The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway Read Online Free PDF Page B

simple: Nonsense! The New York Times reported the flap the next day and suggested that Hall was not going to back away.
    “As the street in which the company have commenced operations is partially blocked up with wooden scaffolding and iron tubes, it is likely the mayor will at least counsel them to remove these,” the paper wrote.
    But Beach was equally stubborn. On January 8, he released a statement: “In reference to the ridiculous stories that have been circulated about our men being sworn to secrecy, and the doors being closed to all persons, there is no truth to them.” The company promised to make any repairs to the surface roads and begged for four more weeks of patience.
    Mayor Hall backed off, and Beach bought himself time. And one month later, fifty-eight days after the digging began, the tunnel was finished. It was a perfect cylinder of 312 feet. All that was needed now were the two most important pieces, the subway car and the fan to blow the car down the tracks.
    The design for the car was unlike anything people were riding on the streets above. It was much smaller than the horsecars, and upholstered seats lined the sides so that it felt like a comfortable lounge inside, with bright lighting and plenty of room to hold twenty-two people. The sliding doors closed with a whoosh.
    As for the fan, Beach knew that he needed one so powerful it could easily blow a car 120 feet long and fourteen feet wide down the tracks. He found it in Connersville, Indiana, where the P. H. & F. M. Roots Company had built a powerful fan to ventilate mines. The Roots Patent Force Rotary Blower, nicknamed the Western Tornado, was the critical piece to Beach’s pneumatic subway. At fifty tons, it was so big it took a train with five platform cars to deliver it from Indiana. It was discretely placed at the Warren Street end of the tunnel, and testing of it began.
    The air for the fan came through a shaft and grate near Murray Street, inside City Hall Park, and when the fan was working it would occasionally blow the hats off unsuspecting pedestrians passing over the grate. Down below, it worked just as Beach hoped. Vacuum-tight doors in both stations controlled the air pressure so that the passengers barely noticed the breeze from the fan. When it was in “blowing” mode, the car gently but swiftly flew down the tracks at about six miles per hour, until it tripped a wire that caused a bell to ring back at Warren Street. That was the trigger for the engineer to pull a rope that reversed the fan, putting it into “sucking” mode. And then the car would return in an equally smooth ride.
    The pneumatic subway worked. But Beach didn’t just want to impress the visitors he was planning to invite down. He wanted to dazzle them, not to mention distract them from any fears they might have of being underground with vermin and demons. He remembered the stories about how dark and miserable the London subway was. And he knew he had only one chance to convince New York that his subway was the future of transportation. He spared no expense, using more than $70,000 of his own savings to make sure the station was a place where people would actually enjoy waiting. The waiting room was enormous, more than 120 feet long, and it was lavish, with chandeliers, mirrors, a towering grandfather clock, a fountain with a basin stocked with goldfish, paintings, settees, and a grand piano.
    News that the tunnel was finished leaked out on February 19, 1870, after a reporter for The Tribune disguised himself as a worker and snuck in. His story the next day provided a detailed description of the tunnel and the stations, but it was the accompanying editorial attacking the subway as useless and not worth any further attention that galled Beach. A week later, he decided it was time to let his work be judged. On February 26, 1870, Beach invited lawmakers, reporters, and dignitaries from the science community to step down into the basement of