#207 The First Subway: Beach's Pneumatic Marvel

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2016

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The first subway in New York -- the first in the United States! – travelled only a single block and failed to influence the future of transportation. And yet Alfred Ely Beach's marvelous pneumatic transit system provides us today with one of the most enchanting stories of New York during the Gilded Age. With the growing metropolis still very much confined to below 14th Street by 1850, New Yorkers frantically looked for more efficient ways to transport people out of congested neighborhoods. Elevated railroads? Moving sidewalks? Massive stone viaducts? Inventor Beach, publisher of the magazine Scientific American, believed he had the answer, using pneumatic power -- i.e. the power of pressurized air! But the state charter only gave him permission to build a pneumatic tube to deliver mail, not people. That didn't stop Beach, who began construction of his extraordinary device literally within sight of City Hall. How did Beach build such an ambitious project under secretive circumstances? What was it like to ride a pneumatic passenger car? And why don't we have pneumatic power operating our subways today? FEATURING: Boss Tweed at his most bossiness, piano tunes under Broadway and something called a centrifugal bowling alley! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys Episode 207, the first subway, beaches, pneumatic transit.
0:07.0	Hey, it's the Bowry Boys.
0:09.0	Hey.
0:10.0	Support for the Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:13.0	Join us for as little as $1 a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:21.0	Hi there, welcome to the Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:25.0	This is Tom Myers.
0:26.0	With an investigation into one of the greatest intrigues in New York City history, the story
0:34.0	of the very first subway in New York. In fact, in the United States, albeit a subway that
0:40.0	had a very brief life and covered only a very modest distance.
0:45.0	Well, but that wasn't its plan. Today, we're telling this story of Alfred Beach and his company,
0:52.0	which is pneumatic transit, which wanted to shoot New Yorkers underground through pneumatic
0:59.0	tubes, which sounds today perhaps a little bit like science fiction or fantasy.
1:05.0	Tom, what is amazing about this story is not just the ideas behind it, but the actual
1:11.0	execution of a demonstration version of this, which was built perhaps in the most conspicuous
1:17.0	area of town under the nose of Boss Tweed and the mayor of New York City.
1:22.0	And if you believe the sort of popular telling of this story, the whole thing happened in secrets
1:28.0	with dirt being carried away by candlelight at night. You know, it's a very romantic tale.
1:34.0	And part of our job today will be to try to separate a little bit of the fact from the fiction
1:41.0	and sort of the urban lore that surrounds this tale of the first subway.
1:46.0	So hold on to your seats as we recount the tubular tale of Beach's pneumatic transit.
2:47.0	So Tom, let's situate the listener.
	...

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