
for a subway.
Armed with data from the
Rapid Transit Commission report,
he argued that a subway
would cut transit time
by two thirds to one half,
and that streetcars
traveling underground
would not be crippled
by inclement weather.
The Boston subway was not
a foregone conclusion,
not by a long shot.
There was tremendous resistance,
first by the merchants
in downtown Boston.
There was a petition at one
point where 12,000 businessmen
in Boston opposed the subway.
There was going to be streets
torn up, sewer systems affected,
water lines affected, wires,
electrical lines affected.
Secondly, folks felt
like traveling underground
was very close
to the nether world,
that you were getting closer
to the devil,
that you were taking
this great risk in God's eyes
by traveling on a subway.
The debate had dragged on for
months and Matthews was fed up.
He had done everything he could
to reassure Bostonians.
He explained that the subway
would not cut through
the Common,
it would only encroach
upon its edge,
the $5 million project would
provide desperately needed jobs,
the air underground
would be safe to breathe.
"The facts of the matter simply
are," Matthews proclaimed,
"that the streets of Boston
"are no longer highways
for public travel,
"they are simply yards
for the storage of cars.
The time has come for action."
On July 24, 1894,
Bostonians went to the polls
to vote on the city's
transportation future.
By the narrowest of margins,
the subway plan was approved.
On the morning
of March 28, 1895,
light snow dusted the hats
and overcoats of a dozen men
standing in a quiet corner
of the Boston Common.
With little ceremony, a shovel
was driven into the ground
and the transformation
of the nation's public
transportation system began.
The 1.8-mile subway route
would be built in two phases.
The first phase was L-shaped,
cutting through the heart
of the city.
Beginning at the southwest
corner of the Boston Common,
workers would dig east
to the corner of Tremont
and Boylston streets,
before tunneling beneath Tremont
to the base of the historic
Park Street Church.
The second phase would run
from Park Street along Tremont
to North Station.
Before excavation could begin,
every tree in the historic
Boston Common was accounted for,
and 130 elms relocated.
Barely a month into the project,
a worker was bending down
to pick up what he thought
was a twig.
They realized after studying it
a little more closely
that it was in fact not a twig,
and was a piece
of a human skeleton.
It was a bone.
It turns out that
this was the site
of a Revolutionary graveyard,
a burial ground,
and that the construction
had disrupted that,
and everybody is taken aback
by that.
There's real concern, "What
are we going to do about this?
We need to handle this in a...
in a reverential way."
In the coming months, city
workers identified 910 bodies
and carefully reinterred them
in a common grave.
This gave ammunition to the
opponents of the subway,
about this religious issue
that man was not meant
to travel underground.
And this was almost symbolic
of the fact
that we shouldn't be doing that,
that God had a hand in this,
in the discovery
of this graveyard
because He didn't want us
to do that.
"They have sacrificed
the Common,"
one Boston newspaper bemoaned,
"and now it seems that the dead
are not to be allowed to rest
quietly in their graves."
They were being asked to put
their faith in these engineers
and just trust them
that this would be safe.
We're going to build something
underground,
under the streets,
and the street's not going
to collapse on us,
and the subway's going
to be safe.
And it was a big leap of faith
for people to accept it,
to embrace it.
There had been
underground aqueducts.
There had been
some underground tunnels.
But this was a major
construction novelty
to build a steel and concrete
structure beneath city streets.
It was basically a work that
was done by men with picks,
and shovels, and wheelbarrows.
Hundreds of Irish and Italian
laborers
worked for 15 cents an hour.
They began to muscle their way
deep into the Earth.
First, ten feet of the trench
was excavated,
the dirt tossed into carts
and hauled away by horses.
As the trench deepened,
workers installed
eight-inch-thick wooden braces
against the walls
to prevent collapse.
Large derricks hoisted up
dirt-filled skips
and dumped the soil
onto small steam trains
that carried it away.
Steel I-beams were erected
as sidewalls
and laid across the top,
serving as the roof
of the tunnel.
Above ground, masons finished
the roof by laying brick arches
atop the beams prior to being
covered again with soil.
A concrete foundation
was poured,
and then covered with crushed
stone on which the steel tracks
and wooden ties would be laid.
But not everyone was pleased.
During construction
of the subway
there is tremendous chaos
in Boston.
There are still above ground
trolleys that are moving.
There are merchants whose...
the front of their stores
are blocked by construction
and by workers.
So there is this
enormous disruption,
as you would imagine
with any public works project,
but think of one in a core city
where you're now attempting
to go underground
for the first time ever.
That kind of heavy digging
was not typically seen
in the cities.
I think it had to have been
something of a shock
to see this degree of excavation
and also just to look down
into these holes and wonder
what's going on down there.
On the morning of March 4, 1897,
police officer Michael Whalen
detected the smell of gas
at the intersection of Tremont
and Boylston streets.
It had been lingering for months
as workers rerouted
the gas lines
beneath the streets.
This day, however, the smell was
stronger than usual.
As Whalen stood
in front of the Hotel Pelham,
three crowded streetcars
rounded the corner.
Trolley 461
caught Whalen's attention
He looked down as its wheels
screeched over the rails,
causing sparks to fly
in the air.
On board the trolley, passengers
gagged from the smell of gas.
The massive explosion
ripped through the intersection.
The shattered windows
of the Hotel Pelham
showered Officer Whalen
in glass.
It sent both of these cars,
which were filled
with probably close to
a hundred passengers in all,
straight up into the air
in a huge ball of fire.
It was a massive explosion and
those cars came crashing down
to the earth
in a ball of flames.
"A number of persons dashed up
to an electric car,"
one passenger recounted,
"and to their horror
found that the conductor
was burning alive."
In all, ten people were killed
from the blast,
and more than 50
gravely injured.
The media's coverage
of the explosion turned into
a public relations nightmare
for city officials.
They now had to scramble
to convince the public
that riding underground on
the subway's electric trolleys
was indeed safe.
Was the tunnel damaged?
Did it crack?
Was it destroyed?
Nobody knew for sure
right after the explosion.
People were reminded
of the fact that,
"We're going to be riding
on a train in a dark tunnel
surrounded by all of these
gas lines."
The city and the state
go to great lengths to explain
that it was an accident,
that a worker had mistakenly
ruptured a gas pipe,
which is what caused it, that
is was not a natural gas issue.
The subway was completely safe.
Work on the subway
proceeded apace,
but nobody knew for certain
if the city's PR campaign
registered with a public
already skittish
about traveling underground.
September 1, 1897,
it was a beautiful morning.
It was bright and clear.
And in a New England-like
fashion,
Boston was not prepared
to do a huge celebration
to announce the opening
of its subway.
There were no speeches planned.
There were no big marquees,
or giant signs,
or anything like that.
It was really just another day
in Boston.
The first streetcar,
driven by the veteran
West End motorman Jimmy Reed,
left the Allston train shed
at 6:00 a.m.
At each stop,
more and more people crowded
onto car number 1752
until it was over capacity.
Passengers excitedly waved
American flags as they rode
the first subway car
in their country's history.
It pulled up right to the crest
of Arlington Street
where it was going to go
underground and into the tunnel.
The first subway car
just clanged its gong
and just went down the ramp,
and everybody who was
on the subway car stood up,
glimpsed ahead to see
what they could see,
and in fact someone
in the back of the car yelled,
"Down in front!"
"The passengers had packed
themselves in like sardines,"
noted the Boston Globe, "And,
yelling like wild animals,
dipped down the incline
for the underground run."
The headline in many papers was,
"People Leave
the Face of the Earth."
And they left the face of the
earth and they went under it.
People would previously leave
the face of the earth
in a condition
where they wouldn't return
to the face of the earth.
They'd be buried.
Now people were traveling
beneath the ground
and emerging later.
People were just struck
by how dry it was,
and how clean the air smelled,
and how it looked.
It just looked beautiful,
and sparkling, and white.
There had been a lot of reasons
to still be skeptical,
and cynical, and fearful.
All the things that people
had been afraid of,
those fears washed away
in that moment.
They went to a lot of trouble
to light these areas.
That's bringing the sublime
into the underworld.
That's making you feel,
"I'm safe.
Nothing's going to harm me."
Despite lingering fears
and doubts,
curiosity and excitement
prevailed.
City officials were shocked
at the day's final numbers:
250,000 people rode the
underground rails of the subway
on Boston's first day.
It was like a light switch
went off once the subways
began running.
All of those
above-ground trolleys
in the downtown area are gone.
It accomplishes exactly
what it's supposed to do.
It alleviates congestion in the
city of Boston, and it creates
a transportation grid and
framework for the city
for years and years to come.
In its first year of operation,
50 million passengers
rode the Boston subway.
And the once-frightening idea
of riding a train underground
became a part of daily life
in cities across America.
Within ten years of Boston's
unceremonious opening day,
New York and Philadelphia
opened their own subways
with more American cities
soon to follow.
The decision to build a subway
is remarkable in demonstrating
how Americans were willing
to try something new
and place their bets
on the future.
That they understood
that technology was reshaping
their world and electricity,
the tremendous potential of it,
is going to be unleashed
here in the subway system.
Frank Sprague's electrification
of Richmond triggered a boon
for the young engineer
as he acquired over half
of the 200 electric railway
contracts in the country.
His company, however,
lacked the capital
to compete with larger
electrical manufacturers
that were quickly expanding.
One year after Sprague's
demonstration in Richmond
set the standard for electric
railway systems across America,
he was bought out by
Edison General Electric Company.
Shortly thereafter,
Sprague's name was removed
from all the equipment
he had developed
and replaced
with the Edison name.
Frank Julian Sprague
lived in the shadow
of one of the great inventors
of all time,
which is Thomas Edison.
And I think because of that
he never quite got the due
and recognition
that he really deserved.
But Frank Sprague played
as important a role
in the development
and growth of cities
as any person in our history.
His motor is one of the most
important contributions,
right there alongside
Henry Ford's vehicle
and the Wright brothers' plane,
as one of the most important
engineering achievements
of our time.
♪♪