It took the covered wagon four to six months to cross the West. Most wagons had wooden or leather hoops on the inside for hanging milk cans, clothes, guns, or even dolls.
It took the covered wagon four to six months to cross the West. Most wagons had wooden or leather hoops on the inside for hanging milk cans, clothes, guns, or even dolls.
They spread out across the prairie like the flag itself: a sea of wagons, with their canvas coverings painted red, white, or blue. There were so many of them that this was the only way they could keep track of who belonged to which wagon train. A nation on the move, setting off across a continent at the pace of an ox.
The American covered wagon was not invented by any one individual but was a tremendous piece of folk craft, perfected over 150 years by countless anonymous carpenters, village smiths, and pioneers.
The wagons that conquered the West evolved out of the Conestogas, first mentioned in accounts going back to 1717: long, heavy wagons with low, curved tops, suited to the rutted roads of Mennonite country in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County. With their bodies painted blue and their wheels a bright red, they looked more like European tinkers’ wagons and were primarily vehicles for hauling freight. German and Scotch-Irish immigrants took them down the Great Wagon Road to the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains, then out to Ohio and Illinois.
The Conestogas were fine for these relatively short hauls, but something more was needed to take on the American West. By the time the pioneers started pushing out from St. Louis in force in the 1840s, the vehicles they used were lighter, higher, tougher, carefully calibrated for journeys of two thousand miles across deserts and mountains, rivers and swamps.
“The prairie schooner,” as it came to be known, was about the size of a family minivan today. Sturdy yet maneuverable, it pivoted on an iron or steel kingpin connected to a wagon tongue and two massive axles. Its wheels were big and wide and rimmed with iron to keep them from getting bogged down in mud or soft earth. The wagon box was generally ten feet long by four feet wide, its hardwood “Yankee bed” waterproofed so the whole wagon could be floated across rivers.
The double-canvas top that gave the prairie schooner its name was tall enough for a man to stand up under it. Often made of hemp, it was stretched out over five or six high hickory bows and waterproofed with paint or linseed oil. The whole family might sleep under it in bad weather.
Covered wagons were pieces of extraordinary workmanship. Just welding on the two pieces of the wheel rims was a painstaking art that required making the iron hot enough to fit securely but not so hot as to burn the wooden wheel. They sold for $250 and up, and a “proper outfit” of wagon, supplies, and the ten to twelve horses, mules, or preferably oxen needed to haul them usually cost $800 to $1,000. Families often saved for three, or four, or five years to buy everything. They rarely rode in them. Built without springs, they jounced enough that pioneers could leave a bucket of milk in the wagon at first light and see it churned to butter by nightfall.
Those who could walk, did. Besides, the wagons weren’t for the settlers but for their possessions. Prairie schooners weighed about 1,300 pounds themselves and could haul 3,000 pounds, but they rarely packed more than two-thirds of that weight. This might include bags of seed, an ax, a rifle, small pieces of furniture, bedding, clothes, and other finished goods that would be hard to come by on the frontier: a skillet, a Dutch oven, a coffeepot, an oil lamp, a spinning wheel—though such items often ended up lining one last mountain pass that was just too steep. Most of what they carried was food: flour, lard, and bacon wrapped in bran, to be augmented by whatever game or fish pioneers could take on the way, enough of it to get them where they were going and then through the year or so it took to plant and harvest a crop there.
The prairie schooner’s back wheels were bigger, five to six feet in diameter, compared to just four feet or less for the front ones, which allowed the wagon to make sharp turns.
The wagon trains could usually cover fifteen to twenty miles a day at a speed of about two miles an hour. The pioneers left notes for each other, scribbled on anything they could find, warning of wrong turns or bad water through the “Prairie Post Office” or the “Roadside Telegraph.” They died along the way, too, twenty thousand of them—one person for every hundred yards along the Overland Trail, according to some estimates—very rarely at the hands of Indians, but mostly through accidental gunshot wounds, snakebite, and illness, above all cholera.
Most of them made it. Some five hundred thousand pioneers set out in wagon trains along the Overland Trail from 1841 to 1869, with many splitting off to take the Oregon Trail to the Northwest, and the rest continuing through to California’s Sacramento Valley. A few thousand more took the Santa Fe Trail to the Southwest, and seventy thousand Mormons took the Mormon Pioneer Trail to Utah by 1869.
The day of the wagon trains was not long, less than thirty years before they were replaced by the Transcontinental Railroad (see “The Golden Vein”: The Transcontinental Railroad). Yet before they were done they took half a million Americans into the West, walking with their families beside their prairie schooners.
the genius details
From 1790 to 1840, some four million American pioneers migrated from the Appalachians to the Mississippi.
Only about twenty-five thousand Americans had taken overland routes to the West before gold was discovered in California in 1848.
Typical food provisions of a prairie schooner included six hundred pounds of flour, four hundred pounds of bacon, two hundred pounds of lard, thirty pounds of pilot bread, twenty-five pounds of sugar, ten pounds of salt, ten pounds of rice, five pounds of coffee, two pounds of tea, two pounds of baking soda, one small keg of vinegar, one bushel of dried fruit, one half bushel of cornmeal, one half bushel of parched, ground corn, and one half bushel of dried beans.
One in every five women on the Overland Trail was in some stage of pregnancy. Most families traveled with small children.
Cholera, the deadliest killer on the Western trails, was most often contracted in Nebraska.
The Erie Canal put America—and New York—at the crossroads of the Industrial Revolution when it opened in 1825. Today the canal system’s 524 miles carry some commercial traffic but are largely a popular tourist and recreation attraction.
New York City in the early nineteenth century seemed doubly blessed by geography. It boasted one of the world’s greatest natural harbors, and its central location put it closer to the emerging economic colossus of Europe than any other major Atlantic port in America.
The question was how to get the fantastic abundance of raw materials that America had and Europe craved to this port. It was no small sticking point. Roads in upstate New York were little more than old Indian trails, all but impassable much of the year and slowed by outrageous local tolls when they were open. Transporting anything from the rich hinterlands of the continent that America was conquering was infinitely more daunting. Midwestern farmers, miners, and lumbermen looking to bring their goods to market had little choice but to take them down the Mississippi and its tributaries to the Port of New Orleans. Once there, the question was how to get back—especially before the advent of the steamboat. Usually, the answer was to walk (something a young Abe Lincoln did twice), a journey that could take weeks or months.
A solution was proffered in 1807 by one Jesse Hawley, a bankrupt flour merchant from the upstate town of Geneva, with no education beyond a country schoolhouse, languishing in a debtors’ prison after failing to get his goods to market before they spoiled. Hawley used his time in stir to write a remarkably sophisticated plan for a “Great Western Canal” system that would connect New York City by water to the shores of Lake Erie.
Similar schemes had been bandied about for decades, but Hawley’s had an advantage. It came to the attention of DeWitt Clinton, the volcanic visionary then serving as mayor of New York City.
Clinton had seen New York’s potential as a great world city even when it was little more than a pestilential muddle at the toe of Manhattan. Much more, he saw it as a new kind of city, one run by free and enlightened men.
To that end, as mayor he fought to abolish slavery and institute universal suffrage, encourage immigration, and end discrimination against Catholics. He pushed through a free public school system, cleaned up New York’s filthy streets and markets, and sought to eradicate the diseases that crept up from its docks. He started an orphanage, a literary and philosophical society, and a historical society that flourishes to this day. He also imposed on most of the island the famous “grid system” of straight, numbered streets and avenues that enabled its development.
“Magnus Apollo,” as the formidable Clinton was called, was not one to chase moonbeams. But when he saw Hawley’s plan he grasped at once that his state contained the only level natural gap through the Appalachian Mountains before Georgia. Cutting a waterway through it to the Great Lakes would connect New York City’s harbor to the whole of the Midwest.
Of course, that meant a 363-mile canal system from Lake Erie to the Hudson, where boats could sail the remaining 150 miles down to New York City. The estimated cost was $7 million—or three-fourths of the total federal budget at the time. President Thomas Jefferson thought it might be a good idea a hundred years on but protested, “It is little short of madness to think of it at this day.” His successor, James Madison, vetoed any federal funds for it as unconstitutional. Undaunted, Clinton got himself elected governor of New York State in 1817, and within three months of his inauguration shovels were in the ground, the money raised entirely by 6 percent state bonds, guaranteed by the tolls the canal would charge.
Now all Clinton had to do was pull off the greatest public works project in the history of the Western world to date, in a country that barely had a single trained engineer. Most of the Erie Canal was dug out by hand and shovels. Some fifty thousand men worked on it—local farmers, Native Americans, African Americans, German immigrants, and, above all, the Irish. At eighty cents a day, Irish immigrants made five times the wages they could get back home, but contractors fed them swill, housed them in shanties, and dosed them with twelve to twenty ounces of whiskey a day—their only fortification against digging through malarial swamps, quicksand, and icy winter streams, sometimes by torchlight or bonfire. They died in droves from dysentery, yellow fever, typhus, pneumonia, dehydration, falling trees, and faulty equipment and were despised by people in the towns they were about to enrich.
From Albany to Buffalo, the Erie Canal cut a waterway that rose as much as 568 feet above sea level, and fell as much as 363 feet below it. Boats navigated it through locks that were filled or emptied of water to raise or lower the boats as well.
What could not be moved by “Irish power” had to be blown out by volatile black powder in those predynamite days. At the Deep Cut, near Lockport, they had to blast their way through seven miles of rock and wet earth, including three miles of hard blue limestone, to a depth of twenty-six feet. Once the powder was packed into a drill hole, a young boy was used to set the fuse, on the theory that he could run away faster.
By the third summer of work, the area around the Deep Cut resembled a war zone. Workers and hamlet alike were under a continual bombardment of stones, small and huge. An English traveler observed the canal workers to be so fatalistic that “instead of running to the shelter . . . they would just hold their shovels over their heads to keep off the shower of small stones and be crushed every now and then by a big one.”
The first fifteen miles of the canal, from Rome to Utica, was not finished until 1819, and criticism swelled. Clinton’s renomination as governor was blocked, and he was removed from his unpaid position on the canal commission. He responded by rallying a broad coalition of voters around him, booted his opponents out of power, and regained the governor’s office in time to take a victory lap down the length of the Erie Canal when it opened, culminating in his pouring two barrels from Lake Erie into the Atlantic Ocean on November 4, 1825, in a symbolic “Wedding of the Waters.”
Everywhere his constituents greeted him with wild celebrations, as well they might. Not only was the Erie Canal finished at cost and two years ahead of schedule, it would add exponentially to New York’s and the country’s wealth for generations to come.
Built for an estimated $4.5 billion in current dollars, the canal’s debt was retired by its tolls within nine years. Backward villages and towns along its route were turned overnight into bustling industrial cities. The time spent hauling goods from the Midwest to the East Coast dropped from weeks to a matter of days. Shipping costs dropped from $100 a ton to less than $9. New York, now at the cockpit of the industrial world, was well on its way to becoming its leading city—none of which would have surprised the canal’s champion.
“The city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations,” DeWitt Clinton predicted. “And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.”
the genius details
The Erie Canal originally had eighty-three locks to manage a gradual rise of 568 feet in elevation from Albany to Buffalo. The original canal was forty feet wide and four feet deep, with eighteen aqueducts allowing it to cross rivers, streams, and ravines.
The Erie Canal was the greatest public work in the Western world since the Great Pyramid of Giza in 2580 BC. Some 11.4 million cubic yards of earth and rock were removed to build the canal—about three times the amount moved at Giza.
Nearly every major city in New York lies along either the Erie Canal or the Hudson River down to the city. To this day, almost 80 percent of upstate New York’s population lives within twenty-five miles of the Erie Canal.
Express passenger service made it possible to get from Buffalo to New York City in an unprecedented four days’ time—as opposed to what had been two weeks by wagon or stagecoach just to get from Buffalo to Albany.
From 1824 to 1882, when they were eliminated, tolls on the Erie Canal brought in a total of $121 million, or over seventeen times the canal’s original cost.
The Flying Cloud, one of Donald McKay’s “extreme clippers,” that Eleanor Creesy navigated around Cape Horn in record time.
They came and went too fast for us to see, save in some old nautical prints and in our dreams. Pillowy forests of sail, moving across the oceans faster than anything ever built. Everything about them was romantic—their names and terminology, the faraway places they traveled to, the elegance of their design. But they were also working ships that sailed through a narrow window in world trade, and when that window closed they vanished. While they lasted, nothing was more beautiful.
Much of America’s early mercantile navy consisted of refitted privateers from the Revolution. They were soon joined by “Baltimore clippers,” swift little two-masted schooners and brigantines, built to evade British blockaders in the War of 1812 (and to run slaves). They sailed out of New York, Boston, or Salem, Massachusetts, to ports around the world. They were in Canton by 1795, trading silver, ginseng, and furs for Chinese goods that Americans soon could not get enough of: silks and porcelain, cassia and nankeen trousers, lacquerware, fans, furniture, and, above all, tea.
The fastest ships had too little cargo space, and bigger ones might take as much as a year out to China and another year back—by which time most teas had lost their flavor. By the 1830s, American shipbuilders up and down the East Coast were working on what we’d call a game changer today: bigger yet still swifter ships that became known as true clippers and then “extreme clippers.”
There was no exact definition for what made a clipper. The author Alan Villiers wrote that one “must be sharp-lined, built for speed. She must be tall-sparred and carry the utmost spread of canvas. And she must use that sail, day and night, fair weather and foul.”
So clippers did. They were long, narrow ships, with deep bows that knifed through the water, and their widest beam moved over halfway back. Their main masts often approached 100 feet in height and ran as high as 230 feet (or twenty-three stories), leaving awestruck observers to dub them “skyscrapers.” They were rigged for power, with extra sails everywhere: skysails and moonrakers on the masts, and studding sails on booms, extended from the hull. They ran through everything. In storms where lesser vessels might shorten their sails and try to ride it out, the clippers plunged on into the waves, heeling so steeply their gunwales were in the water.
Their speed was unprecedented, covering as much as 465 nautical miles in a twenty-four-hour period, a pace of over nineteen knots. They raced each other around the world, and their arrival was a major spectator sport, with men and women rushing to the waterside to watch them come in. People collected beautifully printed “clipper cards” much as they do baseball cards today.
The jib sails at the bowsprit of a Yankee clipper. Clippers boasted extra sails wherever possible, and flew with them hoisted even through the worst weather.
In the 1840s, the clippers came into great demand as the China trade expanded in the wake of the First Opium War and then as the gold rush brought the world to California. Clipper ships were able to halve the six months it had previously taken to sail from New York to San Francisco, and then raced on across the Pacific.
Nearly all the great ship’s architects in the United States tried their hand at designing clippers. The best was Donald McKay, a Canadian immigrant who set up shop first in Newburyport, Massachusetts, then down in East Boston. Of the four hundred or so ships that might be called clippers, McKay designed thirty-eight. They had names such as Staghound, Glory of the Seas, Westward Ho!, Star of Empire, Chariot of Fame, Lightning, and Zephyr, all monikers that evoked speed or spoke to the spirit of the bold new republic whose wealth he helped amass.
The swiftest of all McKay’s creations was Flying Cloud, sold for more than $90,000, maybe $20 million in today’s money. Its maiden voyage was out of New York, under Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy Jr., from Marblehead, Massachusetts, a renowned maritime town whose sailors had snatched Washington’s army from disaster in Brooklyn and rowed it across the Delaware. On board, too, was the captain’s wife, thirty-six-year-old Eleanor “Ellen” Prentiss Creesy, which wasn’t unusual at the time. What was unusual—even unheard of—was that Ellen was also the ship’s navigator.
The daughter of a master mariner, Ellen had taken to navigation because she loved the complex mathematics. She learned to use a sextant and a chronometer and studied meteorology, ocean currents, and astronomy. She also pored through the writings of Matthew Fontaine Maury, the dry-docked “Pathfinder of the Seas,” whose revolutionary work on sea winds and currents made possible the laying of the first transatlantic cable (see “Faster”: The Transatlantic Cable).
The Flying Cloud left New York Harbor on June 2, 1851, carrying passengers and 2,000 to 2,500 tons of cargo, including mining supplies and equipment, household goods, cotton duck, and gourmet delicacies for the epicurean prospectors of San Francisco. In twenty-four hours the ship had gone an amazing 389 miles. It crossed the equator in a record seventeen days, at least twenty-one sails hoisted at all times, more when the winds were booming.
All was not smooth sailing. Like all clipper ships, the Flying Cloud sailed right through storms, In a severe storm off Brazil, it nearly lost its masts. This so frightened some of the crew that they drilled holes in the hull, hoping to force the ship into port. Their sabotage was discovered and repaired—and the Flying Cloud flew on. Rounding Cape Horn in winter, it ran into another furious storm. With the sky gone, Ellen Creesy charted their path below deck for one thousand miles by dead reckoning. Her husband stood on the deck for long hours in the wind and freezing rain, the two of them shouting back and forth above the tempest. It was their first time through the treacherous waters of the Horn—but they emerged just where Ellen had calculated, eight miles from land.
The Flying Cloud “did the 50-50”—going from fifty degrees south latitude in the South Atlantic to fifty degrees south latitude in the South Pacific—in just seven days, a record that still stands. Relying on Maury’s research, Ellen stood the ship farther out to sea off Central America than was customary, and the Flying Cloud made it past the Golden Gate in a record eighty-nine days and twenty-one hours, despite losing a mast in yet another storm. In addition to her navigational work, Ellen Creesy had performed the nursing duties expected of a captain’s wife and had baked a wedding cake for two passengers who got married on board.
By the Civil War, the era of the great clipper ships was over. Refiguring the eternal calculation of speed versus capacity in maritime trade, shipping lines had begun to switch to somewhat slower but bulkier “medium clippers.”
The Creesys had already retired to Salem, where Josiah went into local politics and died in 1871. Ellen lived the rest of her long life far from the sea, though on her death in 1900 her body was brought back to lie beside her husband’s in a hillside cemetery in Salem, above the ocean where once they had swept over the waves like a dream.
the genius details
The definition of a clipper ship, and particularly an “extreme clipper,” has often varied. The first true clipper ship is usually considered to be the Ann McKim, nearly five hundred tons, built in Baltimore in 1833.
The size of clipper ships ranged from less than five hundred tons to a maximum of four thousand tons.
It took steamships some twenty-five years before they could surpass the speed of the clipper ship.
Clipper captains were encouraged by their ships’ owners to set speed records if they could. As in many maritime endeavors, such as whaling (see Power Plant at Sea: The Whaling Ship), ships’ officers were often rewarded with some share in the whole undertaking. Both Capt. Josiah Creesy and navigator Ellen Creesy had a 1/32 share in the Flying Cloud’s initial voyage.
Donald McKay’s Glory of the Seas, out of his East Boston shipyard in 1869, was the last clipper ship built in America.
Connecting the seas: the Panama Canal today, 48 miles long and serving over 144 world trade routes.
America had barely made one great surge across the continent before it surpassed itself with another. The Erie Canal cut the time it took to travel from the East Coast to the Great Lakes from two weeks to about four days (see Inventing a City: New York—the Erie Canal). Within another generation, the Transcontinental Railroad was zipping passengers across North America by train in just three and a half days (see “The Golden Vein”: The Transcontinental Railroad). The brilliant Yankee clippers cut the trip around the Horn from six months to three (see The Original “Skyscrapers”: The Yankee Clippers), and in another fifty years, 7,800 miles would be lopped off that voyage. It would take only twenty to thirty hours to pass from the Caribbean to the Pacific—thanks to the Panama Canal.
It was the dream of centuries, to cut a notch through the thin tendril of land that was the Isthmus of Panama. The king of Spain had first ordered it surveyed in 1534, and numerous plans had been proposed over the years. By 1855, a railroad was whisking travelers the forty-eight miles over the isthmus—an engineering marvel that required three hundred bridges and culverts and cost the lives of five thousand to ten thousand laborers. But the journey meant taking your life in your hands, thanks to the “yellow jack,” the epidemics of lethal yellow fever that swept the area.
Building a canal proved more difficult than the map suggested. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who had organized the excavation of the Suez Canal, tried to duplicate his feat in Panama in 1881. It was a disaster. By the time it ground to a halt in bankruptcy eight years later, Lesseps’s company had run through twenty-two thousand lives, $287 million, and the savings of eight hundred thousand small investors, and Lesseps and his son were both facing five-year prison sentences for immense financial scandals. Their men, most of them poor black workers from the Caribbean islands, had died in droves, not only from yellow fever but from malaria, dysentery, poisonous snakes, jungle insects and spiders, and landslides caused by a rainy season that lasted from May to November. Most of the French engineers recruited for the project had fled back to Europe as soon as they could.
Not Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who had come over to work the canal when he was only twenty-six and who then spent more than a decade lobbying governments around the world to take up the great work again. His plan gained a hearing in 1901, when the youngest and most vigorous president ever to occupy the White House moved in. Teddy Roosevelt believed that cutting a path between the seas was vital to consolidating American economic and naval power. With the help of a New York corporation lawyer named William Nelson Cromwell, Roosevelt got Congress to set up an Isthmian Canal Commission that bought out the remaining equipment and facilities of de Lesseps’s company for $40 million, less than half what it was asking.
Secretary of State John Hay inked a treaty with Colombia, which then controlled Panama, to lease the isthmus in perpetuity to the United States in exchange for $10 million up front and then annual payments of $250,000. When the Colombian senate demanded another $10 million at the last minute, Roosevelt sent warships to support a bloodless insurrection by the locals. In the course of four days, November 3 through 6, 1903, Panama declared itself an independent country, appointed Bunau-Varilla its ambassador to the United States, and cut what was essentially the same deal that had been offered to Colombia.
It was an ugly start to a glorious adventure, an imperialist land grab that would leave a lingering resentment in Latin America for decades. The New York Times called it “an act of sordid conquest” and the New York Evening Post a “vulgar and mercenary venture” (though it was not quite so ugly as it looked: Panamanians had already been actively rebelling against what they considered a distant and indifferent Colombian government for over fifty years).
Digging the canal remained a colossal undertaking that would require over ten years. Just replacing or refurbishing the rotting, tangled equipment and 2,148 buildings the French left behind took months. The Americans brought in state-of-the-art cranes, rock-drilling equipment, and dredges, along with 102 gargantuan, rail-mounted steam shovels—but most of the canal would still be dug by hand, by seventy-five thousand workers in all, drawn from the United States and Panama but also Barbados, China, and Europe, threatened constantly by death from one disease or another.
Yet because of two main innovations, one mechanical and one hygienic, the American effort would succeed where the French had failed.
Unlike the Suez Canal, which was little more than a ditch cut through a desert, the Panama Canal meant digging through nearly impenetrable jungle, up to eighty-five feet above sea level. The Chagres River, where the canal began, could rise by up to thirty-five feet in the seemingly interminable rainy season. US engineers overcame these obstacles by committing to a system of three gigantic sets of locks that would lift ships up and down the hills of the isthmus. This in turn meant creating both the world’s largest dam and its largest man-made lake up to that time in order to fill and empty the locks, and it required excavating almost 239 million cubic yards of earth and rock, over and above the thirty million cubic yards already dug out by the French.
If seizing the isthmus in the first place was one of the uglier episodes in the history of US relations with Latin America, the hygienic innovation was one of the noblest. American army doctors under Major Walter Reed had just determined in Cuba, mostly by conducting debilitating and even lethal experiments on themselves, that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes.
The locks fill with water, then empty again as each ship moves on, lifting the ships up to eighty-five feet above sea level as they cross the Isthmus of Panama. The average toll per ship is $54,000. The largest toll ever paid was $375,000, by a cruise ship, while the lowest was 36 cents, paid by American Richard Halliburton, who swam the length of the canal in 1928.
Acting on Reed’s results, Major William Crawford Gorgas swept Cuba of mosquitoes wherever possible, all but wiping out yellow fever in Havana. When he arrived to do the same in Panama, Gorgas was mocked by some members of the canal commission. But following a 1914 appeal to Roosevelt, who wasn’t in office anymore but was still the most popular man in America, Gorgas’s anti-mosquito campaign reduced yellow fever in Panama to half of what it was in the United States itself. And on August 15 of that same year, the SS Ancon, a cargo ship, became the first vessel to officially pass through the Panama Canal.
In 1921 the United States agreed to pay Colombia $25 million for the canal rights, and in return Colombia recognized the independence of Panama. Panama has controlled the canal since the end of 1999 and draws $1.4 billion in annual income from it.
the genius details
Before efforts were taken to eradicate disease in Panama, 5,600 workers under the US effort would die, from smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, hookworm, and even bubonic plague. In 1906 alone, 80 percent of the workforce was treated for malaria.
For many years, skilled, white American and European workers were placed on the “gold roll”—paid in gold dollars and given first-class food and lodgings to get them to stay. Unskilled workers, especially those of color, were placed on the “silver roll,” paid as little as ten cents a day in various currencies, and badly fed, housed, and treated.
The most difficult part of digging the canal was the “Culebra Cut,” which went 7.8 miles through a mountain ridge and across the Continental Divide.
The volume of earth excavated for the Panama Canal was over twenty-five times the volume dug out for the Chunnel.
Annual traffic through the Panama Canal went from 1,000 ships in 1914, the year it opened, to 14,702 ships, with 309.6 million tons of cargo, by 2008.
A 1 train at today’s Times Square-42nd Street station in Manhattan.
New Yorkers were mad with excitement. All day long, they blasted horns and sirens, rang church bells, fired off guns and cannons, and festooned buildings with flags and bunting. Then, at seven o’clock on the evening of October 27, 1904, over 110,000 of them swarmed underground.
The subway had arrived.
For the rest of the night, they rode the trains for free, many of them lustily singing songs written for the occasion. They rushed off to “subway parties” and danced the “Subway Express Two-Step.” The following Sunday, over one million people—nearly three times the system’s capacity—tried to “do the subway.” They marveled at the speeds at which the trains whisked them through the city and were so outraged when the privately owned Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) started hammering up tin advertising signs in the stations that the city sued to have them removed. (They were not.)
Americans did not invent rapid, underground transit, but an American did provide its most crucial element, and it was in America that the subway first became a viable means of transporting a city’s worth of people every day.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the size of cities seemed permanently constricted by the awful knots of traffic on their streets. London was the first to go underground with its “Tuppenny Tube” in 1863. This was a brilliant feat of engineering, but the trains were still pulled by lumbering, coal-powered steam locomotives that spewed smoke, soot, and sparks into the deep tunnels, until one journalist reported he was coughing “like a boy with his first cigar.”
A direct-current electric motor, which drew steady electric power through the “third rail,” then pumped its energy back into the system every time the trains braked—thereby making possible New York’s revolutionary subway system.
The tubes also caught the interest of Frank Julian Sprague of Milford, Connecticut. After losing his mother at eight, Sprague was raised by an aunt in New York City and went to take what he thought was an exam for the US Military Academy at seventeen. It turned out to be a test for the Naval Academy, but he passed with flying colors, and his brief career at sea enabled him to visit the London Underground in 1882. Sprague had already patented his first “dynamoelectric machine” when he was twenty-four, and he quickly grasped how an electric motor might be the solution to running underground trains.
Electric motors had been powering machinery for half a century, but most had proved to be too costly, erratic, and dangerous. Starting his own company with what little financing he could find, Sprague invented the first practical direct-current electric motor. Sprague motors didn’t spark, they could be adapted for any size job, and they provided constant, steady power. Soon they were powering factory machines, elevators, and printing presses all over America and Europe.
They were ideal for underground trains. A motor on each car would eliminate smoke and cinders and the locomotive itself. Trains would stop and start much more easily and run more smoothly. Sprague and collaborator William J. Wilgus, who would plan the development of Grand Central Terminal (see The New Cathedrals: America’s Train Stations), invented a system that allowed his motors to keep touching a “third rail” that conveyed power throughout the system. Whenever the cars braked, their motors created electricity that ran back along the extra rail, thus saving nearly three-quarters of the system’s energy costs.
Toiling ceaselessly under tremendous time and money pressures to match his motors to an entire transit system, Sprague first electrified the streetcars of hilly Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. London’s trains were electrified soon after, and then America’s first subway system opened in Boston in 1897.
It was in New York, though, that the subway would reach its apotheosis, becoming almost synonymous with the city. It was built through all manner of terrain: burrowing under riverbeds, soaring over the Manhattan Valley on elevated tracks. The IRT recruited veteran miners from all over the world to dig a two-mile tunnel 180 feet below the surface of Fort George Hill, through Manhattan’s treacherous layers of granite schist. In one terrible moment, a three-hundred-ton boulder suddenly dislodged and killed ten men—but the tunnel was built.
Most of the construction utilized a safer technique known as “cut-and-cover,” first utilized in Paris. Workers drilled and blasted open city streets, all the while maneuvering carefully among water pipes and power lines and carefully propping up homes, businesses, and even a statue of Christopher Columbus atop a seventy-foot granite column as they worked. Their method was simple. After digging down about twenty feet, they inserted steel columns and beams, then poured in cement stations and tunnels.
The stations became little jewel boxes of craftsmanship, as once again Americans appropriated the best of the Old World, copying the ornate iron-and-glass, Art Nouveau station entrances of the Paris Métro and Budapest Underground. Down below were ticket booths made of polished oak with bronze fittings; leaded-glass skylights and chandeliers; and tiled walls, with distinctive bas-relief panels for each station and mosaic work spelling out each stop’s name and street number. All for five cents.
The subway would suffer from neglect and crime periodically over the years, but today it shines brightly, more extensive and integral to the success of the city it serves than ever before.
“Without the subway, New York might very well have turned out to be Bridgeport,” wrote urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.
the genius details
Annual ridership by 1930 was 2,049,000,000. In 2014 it was 1,751,287,621.
The subway had 28 stations when it first opened. Today it has 468.
Operating track when the subway first opened extended 9.1 miles. Today it extends 232 miles.
Top speed of express trains in 1904 was forty miles an hour—three times the speed of New York’s elevated trains and six times the speed of its streetcars. Top speed today is fifty-five miles an hour.
The three New York subway lines—the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit Company), BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation), and the IND (Independent Subway System)—were unified under public ownership in 1939 in what was the largest railroad merger in US history.
The most beautiful car in the world? The 1939 Lincoln Zephyr.
They said he got the idea from watching a flight of geese as they moved through the fall sky in their “V” formation—or a squadron of army planes, or one of the new airships, the Zeppelins, that appeared in American skies in the 1920s. Whichever it was, Carl Breer was convinced that American auto design had to change, and change radically.
The son of a German blacksmith who immigrated to Los Angeles, Breer was inventing from the moment he could walk. Along with his brothers and sisters, he built tricycles, bicycles, a camera, and a wagon their dog could pull. A trip to the Los Angeles Water Works—about to change the whole future of his hometown (see Inventing a City: L.A.—Southern California Aqueduct)—left him with a lifelong love of engineering and the friendship of Fred J. Fisher, chief engineer there, who would help Carl build a generator that lit up his whole house. Breer was still in grammar school.
By the time he was eighteen, in 1901, Breer had built his very own steam-powered car from scratch. After college he went to work for a string of car and auto parts companies in the Midwest and on the Pacific Coast, becoming best friends and working partners with two other hugely talented designers and engineers, Fred Zeder and Owen Skelton. “The Three Musketeers” stuck with their boss, veteran auto executive Walter P. Chrysler, when he went out on his own. Together they turned out the first generation of Chryslers—smooth-running, well-engineered beauties that immediately elbowed their way into a significant share of a 1920s auto market that still included forty-four different manufacturers.
Inspired by the skies, Carl Breer wanted something more. Along with Zeder and Skelton, he recruited Orville Wright to help him build a primitive wind tunnel, where they tested at least fifty scale models in April 1930. What they found was startling: American cars, usually built in a “two-box” design, were so aerodynamically retrograde that they were more efficient driven backward. When they were full of passengers, 75 percent of their weight rested over their back wheels, wrecking their springs and making them much more dangerous to handle on wet or slippery roads.
“Just think how dumb we have been. All those cars have been running in the wrong direction,” Breer remarked.
The Three Musketeers turned the car around. Utilizing—and inspiring—the same “streamlining” methods then transforming trains (see The Trains They Paid to See: Streamlined Trains), Chrysler moved the engine forward and down between the front wheels instead of leaving it in its customary position behind the front axle; evened out weight distribution; made the front seat wider and the rear seat deeper; expanded the front fenders; and built the windshields out of not one but two pieces of glass to form a “V” shape—all to deflect the stream of air closer to the car between its wider front and its narrower rear fenders.
In 1934, the Chrysler/DeSoto Airflows were a revolution in design, sleeker, lower, and closer to the ground than anything then on the road, with a full steel body. They nearly wrecked the company, thanks in part to a number of glitches that had escaped notice, such as engines occasionally breaking loose from their mountings when the car reached eighty miles an hour.
Yet the real problem with the Airflow wasn’t its performance but its appearance. It may have been the most aerodynamically advanced car in existence, but it didn’t look fast, thanks to its “waterfall” metal grille, curved hood, and combined form, which led critics to call it an “anonymous lump,” or “a lumbering, stupid, almost featureless animal, a blank face with nose and eyes reduced to flat surfaces.” Buyers needed two or three days just to “become accustomed to them.”
By 1937, the Airflows had been discontinued—but they did not die in vain. They would have a tremendous influence on similar contemporary advances in car design, such as Gordon Buehrig’s luscious Cord 810 from Auburn Automobile and the Chevrolet Master Deluxe Sport Coupe.
The car that really fulfilled all the promise of the Airflow, though, was the Ford Lincoln Zephyr. Edsel Ford would endure almost unbelievable cruelty from his father as Henry Ford’s mind crumbled—part of what the aging magnate thought of as “toughening up” his son. This would include Henry destroying a car model and coke ovens that Edsel had commissioned, firing a whole department of accountants just to spite him, and hiring a street thug to usurp Edsel’s role in most Ford operations (see Utility as Beauty: The River Rouge).
Through it all, Edsel hung on grimly, doing what he could to keep Ford Motor Company, once the wonder of the world, from losing even greater chunks of the car market. He found sanctuary in his design office at the Briggs Body Plant, a major Ford supplier, where he worked for years on a new type of car, one that might outdo all the other astonishing models being turned out by American car companies in the 1930s.
“Father made the most popular car in the world,” Edsel Ford once said, “and I would like to make the best.”
To that end, he hired John Tjaarda, a Dutch immigrant who had worked extensively on monocoque (“single shell”) airplane designs and had built the rear-engine, aerodynamic Briggs Dream Car for the 1933 Ford Pavilion at the Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair. Working with Edsel Ford, Tjaarda would produce a series of superb, front-engined variations on the Dream Car, starting with the relatively small 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, which was a huge hit at the New York Auto Show and was immediately declared “the first successfully designed streamlined car in America.” A series of Zephyrs—the auspicious name also borne by the most beautiful streamlined trains of the age—followed until Edsel had the 1939 Lincoln Zephyr convertible, a luxury car, built first as a prototype for himself alone. That February he drove it down to Florida, drawing admiring gazes and excited queries from everyone he encountered.
With its “teardrop design” fenders, its long, low lines and jutting hood, its rear trunk scalloped around its spare tire, its gorgeous detailing, and its V-12 “glider-ride” engine, the Zephyr was perhaps the finest combination of style and performance in an American automobile, “a classic car in the age of the classic car,” as author Robert Lacey would call it. Henry Ford disparaged it, of course, but the Lincoln Continental would become Edsel’s lasting contribution to his company, Ford’s flagship car through 2002.
American cars had become something transcendent, as Arts and Decoration magazine recognized at the time: “The modern automobile is painting and sculpture in motion.”
the genius details
The interiors of the first 1934 Airflows featured chrome tubing for the seats and marbled rubber for the floor mats.
Only three 1934 Imperial Airflows are believed to be still extant.
The two great hits of the New York Auto Show in November 1935 were Ford’s Lincoln Zephyr and Auburn’s Cord 810. Hundreds of spectators crowded around to see them, standing on the bumpers of other vehicles.
Breer would remain at Chrysler until his retirement in 1949. He died in 1970, aged eighty-seven. Edsel Ford would die of stomach cancer in 1943, aged just forty-nine.
In trying to rebut the GM-led attack on its performance, Chrysler put out a short film for theatrical distribution in which an Airflow was shoved off a 110-foot cliff, was righted, then started immediately and was driven away.
The DC-3 sparkles in the air in 1989, over fifty years after its introduction—its burnished silver skin, in the words of architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson, “creating a new standard of machine beauty.”
The tragedy made headlines all over the United States: Knute Rockne Killed as Air Liner Crashes. It was, President Herbert Hoover wrote in a telegram to his widow, “a national loss.” Coach Rockne was already a legend, the Notre Dame football coach who would always be remembered for his “Win one for the Gipper” halftime speech. His death in a Kansas field, on the last day of March 1931—along with all seven of his fellow passengers and crew members—sent shock waves around the country.
At the time, plane travel had taken tremendous leaps and bounds, but it was still a mode of transportation primarily for those who liked to take their lives in their hands. The probe into Rockne’s death revealed a big reason why. The plane he was traveling in, the Fokker Super Universal Tri-Motor, was considered a piece of cutting-edge technology, fast, light, efficient, and capable of going faster than 120 miles an hour with a 700-mile range. But the investigation by the Aeronautics Branch of the federal Department of Commerce revealed that the wooden structure that made the Fokkers so light also made them death traps. The plane Coach Rockne had flown in was rotted through, the panels of one wing separated by moisture that had seeped inside it undetected.
The wooden Fokkers were immediately grounded. The fledgling Kansas City–based airline Rockne had been flying, an outfit known as Transcontinental & Western Air, or TWA, tried to replace them with the metal Ford Tri-Motor, but this was a slow plane that looked all too much like the Fokker. Desperate, TWA turned to the Boeing Company, which had just launched its new 247 line, the first real modern airliner, with an all-metal, stressed skin, radial engines, and retractable landing gear. But Boeing’s parent company, United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, also owned United Air Lines and had promised to give the 247 exclusively to United for a year.
TWA turned to one contractor after another, looking for someone to build them a plane. The man they found was Donald Douglas, who had already decorated his Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica with a giant picture of the Boeing 247 and the caption “Don’t copy it, do it better!”
Born in Brooklyn, Donald had followed an older brother into the US Naval Academy, but he was never able to overcome his lifelong obsession with planes. Even at Annapolis, he built model aircraft in his dorm room. Dropping out, he enrolled at MIT and became the first person to graduate from the school with a degree in aeronautical engineering, completing his undergraduate work in just two years. He quickly found positions at different firms in the emerging industry, then started his own company, trying to produce the first plane that could fly nonstop across the North American continent, the Douglas Cloudster.
The Cloudster was downed by engine trouble, but Douglas went on to found another company, concentrating on selling torpedo planes to the navy, and eventually picked up a company belonging to a talented draftsman named Jack Northrop. Northrop helped Douglas produce six Douglas World Cruisers—biplanes with flotation devices—for the army, planes with the ability to fly around the world. But Douglas wanted more.
What TWA wanted was a three-engine aircraft of all-metal construction that could take off from any field the airline owned and could seat—and sleep—twelve. Douglas flew his whole engineering staff to New York to show the airline he was serious and convince TWA that the three-engine plane was a thing of the past. Instead, using design advances initiated by Northrop, Douglas produced a prototype of a DC-1—Douglas Commercial-1—for 1934 with more powerful and efficient twin propeller engines. From there he moved on quickly to the DC-2, with its all-metal, multicellular wing stuck under the fuselage, where it gave stronger support and allowed more room for the passengers. (The Boeing 247 was so crowded on the inside that passengers had to either climb over or sit astride the huge wing, which ran right through their compartment.)
In 1936, though, Douglas came up with his greatest plane of all: the DC-3. The first airliner ever to make a profit from carrying passengers alone, it “revolutionized air transport in the 1930s and 1940s,” according to transportation historians, and was “one of the most significant transport aircraft ever made.” Efficient, reliable, and easy to maintain, it could use the shortest TWA runway. An aviation version of the streamlined cars (see Dream Car: The Lincoln Zephyr) and trains (see The Trains They Paid to See: Streamlined Trains) of the era, tested inCaltech wind tunnels, it could attain a speed of up to 207 miles per hour and a range of 1,500 miles. Where the Transcontinental Railroad had taken passengers across America in 83 hours back in 1876, the DC-3 could do it in just 15 hours east to west (17.5 hours west to east), with a couple hops to refuel.
The DC-3 was so fast that the traditional sleeper berths on long-distance planes weren’t necessary and could be removed, providing passengers with unprecedented space and comfort.
This speed and range was crucial. It meant the sleeper berths could be removed, allowing the DC-3 to comfortably—and profitably—carry a record twenty-eight passengers inside its stressed-skin, semimonocoque, light aluminum body. But the key selling point was not how it performed but how gorgeous it looked. The DC-3’s burnished silver skin was arranged in squares that “flowed into each other, creating a new standard of machine beauty.”
The competition was routed. DC-3s were bought by American, United, Piedmont, and Eastern Air Lines, as well as TWA. They were adapted or purchased by countries from Japan to the Soviet Union, China to Cuba, and were pressed into military service as the C-47 Skytrain during World War II. By that time, Donald Douglas was busy making the SBD Dauntless Dive Bombers, which would turn the course of the war in the Pacific in a matter of minutes at Midway. And the DC-3 . . . never really did go away. An estimated four hundred of them are flying regularly scheduled passenger flights to this day, and it may become the first plane ever to last a hundred years in service. It was just done better.
the genius details
Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s leading flying ace in World War I, headed a team that flew the DC-1 from Burbank, California, to Newark, New Jersey, in a then record thirteen hours and four minutes, to create publicity for TWA.
The DC-3 first used a Wright R-1820 Cyclone 9 engine before shifting to a Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp for better altitude and performance.
Douglas Aircraft was acquired by Howard Hughes in 1941. It would remain the nation’s leading aircraft maker during the propeller era but would be surpassed by Boeing in the jet age.
The Douglas-Boeing competition would spur great advances in aviation until Douglas Aircraft was acquired by McDonnell Aircraft in 1967. McDonnell Douglas would merge with Boeing in 1997.
The death of Knute Rockne in a 1931 airplane crash would lead to a federal takeover of air safety standards and inspections.
One of an estimated 5,000 container ships at work today, hauling some 300 million shipping containers in use around the world.
By 1956, the Port of New York had been the busiest harbor in the world for at least half a century—and it was moving backward. Though it was located beside the greatest city in the most technologically advanced nation on earth, unloading a ton of cargo there took 50 percent longer than it had just six years earlier. Pilferage was rife, culminating in the disappearance of an entire electrical generator from the docks. The amazing hedgehog of 283 wharves that rimmed Brooklyn and the lower half of Manhattan Island, some of them as much as seven hundred feet long, was crumbling from long neglect.
The fifty thousand men who worked “alongshore” to load and unload ships did backbreaking work with the most minimal of tools, but they, too, were the victims of abuse, savagely exploited and subjected to the notorious “shake-up” that forced them to practically beg for work every morning. They were slaves to a corrupted union controlled by a single, shady businessman, one William McCormack, who employed some of the most notorious Mob killers in American history to enforce discipline on the docks and beat or murder anyone who dared to stand up to him. Out of fear of these goons or a misguided sense of solidarity, almost no longshoreman would testify against such tactics. The most famous Mob-busting prosecutors in the country, fearless political reformers, a Pulitzer Prize–winning exposé in the New York Sun, a contingent of battling labor priests, and acclaimed books, plays, and movies by some of America’s leading artists—nothing was able to break the hold that one evil man had on the nation’s greatest port.
Yet McCormack, the Mob, and their ilk proved no match for another solitary, determined individual from Maxton, North Carolina, Malcom McLean.
In the postwar years, it took an average of eight days to load “break-bulk shipping”—anything in a crate, a box, or a bale—onto a ship, and eight days to unload it. This was largely true even on the West Coast, where a breakaway waterfront union under radical Harry Bridges had greatly diminished theft and improved working conditions. Going much faster simply wasn’t possible; one small cargo ship of 5,015 tons, for instance, was loaded with 194,582 separate items.
McLean had a better idea, startling in its simplicity: put the truck trailer on the ship. Standardized containers had already been tried with considerable success during World War II. Andrew Jackson Higgins, the visionary New Orleans boatbuilder who manufactured over twenty thousand landing craft for the United States with an integrated workforce, and “who won the war for us,” according to Eisenhower, had tried to emulate the idea in civilian life, but he had found no backers and his health broke down.
McLean, on the other hand, was in more of a hurry than ever. A chain-smoking executive with a head for numbers and a penchant for taking risks, McLean had begun his working life during the Great Depression, hauling dirt and tobacco around his hometown of Maxton, North Carolina, with a $120 used pickup. He soon became a long-haul trucker of cotton up to the New York docks.
A gantry crane loading directly onto a container ship. Worldwide, container ships cut the cost of shipping an object from 50 percent to just 10 percent of its price.
By 1953, when he was still just forty, McLean had—with his sister Clara and his brother Jim—built his trucking business into a $12-million concern, operating 1,700 trucks, but he threw it all over, convincing National City Bank (later Citibank) to help him buy a small shipbuilding company and a couple of used, oceangoing oil tankers. His first ship, the Ideal-X, was reconfigured by engineer Keith Tantlinger, who designed a new aluminum container and invented the “container spreader bar,” which let the containers be lifted and lowered by cranes without any ropes needing to be attached. This meant, as the historian and economist Marc Levinson has written, that “once the box had been lifted and moved, another flip of the switch would disengage the hooks, without a worker on the ground touching the container.”
The standardized aluminum or steel containers could be stored anywhere on a ship, even the open top deck. There was little chance for thieves to break in or even know what was inside. At the end of the voyage, each container could again be lifted and lowered directly onto a freight train or a truck chassis. A high-speed crane would soon be able to load a twenty-ton container every three minutes, making it over forty times more productive than a longshoremen’s crew with their winches, pallets, and hooks.
The SS Ideal-X, nicknamed the SS Maxton, set sail from the Port of Newark for Houston with fifty-eight containers and its regular load of liquid tank cargo on April 26, 1956.
“Containerization” would fundamentally alter both the way world trade was conducted and what American cities would be, for better and for worse. McLean’s bold innovation made it possible to move goods from developing countries around the world to the United States and Europe. But as the geographer David Harvey has pointed out, they would also spur the massive “deindustrialization” of America.
Container ports, requiring vastly more open land and water to operate, were now built outside major metropolises, all but annihilating cities’ advantages as manufacturing centers. By 1958, for example, just two years after Malcom McLean’s first ship set sail, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey started building the massive Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal out by the Jersey Meadowlands. It would crush the power of the port’s corrupted unions and—a generation later—would lead to a massive real estate boom as New Yorkers found their way back to the waterfront. Container ships would also provide an increasingly energy-efficient way to move goods around a warming planet. In several parts of the world, sunken containers have been used to construct artificial ocean reefs. But at the same time, new container ports around the country eliminated millions of decent working-class manufacturing jobs, traditional stepping-stones into the middle class. The change helped destabilize American cities, then left them seriously divided between the haves and have-nots. Like so many new technologies, the container ship was probably inevitable and usually beneficial. But we have still to adjust to what it wrought.
the genius details
The biggest container ships today are usually about 1,300 feet long and 180 feet wide. They can be as much as twenty-one stories tall, with engines that weigh 2,300 tons and propellers that weigh 1,300 tons. They can now carry up to 18,270 TEUs.
A fully loaded coal train—the heaviest and largest form of land transportation today—carries twenty-three thousand tons. A large container ship carries three to four times that weight.
Modern container ships have an average life span of twenty-six years. Their fuel efficiency improved by 35 percent between 1970 and 2008, and they emit on average roughly forty times less carbon dioxide than a large freight aircraft and three times less than a heavy truck. Overall, container shipping is 2.5 times more energy efficient than rail shipping and seven times more efficient than shipping by truck.
The computer tracking of container ships is now so precise that a two-week voyage can be estimated for arrival within a range of fifteen minutes. Nearly all containers are bar-coded.
The Apollo 11 spaceship sits atop its mighty Saturn V rocket, with its 7.5 million pounds of liftoff thrust.
“If they could put a man on the moon, why can’t . . .” began the cliché after July 20, 1969, referring to the most prodigious undertaking anyone could imagine. But to this day most Americans probably do not understand what it took to get a dozen men to the moon and bring them back again.
Putting a man on the moon would take eight years of work, including ten manned and unmanned missions. It would mean building a huge new Mission Control Center for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Houston and a new launch center at Cape Canaveral. But by 1969, Apollo 11, the remarkable spacecraft that would take humankind to the moon, was ready. (The program was dubbed Apollo by NASA manager Abe Silverstein because “Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.”)
It was really three spacecrafts in one, a design from a NASA engineering team headed by Maxime Faget, “a truly essential genius of the early U.S. space program,” according to author Andrew Chaikin.
First, there was the Saturn V rocket, developed by former-Nazi rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun. It was the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, a brilliant, complicated piece of technology with 950,000 gallons of fuel to blast the whole ship into orbit, 118 miles above the earth. After a turn and a half around the planet, its rockets were fired again, slingshotting Apollo on its translunar trip.
After that, “all” that the three astronauts aboard—mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilots Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins—had to do was detach their command module, Columbia, from the Saturn V, turn it around in space, attach the lunar module Eagle to itself, unlock the Eagle from the spent rocket, then speed on to the moon.
After Apollo 11 reached lunar orbit on July 19, Armstrong and Aldrin undocked the Eagle from the command module and headed for the moon’s surface. But three minutes from landing, the lunar module’s computer started to sound an alarm and flash error message numbers unfamiliar to the astronauts—or anyone at Mission Control. Deciphered, the computer’s alarm signal was saying it was overloaded. The trouble was a radar switch set in the wrong position.
The Eagle’s computer possessed thirty-six kilobytes of memory, or less than your cell phone uses today. It was, however, incredibly reliable, thanks to the crack team of MIT scientists who had literally hardwired it. Margaret Heafield Hamilton, a thirty-three-year-old pioneer in software engineering (she had, in fact, coined the term software engineering), had also incorporated a set of recovery programs into the Eagle’s software so that during the descent to the moon it could repeatedly reboot itself and reprioritize its tasks.
Seconds later, though, as the Eagle zipped along four hundred feet above the moon’s surface, a new problem emerged. The planned landing site was a spot on the Sea of Tranquility, a smooth lava plain. Passing before the window of Commander Armstrong was, instead, a seemingly endless field of crater holes and boulders the size of trucks. When the Eagle had undocked from the command module, its cabin had not been fully depressurized, releasing a small burst of gas that sent it a critical four miles off course.
Armstrong, a navy combat and test pilot, took manual control of landing the Eagle with just sixty seconds of fuel remaining for the descent. Back in Houston, the mission’s controllers wondered if they should order the mission aborted—a reversal that, with the Eagle so close to the surface, might easily have killed the astronauts. Ten feet from the moon, the ship was kicking up so much dust that Armstrong had to gauge his landing by some nearby boulders and by the shadows cast by the sun. He did so perfectly. The “small step for a man” actually turned out to be a three-and-a-half-foot jump; Armstrong had landed his craft so gently that its shock absorbers had failed to bend.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” Armstrong radioed back calmly, a report heard by an estimated six hundred million people, or one-fifth of the world’s population.
Yet even now the astronauts were far from “safe” in such an unforgiving environment. After they landed, the extreme cold from the moon’s surface permeated a fuel line, plugging it with ice. Realizing this had the potential to cause a massive explosion, Houston scrambled to decide whether the Eagle should immediately lift off again.
Instead, the heat of the engines melted the ice, relieving the pressure. But when the astronauts were ready to walk outside, there was still too much air in the capsule to depressurize it and get the door open. Aldrin had to carefully peel back an edge of the hatch. Then, as Armstrong struggled to squeeze through, his backpack snapped off the arming switch for the ascent engines—a tiny piece of equipment that might have proved irreplaceable, 239,000 miles from a hardware store.
Armstrong would later replace the switch and arm the engines with his Fisher Space Pen. In the meantime, he walked down the ladder, stepped onto the moon, and uttered the historic phrase, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Or something like that. An interruption in the transmission may have obliterated the first “a,” or he may have forgotten to include it. Incredibly enough, Armstrong’s words were not prescripted. He had only bothered to think them up after the Eagle had landed, believing that “the chances of a successful touchdown on the moon surface were about even money—fifty-fifty. . . . So it didn’t seem to me there was much point in thinking of something to say if we’d have to abort landing.”
The astronauts’ time on the moon’s surface was limited because NASA did not really know how well their spacesuits would hold up in the moon’s atmosphere. There was even some speculation that once the moon dust on their suits mixed with the oxygen back in their module it would cause a conflagration.
Armstrong and Aldrin spent about two hours on the powdery bed of the Sea of Tranquility, gathering moon rocks and data, before blasting off again to rendezvous with Collins, who had remained on the command module—out of human contact whenever his craft swung around to the dark side of the moon. But a great challenge remained: reentry to the earth’s atmosphere, at speeds that would reach seventeen thousand miles an hour and heat their craft to nearly four thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
The lunar module Eagle, the first spacecraft to land on the moon.
Fortunately, NASA engineer Harvey Allen had designed the Columbia to look “like an inverted Styrofoam coffee cup with a saucer-shaped lid,” in Chaikin’s description. Entering the atmosphere blunt end first, it created a shock wave that directed most of the heat away from the capsule. The command module splashed down safely in the Pacific, not far from Wake Island. The total duration of the Apollo 11 mission was eight days, three hours, eighteen minutes, and thirty-five seconds.
There would be six more Apollo missions, with five of them landing men on the moon. The project would lead to huge gains in computer technology, but above all it was a story of ingenuity, teamwork, and unsurpassed courage. Forty years after Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong’s footprint is still visible on the moon, and it may be there a million years from now—a final testament to what a forbidding and alien environment mankind ventured into.
How Will We Travel in the Future?
From the space elevator to the HoverBoard
A “space elevator” climbs high above the earth.
“It’s like we’re living in the fifties here,” Jerry Seinfeld once griped about the lack of flying cars, the advance whose advent was so widely heralded that its failure to materialize has become a running cultural joke. At long last, the flying car may be winging its way to you—but don’t expect the model George Jetson used to tool around in.
The first patent for a flying car was registered back in 1903, and aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss’s Autoplane—essentially a Model T with wings and a propeller attached—made its debut in 1917. The years since have witnessed some 2,400 serious flying car designs, with at least 300 of them able to get off the ground. But nearly every model looked pretty much like either a small airplane with wheels—such as Robert Edison Fulton Jr.’s Airphibian—or a car with wings attached—such as the Henry Dreyfuss ConvAirCar. They came with high price tags and a dismaying record of fatal crashes. Even the US military, with its very deep pockets, abandoned attempts in the 1950s to develop a “flying Jeep” for the battlefield.
The intrinsic problem is that an aircraft needs to be as light as possible, while a car needs to be solid enough to withstand gravity-bound wear and tear, not to mention crashes. Attempts to reconcile these disparate needs have generally resulted in building both a bad plane and a bad car.
This may be changing. Taking advantage of technological advances in fuels, engines, and materials, companies in the United States and Europe are trying to develop a new generation of flying cars—or “roadable aircraft”—that look as enticingly cool as anything out of Back to the Future, with dual hulls or even flying saucer shapes. Some, such as American Paul Moller’s Skycar 200/400, can operate on electricity plus pretty much any other fuel and use only three wheels, making them officially more flying motorcycles than cars. Others are more like helicopters: the Netherlands’ PAL-V One is, for example, also on three wheels, with a rotor that has no stall speed, so that even if the engine gives out your vehicle will land softly. While these and other prototypes are currently priced at anywhere from $246,000 to $500,000, mass production could conceivably drive the price down to $50,000, cheaper than some luxury cars.
The Transition roadable airplane, with foldable wings and a pusher propeller, currently under development by Terrafugia, an American company founded by a group of MIT graduates.
Don’t start looking for a local dealership just yet. Problems big and small remain. Many of the new generation of flying cars still have wings or rotors that need to be manually folded away, making the transition from air to land far from seamless. And don’t think you’ll just be taking off from your next traffic jam. Most of the prototypes still require at least a short runway, meaning you’ll need either a large estate or one of our already overcrowded airports. Even those with a vertical lift can hardly be put down in the driveway; it would be like “sandblasting the neighbor’s car while landing on a column of noise on the front lawn,” noted John Brown, program manager for Germany’s Carplane.
Reducing the sound and the fury from a takeoff might prove possible, but there remain serious questions about keeping order in the air. Picture a bottomless six-lane highway operating just over your house, and you have some idea of what sort of chaos unregulated carplaning might produce. To prevent sheer carnage in the skies (and on the ground below), flying cars would almost certainly have to be self-flying cars, directed by intricate computer systems to keep from constantly colliding and plummeting to earth. What should happen if the computers fail—or are sabotaged—is anybody’s guess.
“Mark my words: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come,” Henry Ford said—in 1940. We’re still smiling. But we may see flying cars in at least some capacity—as emergency service vehicles, air ambulances, or even vehicles for daily commutes by the very rich—before another lifetime goes by.
Why fly, though, when you can take the elevator? The space elevator, that is.
The idea of shooting a sort of endless rope into outer space was thought up all the way back in 1895, by Polish-Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and was popularized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1978 science fiction novel Fountains of Paradise. Tsiolkovsky imagined connecting a cable from a “celestial castle” to the top of the Eiffel Tower. A group of four American engineers revived the idea in 1966 as a “skyhook” into space, complete with a space elevator to take payloads up and down—a concept refined in 1975 by Jerome Pearson, a Marine Corps veteran, engineer, geologist, and inventor working for the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Pearson, looking for a way to slash the cost of getting equipment into space for NASA, and its new space station, conceived of this space “tether” as extending all the way to a counterweight—a man-made space station, or even a captured asteroid—maybe 89,000 miles into space, or nearly half the distance to the moon. This cable would be narrowest on either end, tapering to its thickest at geostationary, or geosynchronous, orbit—that is, 22,236 miles above the earth—where the tensions on it would also be greatest.
At the time, these ideas looked no more realizable than Tsiolkovsky’s celestial castle, mostly because no material on earth was suitable for building the skyhook. Steel was not remotely strong enough, and diamonds were too brittle. But the development of nanotechnology in this century may well change everything. Lightweight carbon nanotubes are a hundred times stronger than steel, more than able to stand the stress on such a rope to the stars. Diamond nanotubes look just as promising.
Physicist Bradley C. Edwards has suggested that such materials could be shaped into a paper-thin ribbon 62,000 miles long. Tethered preferably to an island mountain, or some sort of floating station near the equator in the western Pacific—where the risk from hurricanes, tornadoes, and lightning would be smallest—the space elevator cable would rotate with the rotation of the earth. The higher it got, the less the drag of the gravitational force weighing it down, and the higher the centrifugal force pulling it upward, until the two forces balanced at geosynchronous orbit. The tensions on the cable would be greatest there, meaning the “rope” would have to gradually widen until it reached that point, then taper off again as it continued upward to its (asteroid?) anchor.
Unlike building elevators, the space elevator would not have moving cables. Instead, its “cars” would likely be vehicles held to the cable by rollers, or magnetic levitation technology, and would be powered by either laser beams fired at photovoltaic cells or by solar or nuclear energy. It could be built by methods not unlike those used to construct suspension bridges, with the cable literally unspooled—both down to earth and up into space—from a spacecraft at the point of geosynchronous orbit. Every subsequent elevator could be built all the more easily, by materials simply hoisted up the first cable.
How likely are we to see such a lift to the stars? Very, if the nanotechnology can be perfected. The cost of building such a structure is currently estimated at anywhere from $6.2 billion to $20 billion. But it would cut the cost of putting into orbit all sorts of payloads, for commercial or scientific endeavors, from the $11,000 per pound that firing them in rockets now costs to as little as $100 a pound. Even this cost might be quickly defrayed by “space tourism.” The speed of climbing the elevator might have to be “limited” to 190 miles an hour in order to keep the cable intact. That would mean a ten-day space cruise into orbit and back as you watched the big, blue marble of the earth open up beneath you.
Plenty of challenges still have to be met. Any “elevator to the stars” would have to withstand threats from weather, man-made space debris, and other hazards, but ascending it would still be exponentially safer—and more comfortable—than blasting off in a rocket.
As in all things, it’s likely that developments in the technology of some modes of transportation will spur advances in all of them. The magnetic levitation vehicles that will probably climb the space elevator, for instance, are now being perfected considerably closer to earth. They’re called “trains.”
The use of magnetic levitation, or “maglev,” technology—the use of magnetic fields to both suspend objects above the ground and push them forward—was envisioned by a number of scientists in the United States and Europe at the turn into the twentieth century. In 1912, Emile Bachelet, a largely self-taught native of France who had been orphaned at the age of nine and grew up with his younger brother on the streets of Paris before immigrating to the United States, developed the first miniature demonstration model of how such a train might run. When he took his invention to England in an effort to attract investors, Winston Churchill called it the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. But the inability to successfully generate and maintain the level of electrical power necessary for his magnets ultimately doomed Bachelet’s venture.
In 1960, the American nuclear physicist Dr. James Powell came up with a new version of a maglev train while—unsurprisingly—stuck in traffic on the Throgs Neck Bridge. Together with his colleague Dr. Gordon Danby, Powell worked out a concept whereby superconducting magnets facing each other on a train and its track would lift the train off the ground and propel it forward as it passed through a series of magnetic loops. Such a train would be freed from the friction of wheels meeting rail. It probably wouldn’t even have wheels, slowed only by air resistance, as if it were a plane.
Over the next five decades, Dr. Powell and Dr. Danby’s ideas transformed train travel as we know it . . . but not in America. Working maglev trains in Japan now routinely reach speeds of up to 311 miles an hour, and have made test runs as high as 375 miles an hour. Maglev trains already reach comparable speeds in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Germany.
Magnetic levitation trains have attained speeds of up to 375 miles an hour.
Don’t plan on stepping aboard one anytime soon in the United States, though, where intercity express trains now dawdle along at an average of 69 miles an hour, slower than they traveled in the 1930s. Maglev trains require dedicated tracks, whereas Amtrak passenger trains must share the rails with freight trains. Reclaiming abandoned rail corridors in heavily trafficked areas such as the Northeast and building maglev tracks is estimated to be prohibitively expensive—perhaps as much as $150 billion—if the right-of-ways can be regained at all. Building such lines through the less inhabited West would be considerably cheaper. But America’s sheer size would likely make any such project impractical. Cutting the roughly forty-eight hours it currently takes to get from Chicago to the West Coast to, say, eight hours . . . would still take several times longer than a commercial flight would.
Straight from Back to the Future, the hoverboard—no, not that silly scooter thing, but a real hovering hoverboard—may soon be an ordinary plaything.
Then there’s the hoverboard. The idea of hovercrafts—vehicles creating their own layer of air to ride on—has been around since at least the early eighteenth century. Successful oceangoing hovercraft vessels were produced beginning in the 1960s, and some working prototypes of “hovertrains” or “aerotrains” have also been produced. But hoverboards—skateboards without wheels, that operate a few inches above the ground—first captured America’s imagination in, once again, those visionary masterpieces, the Back to the Future movies, and their magic has survived segues into Segways and various hoaxes.
Several inventors claim to have invented some version of a hoverboard, including Greg Henderson’s Hendo company, which seems to rely on conductors and an oscillating magnetic field. Lexus recently produced a hoverboard it called SLIDE, complete with smokin’ cool liquid nitrogen—basically dry ice—wafting from it. SLIDE, introduced in a car ad that had nothing to do with the hoverboard, operates on maglev technology, with superconducting magnets repelling each other to keep the board afloat. But for them to be effective, the surface underneath must contain some magnetic materials. Cue the hoverboard parks, and maybe even hoverboard sidewalk/street strips, but don’t count on anything more, anytime soon.
That leaves us with . . . cars. Not flying cars, but good old driving cars. Cars, in fact, that drive themselves.
Self-driving cars are not only the transportation of the future, they’re already here, legal for at least road testing in California, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington, D.C. Google has been testing its self-driving “Google Chauffeur” systems for years now, utilizing a Toyota Prius, an Audi, a Lexus and a Lexus SUV, and its own very compact Google X cars, which look like something out of Woody Allen’s futuristic comedy Sleeper. All told, the cars have undergone over a million miles of road and highway testing and have endured only a handful of minor accidents, nearly all of them caused by people-operated cars rear-ending or side-swiping them. Delphi, the auto parts supplier, has had similar success, sending its self-driving Roadrunner car 3,400 miles across the country, from San Francisco to New York, without incident.
Self-driving cars are equipped with cameras that constantly monitor the car’s surrounding environment—more quickly, accurately, and attentively than any human drivers do. Lasers also pick up traffic lights and signs, map the passing scene, and compare it on an inch-by-inch basis with maps from the vehicle’s built-in global positioning system. Sensors monitor speed and pick up the nearness of other cars and pedestrians, and a radar system detects many threats before people can possibly become aware of them, such as that bicyclist about to cut out from behind a high hedge, or an accident ahead of that semi blocking your view. A central computer puts it all together and steers, brakes, or accelerates more quickly and adroitly than your basic NASCAR star.
Currently, the cost of all this hardware and software puts the cost of a self-driving car at over $300,000. The sensors on the Google X alone cost $70,000. But these prices are likely to come down radically as computer costs continue to drop and as auto companies around the world perfect and add “autonomous” features, such as advanced cruise control, “automatic parking,” and warning systems, to old-fashioned, people-driven cars.
Meanwhile, a world full of self-driving cars would save us many billions of dollars as a society—not to mention untold grief and suffering. According to estimates quoted in the Washington Post, a United States in which 90 percent of cars were “autonomous” vehicles would save 21,700 lives every year from auto accidents. There would be over four million fewer accidents and over $447 billion in annual, comprehensive savings, figuring in all those smash-ups, deaths, injuries, and other factors. Morgan Stanley estimates that autonomous vehicles would save the United States $170 billion every year in lower fuel costs and another $138 billion in reduced congestion, and having to buy auto insurance might well become a thing of the past. Converting just 10 percent of American vehicles to self-driving cars would save $37 billion and result in 1,100 fewer road deaths.
What’s more, self-driving cars would not require the building of some vast new infrastructure or the development of new technologies. The infrastructure to accommodate such cars exists now, in our roads and highways—though eventually wireless induction chargers might be imbedded there, enabling the coils within your car to recharge your electric motor as you drive.
Unlike maglev or vacuum trains, autonomous vehicles can be added gradually to our everyday lives, an element critical to the development of any new technology. The elderly, the invalid, the blind, the estimated 45 percent of disabled Americans who work would all benefit immensely from self-driving cars. Individuals with drunk-driving convictions would no longer have to risk losing their jobs because they had no way to get to them. (There might not be drunk driving, period.) Long-distance truck drivers would no longer have to risk falling asleep at the wheel, endangering themselves and all around them. There might not be any long-distance truck drivers anymore, either—or cab drivers, or bus drivers, or delivery drivers—although surely there would be more of a need than ever for road crews to reach motorists stranded by breakdowns.
Already on the road, self-driving cars, such as this one from Google, are likely to be ubiquitous within another ten years.
Self-driving cars are likely to change the entire culture of automobiles. It may be that almost no one will own a car at all. Instead, you’ll order one up with your smartphone and leave it when you’re done. The car will hurry off to its next assignment, instead of spending 95 percent of its existence parked somewhere, as most cars do today.
Surely, many of us will miss the enjoyment of handling a superb piece of machinery on a highway. But computer-directed cars could move on highways at speeds impossible for humans to control; picture a driving experience like something out of Mad Max. You could spend journeys of thousands of miles working, reading, sleeping, even exercising in your own private compartment. Google is already working on a car that lacks a steering wheel or pedals.
In the future, some of us may or may not shoot up an elevator into outer space or hover in the air above electromagnets. But we will all be driven about like aristocrats in our computer-chauffeured autos.
the genius details
The “Very High Speed Transit System” (VHTS), conceived by the American engineer and nuclear physicist Robert M. Salter Jr., proposed a system whereby people might travel as fast as 14,000 miles an hour. Salter calculated that a capsule holding 100 individuals could go from New York to Los Angeles in just twenty-one minutes.
Daryl Oster’s Evacuated Tube Transportation Technology (ET3), or “Space Travel on Earth,” envisioned using maglev technology inside near-vacuum tubes to whisk people around the United States at speeds of 370 miles an hour, or at 4,000 miles an hour for international trips. New York to Los Angeles in forty-five minutes? New York to Beijing in two hours?
The American immigrant and inventor Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop, which he described as a “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table.” The Hyperloop would be a pair of elevated tubes whisking passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in thirty-five minutes, reaching a maximum speed of 760 miles an hour. Its claimed cost would be no more than $6 billion.