THE STEAM ENGINE DEVELOPED by James Watt and patented in 1769 was something very new indeed under the sun: the first source of work-doing energy since the windmill had appeared in Persia in the seventh century. But Watt did not invent it; Thomas Newcomen had patented the first practical steam engine in 1712. Watt’s improvements, however, made the Newcomen engine four times as fuel efficient, greatly increasing the number of possible applications. When Watt developed a rotary steam engine in 1784, which converted the reciprocal up-and-down motion of the Newcomen engine into rotary motion that could turn a shaft, the steam engine’s economic potential became boundless.
Until the coming of the steam engine, only human beings, draft animals, falling water, and windmills were available to do work. They each had severe limitations. Waterwheels and windmills had to be placed where the water and wind could be found, which is why the factories of the early eighteenth century were usually located in the country, not in urban areas. Humans and draft animals have limited power and can be harnessed effectively together only to a limited extent. But a steam engine could be built large enough to produce prodigious quantities of energy and could bring that energy to bear on almost any task. Because of the steam engine, many tasks that had been difficult (and therefore expensive) became easy (and therefore cheap). Many more tasks that had been impossible were within reach. Like the printing press of the fifteenth century, the steam engine was a world-transforming technology.
With England’s advanced iron industry and coal reserves providing cheap fuel, the steam engine spread quickly through the British economy. In the United States, however, with its industry at first centered in New England, where water power was abundant, steam was adopted only slowly for industrial purposes. As late as 1832 a census of 249 factories east of the Appalachians showed only 4 were steam-powered.
But almost from the moment that James Watt patented his rotary steam engine, men were at work trying to apply it to the task of moving boats through the water. The advantages of steam were more than obvious. Small vessels could be moved by oars, paddles, or sculls worked by men; large ones could move only by wind pushing on sails.
The “fuel” for sailing ships is free, as they are, in the last analysis, solar-powered. But a sailing ship can only go where—and when—the wind is willing to take it. The tubby merchant ships of the eighteenth century could barely make headway against wind forward of the beam and often had to go hundreds, even thousands of miles out of their way to find a favorable slant. The prevailing westerly winds of the North Atlantic are the principal reason that the passage from America to Europe was usually so much quicker than the reverse trip, from Europe to America.
The main problem with applying steam to navigation was how to transmit the power generated by the steam engine to the water and thus move the boat. Any number of methods was tried. James Rumsey tried a system of pumping water in at the front and expelling it out the stern, but it was too complicated to be practical. There was even an attempt to imitate the feet of a duck, likewise unsuccessful.
Another system attempted was a series of oars attached vertically to a horizontal rod. The center of the rod moved in a circle, dipping the oars into the water, moving them backward, lifting them, and bringing them forward for the next stroke. John Fitch, born in Windsor, Connecticut, was living in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, when he became interested in the problem. He built a boat powered this way that operated on the Delaware River as early as 1787. It worked, but as with so many pioneering inventors, Fitch never paid much attention to the commercial necessity of making money, and while his boat operated for a while on a regular schedule, it did not make a profit and soon vanished.
The most promising method was the paddle wheel. The idea came from the water mill, where water pushed the wheel to turn the machinery. The paddle wheel reversed this: the machinery turned the wheel to push the water and thus move the boat. But there was one big problem. Early paddle wheels were placed low in the boat so that the bottom half of the wheel was immersed in the water. But most of the energy transmitted from the engine to the water was wasted as the paddles entered the water more or less horizontally and pushed the water down rather than backward. The opposite was true at the end of the stroke, when the paddle pushed the water upward. Only at the bottom of the stroke was useful work being done.
It was a Scotsman, William Symington, who found the answer by putting the wheel high, so that only the tips of the paddles entered the water, at a point where they could push the water efficiently. In January 1803 his Charlotte Dundas towed a vessel of one hundred tons from Stockingfield to Port Dundas on the Forth and Clyde Canal at the rate of three miles an hour.
Symington’s vessel worked well, but not in a canal, where it was far less economical than horses towing barges. He more or less lost interest in it, but an American named Robert Fulton did not.
Fulton was born in Pennsylvania and early displayed a considerable mechanical aptitude. He became expert in gunsmithing, although he was not apprenticed to a master, the usual way to learn such skills in the eighteenth century. At the age of fourteen, he built a small boat with a hand-powered paddle wheel. Apprenticed to a Philadelphia jeweler, he soon branched out into painting miniatures and doing “hair work.” He went to England in 1786 to study under the great American painter Benjamin West, but he abandoned art for engineering in the early 1790s. In 1797 he moved to France.
Fulton was not an original inventor; instead he used the ideas of others, improving them and synthesizing them into a better whole. He improved the submarine David Bushnell had designed in 1776 to attack the British fleet in New York harbor, and tried to sell it, unsuccessfully, to the French (while keeping the British fully informed of his negotiations, presumably to make a second profit).
Fulton was a gifted, if not overly scrupulous businessman, and had the knack of making friends with the powerful. His most powerful friend was Robert Livingston, appointed United States minister to France by Thomas Jefferson and a member of the great New York Livingston clan that then played a major part in the politics of the state.
Livingston had a vast estate named Clermont 110 miles up the Hudson from New York City and wanted to speed up travel between the two places. An amateur tinkerer, he had tried to develop a steamboat on his own, but without success. However, he had managed to get New York State to grant him a monopoly of steamboat navigation in New York waters, provided that he build a boat capable of traveling four miles an hour within a year. He didn’t meet the deadline, but the legislature extended it in 1803, passing the bill amid gales of laughter, as most members thought the requirements beyond possibility.
When he met Fulton in Paris, Livingston decided to help fund Fulton’s steamboat experiments, and the two signed an agreement to build a steamboat for use in the Hudson River back home. It boiled down to Fulton supplying the design and Livingston supplying the money—and the monopoly that would guarantee the enterprise’s profitability. Fulton had become committed to a chain-drive mechanism, a bit like a tank tread with paddles on it, for transmitting the engine’s power to the water. Livingston pushed for a paddle wheel, but Fulton resisted, and Livingston went along. According to Symington’s later recollection, however, Fulton visited him in Scotland, took a ride on the Charlotte Dundas, and was mightily impressed.
Fulton always insisted that his steamboat was wholly his own design, but Fulton is known to have hedged the truth and even lied outright about countless other matters, and it is altogether likely that he adopted vital aspects of Symington’s design without acknowledgment, especially the high placement of the paddle wheel axle. Certainly he abandoned the chain drive concept on his return to France.
Returning to the United States for the first time in nearly twenty years in 1806, Fulton settled in New York City and set about building a steamboat to run on the Hudson River. When completed, it was 146 feet long and 12 feet wide, with a flat bottom and straight sides. The wrought-iron paddle wheel mechanism and the copper boiler were constructed locally, but the twenty-four-horsepower steam engine came from James Watt’s firm in England.
On the morning of August 1, 1807, the North River Boat, as Fulton rather unimaginatively named it (only after his death would it come to be remembered as the Clermont), set off from the Christopher Street dock. A large crowd had assembled to see it off, many of them undoubtedly expecting the vessel—which someone likened to a sawmill placed on a raft and set afire—to sink or explode.
But it didn’t. Instead it chugged steadily northward, passing sailing ships on the way, and reached Livingston’s estate at Clermont by mid-morning the next day. Livingston came on board, and the two partners went on to Albany, arriving in the morning of the following day. The vessel had taken thirty-two and a half hours to travel the hundred and fifty miles between New York and Albany, averaging four and a half miles an hour. The provisional monopoly of steamboat navigation in New York waters, granted in 1803, was now the property of Livingston and Fulton.
Fulton advertised for passengers for the return voyage, but only two were willing to pay the $7 charge, more than twice the usual price for a boat passage to New York. On the return, however, the shores of the Hudson were lined with people, including the cadets at West Point, cheering the boat on. Regular service was soon established between New York City and points north. By 1812 Fulton and Livingston had six steamboats plying the local waters.
LIVINGSTON, who had negotiated the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon, was well aware of the potential of steamboats in the Mississippi River and its tributaries. These rivers provided no less than sixteen thousand miles of navigable waters that drained an area of more than a million square miles from western New York State to Montana. Much of it was the finest agricultural land on earth with almost limitless economic potential. Much of it was also rich in minerals.
But there was a problem before the coming of steam: these great fluvial highways were virtually one way. Flatboats, hardly more than large rafts casually knocked together, could carry thirty to forty tons of cargo apiece to be swept by the current downriver to New Orleans. The young Abraham Lincoln twice made such a voyage. Once in New Orleans, the cargo would be sold while the flatboats were broken up and sold for lumber.
But the only way upriver was by keelboats, which hugged the shore where the current was least and were poled upstream by human effort. A trip by flatboat from the Ohio Valley to New Orleans could be made in a month, with hardly any expenditure of human labor. The return trip by keelboat took three months of unremitting toil. Most didn’t even try and walked home instead. The Natchez Trace, running between the Mississippi at Natchez and Nashville, Tennessee, on the Cumberland, was a major highway until the coming of steam.
In 1811 Livingston and Fulton sent the boatbuilder Nicholas Roosevelt to Pittsburgh to build a steamboat there, designed by Fulton. At the same time Livingston tried to obtain monopolies similar to what he had in New York. Most states and territories refused this scion of the eastern establishment abruptly. “Our road to market must and will be free,” thundered the Cincinnati Western Spy at the very idea. “This monopolizing disposition of individuals will only arouse the citizens of the West to insist on…the privilege of passing and repassing, unmolested, on the common highway of the West.”
But while he did not succeed elsewhere, he did succeed where it really mattered, the Territory of New Orleans. There the territorial governor—who by no coincidence whatever was his brother Edward, a former New York City mayor and congressman—granted him a monopoly in Louisiana waters. As New Orleans was the breakpoint between river and ocean traffic, this was nearly as good as a monopoly over the whole Mississippi Valley.
But the monopoly was often ignored or, more accurately, defied. A boat owner named Henry Shreve took the case to federal court and eventually won a verdict holding that the territory had no authority to grant such a monopoly. By this time both Livingston and Fulton were dead and the case was not appealed. The number of steamboats in the Mississippi River system exploded as a result.
Thanks largely to Henry Shreve, who had a knack for naval architecture among other things, they rapidly evolved into a new form. Multi-decked, wide-beamed, shallow-drafted vessels, they were able “to float on a heavy dew,” and were well adapted to the rivers, which were threaded with ever-shifting sandbars and mudflats. As these handsome, ginger-breaded vessels proliferated on the rivers of the mid-continent, they soon entered into the folk memory and became an enduring image of nineteenth-century America, thanks to such people as Currier and Ives, Mark Twain, and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Henry Shreve also solved another major problem of navigating the Mississippi and its tributaries: snags. The river often undercut its banks, and large trees would fall into the water and make their way downstream. Those that floated free were called “sawyers” for their resemblance to circular saw blades as they rolled lazily in the current. Far more dangerous were the “planters,” trees that had become lodged on the bottom. Often invisible, they could rip the bottom out of a steamboat and sink it in seconds. There would be only “a sudden wrench, the rush of sucking water, a clanging of bells, terrified screams, and the current would sweep over another tragedy.”
In the 1820s, it was estimated that there were at least fifty thousand snags in the Mississippi River system, having accumulated since the ice age, and most people thought there was nothing to be done about them. Henry Shreve thought otherwise. He built two steamboat hulls, each 125 feet long, each powered by a paddle on only one side. These he connected together with beams that held a large wooden wedge, sheathed in iron for catching the snag, and a pulley and windlass system for lifting them from the river.
On August 19, 1829, Shreve’s snag boat, the Heliopsis, went to work at Plum Point, Tennessee, one of the most snag-ridden places on the entire Mississippi. Shreve pointed it at a planter sticking out of the water and charged. The ram split the snag in two, and the crew winched the tree up by the block and tackle and sawed it into harmless chunks. By that evening the channel at Plum Point was clear. By the following year a newspaper was able to report that “Capt. Shreve has perfectly succeeded in rendering about 300 miles of river as harmless as a millpond.”
Shreve’s greatest feat of snag clearance was cutting a path through the Great Raft, a logjam 150 miles long on the Red River. It opened up all of northwest Louisiana to commerce, and today the largest city in that part of the state is called Shreveport.
THE WATT STEAM ENGINE, as Fulton had shown, could power a vessel. But it was very bulky and its low pressure and leisurely pace—only about twelve cycles per minute—provided little power per unit of weight. A radical new type of steam engine was needed to make the steamboat a really paying proposition. Oliver Evans in the United States and Richard Trevithick in Britain developed such an engine independently.
In the Watt engine, steam pushed the piston to the bottom of the cylinder and was then drawn off and condensed, creating a vacuum that brought the piston back up. In both the Trevithick and Evans engines, steam not only pushed the piston down, but pushed it back up as well, dispensing with the separate condenser. (Because the steam was vented twice each cycle rather than condensed, they came to be called puffer engines for their characteristic noise.)
This allowed many more cycles per minute and produced much more power per unit of weight. Evans, who had built the first steam engine of the Watt type ever constructed in the United States in 1800, built one to his new design in 1803. It had a cylinder only about six inches in diameter and eighteen inches long. It produced about five horsepower. The Watt-type engines that had been built in England, and installed shortly before in Philadelphia’s Central Square as part of the city’s waterworks, each had cylinders thirty-two inches in diameter and six feet long, but developed only about twelve horsepower.
Oliver Evans did not build a steamboat, but he did build the first steam-powered vehicle in the United States—and arguably the world’s first automobile thereby. Commissioned to build a steam dredge for the port of Philadelphia, he produced a vessel thirty feet long and twelve feet wide, which weighed seventeen tons. He mounted a new engine in it, smaller, lighter, and even more efficient than his first model, at his shop about a mile up Market Street from the Schuykill River. He then put the whole thing on wheels and attached the engine to one axle with a chain drive. Giving the contraption the improbable name of Orukter Amphibolos, he set off down Market Street for the river “with a gentle motion.”
When Evans reached Central Square, he circled around the waterworks several times, literally as well as figuratively running rings around Watt’s low-pressure engine design, before continuing on to the Schuykill, where he dropped the wheels, and the Orukter Amphibolos departed from history to take up its duties as a dredge.
The Watt engine, which had helped to spark the Industrial Revolution and was the most fundamentally important technological development since the printing press three hundred years earlier, was obsolete after only three decades. The pace of change had already begun the relentless acceleration that continues to this day.
Evans began manufacturing steam engines at his Mars Iron Works in Philadelphia, and later a branch, under the direction of his son, opened in Pittsburgh to supply steam engines to the ever-growing fleet of steamboats in the Mississippi Valley.
The Erie Canal and the steamboat profoundly changed the economic gravity of the upper Mississippi River basin. Where before, most of the rapidly increasing output of this area had, perforce, gone down the Mississippi to New Orleans, now it began to move east instead. By 1830 Ohio had begun trading predominantly with the East. Indiana (1835), Michigan (1836), Illinois (1838), and Wisconsin (1841) soon followed. Even Cincinnati, located right on the Ohio River, was trading predominantly with the eastern cities by 1860.
Besides contributing greatly to the growth of such cities as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, this shift in economic orientation firmly attached the Upper Middle West, largely populated by immigrants from New England and upstate New York, to the Northeast, and assured its allegiance to the Union cause in the Civil War.
But New Orleans, thanks to its location at the base of this vast commercial network, still prospered beyond any other southern port. Freight exported out of New Orleans was only 65,000 tons in 1810. By 1860 it was 4,690,000 tons, increasing seventy-two fold in only fifty years.
THE MONOPOLY OF STEAMBOATING in New York waters lasted far longer than it did in New Orleans and would have far greater consequences.
New Jersey and Connecticut retaliated as best they could against New York by banning New York boats from their waters as theirs were banned from New York’s. The monopoly was, of course, extremely unpopular with everyone except its direct beneficiaries, including New Yorkers who had to pay higher fares because of it. One man from New Jersey, Thomas Gibbons, decided to fight both in court and in the marketplace. He owned a steamboat named the Stoudinger (although, because it was very small, it was usually known as the Mouse), which he put on the New York–New Brunswick run, the first leg of the quickest route to Philadelphia. He hired as its captain a young man from Staten Island named Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt, still in his twenties, had already owned a small fleet of sailing ships, but he realized that the future belonged to steam and went to work for Gibbons to gain experience and build up his capital. He soon convinced Gibbons to build a larger boat, designed by Vanderbilt, which Gibbons named Bellona, after the Roman goddess of war. In that far more classically oriented age, the implication in the name was clear to everyone.
Flying a flag that read “New Jersey Must Be Free!” Vanderbilt would steam boldly to New York, dock wherever the New York State authorities seemed not to be, and immediately disappear into the city. The authorities didn’t dare seize the boat itself, knowing that New Jersey would retaliate by seizing the first monopoly steamboat it could lay its hands on. At sailing time he would sneak back as near to the ship as possible and then make a dash for it, the crew casting off the instant he was aboard.
The authorities even tried to arrest Vanderbilt by boarding the Bellona in the middle of New York harbor. But all they found at the wheel was one of the female passengers—all innocence, ribbons, and bonnet—while Vanderbilt hid out in a secret compartment he had had the foresight to install belowdecks. The other passengers hooted their derision at the hapless police.
The monopoly tried to buy Vanderbilt by offering him the colossal salary of $5,000 a year, but he declined abruptly, saying, “I shall stick to Mr. Gibbons till he is through his troubles.” Throughout his long career, from farm boy to the richest man in America, Vanderbilt could always be counted on to keep his end of a bargain once it was made.
While the monopoly was having limited success preventing competition in the real world, it not surprisingly kept beating Gibbons in the New York State courts. After five years the case finally reached the United States Supreme Court, and Gibbons hired two of the best lawyers in the country to represent him there—Daniel Webster, then serving as a congressman from Massachusetts, and William Wirt, who was attorney general of the United States, although here acting in a private capacity.
Webster took all day to deliver what was universally recognized as a brilliant legal oration, which he gave before a packed chamber. He claimed that the grant of power to the federal government by the Constitution to “Regulate Commerce…among the several States” was sweeping and exclusive. New York had no power to grant a monopoly in New York waters that excluded non–New Yorkers, according to Webster, because the federal government alone had jurisdiction in the matter.
William Wirt and the lawyers for the Livingston interests, Thomas J. Oakley and Thomas Addis Emmett, also spoke at length and, by all reports, eloquently. The decision was widely awaited, not only in New York but elsewhere as well. “Great anxiety is manifested in this city,” reported the New York Statesman on February 14, 1824, “to learn the decision of the great steamboat question which has lately been argued with consummate ability at Washington.”
Matters were delayed when Chief Justice Marshall, returning from a visit to the White House, fell on leaving his carriage and dislocated his shoulder on February 19. Still, the opinion was read out by Marshall, in a “low, feeble voice,” on March 2, only three weeks after the Court heard arguments. “Commerce undoubtedly is traffic, but it is something more, it is intercourse,” Marshall wrote for a unanimous court ( Justice Johnson of South Carolina wrote a concurring opinion, even more absolute in its interpretation than Marshall’s), and “…is regulated by prescribing rules for carrying on that intercourse.” Since the Constitution gave the federal government the power to “regulate interstate Commerce,” the federal government and the federal government alone was empowered to prescribe the rules.
This, of course, is precisely what Webster had argued. (Webster, patting himself on the back as usual, wrote, “The opinion of the Court, as rendered by the Chief Justice, was little else than a recital of my argument.”) But it was also a new and breathtaking assertion of federal power. President Monroe, in 1822, in a veto message to Congress, had written that the power granted by the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce did not extend beyond the power to lay duties on foreign commerce and to prevent duties being laid on trade between the states, which was explicitly forbidden by the Constitution.
The decision was greeted jubilantly everywhere, and many newspapers reprinted the decision in its entirety. “Some of the New Yorkers,” wrote a Missouri paper, “show themselves a little restive under the late decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on the subject of the steamboat monopoly. They may rest assured that it is a decision approved of in their sister states, who can see no propriety in the claim of New York to domineer over the waters which form the means of intercourse between that State and others, and over that intercourse itself.”
In fact, even most New Yorkers heartily approved. Shortly after the decision was handed down, “the steamboat United States, Capt. Bunker, from New Haven, entered New York in triumph, with streamers flying, and a large company of passengers exulting in the decision of the United States Supreme Court against the New York monopoly. She fired a salute which was loudly returned by huzzas from the wharves.”
The huzzahs were heard all over the nation. The Georgia Journal reported that two steamboats arriving in Augusta were greeted with “cries of ‘down with all monopolies of commerce and manufactories—one is as great an evil as the other. Give us free trade and sailor’s rights!’” While one might well doubt that the anonymous reporter was accurately transcribing what was being yelled from a wharf, he undoubtedly captured the spirit of the moment. As a judge described it twenty years later, the decision had “released every creek and river, every lake and harbor in our country from the interference of monopolies.”
The economic effects of what Charles Warren, author of the classic work The Supreme Court in United States History, called the “emancipation Proclamation of American Commerce,” were immediate. Fares from New Haven to New York fell by 40 percent thanks to competition, and the number of steamboats operating in New York waters jumped in less than two years from six to forty-three.
But the long-term effects were even more profound. States stopped granting monopolies of any sort to rent-seeking influential citizens, as all of them were now presumptively unconstitutional. Other barriers to interstate commerce, erected for parochial benefit, fell as well. Thus, thanks to Gibbons v. Ogden, the United States became the world’s largest truly common market, just as the power of steam to move goods cheaply over long distances—a power merely hinted at by the steamboat—was about to grow exponentially. The railroad would prove the seminal invention of the nineteenth century and create the modern economy that Gibbons v. Ogden had made the United States ready for.
LIKE SO MANY nineteenth-century inventions (and far more twentieth-century ones), the railroad was not a single invention created by a lone genius. Instead it was a system whose components were invented separately and then pieced together by people in the new profession of civil engineering (so-called because until the middle of the eighteenth century, “engineer” had been solely a military specialty).
It had been known since the sixteenth century, when it was used in mining operations, that a draft animal (or a human being) could pull a much heavier load if the wagon was set on rails. The reason is that metal flanged wheels set on metal rails have very low “rolling friction.” A forty-ton locomotive accelerated to sixty miles per hour will coast about five times as far as a truck of similar weight on a level highway. This makes railroads, even today, by far the most economical means of hauling freight.
And it was not long after the coming of the steam engine that it occurred to people to marry the two technologies. Indeed, Oliver Evans foresaw the railroad nearly in its totality long before it became a practical reality. “The time will come,” he wrote in 1813, fifteen years before the first commercially successful railroad, “when people will travel in stages[i.e., stagecoaches] moved by steam engines, from one city to another, almost as fast as birds fly…A carriage will set out from Washington in the morning, the passenger will breakfast in Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia and sup at New York on the same day…. To accomplish this, two sets of railways will be laid…to guide the carriage, so that they may pass each other in different directions and travel by night as well as by day.”
Evans never adapted his engine to the concept of the railroad, but Trevithick did when he built the world’s first locomotive, using the high-pressure steam engine. He tried it out on the tramway at the iron foundry of Samuel Homfray in Glamnorganshire, Wales. On February 21, 1804, the first locomotive pulled the first train along a set of tracks, and the railroad was born.
It would be another twenty-five years, however, before the multitude of problems that stood in the way of a practical railroad were solved and George Stephenson—who solved many of them—built the world’s first commercially successful steam-powered railroad, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. It opened on September 15, 1830, with the Duke of Wellington, then prime minister, present. Connecting as it did the great industrial city of Manchester with the great port city of Liverpool, it was an immediate financial success.
But railroad projects were already under way in the United States by this time. John Stevens, founder of the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey, had been granted a charter to build a railroad between the Delaware and Raritan rivers, but it was never built. Stevens also built the first locomotive in this country, in 1825, but it only ran on a circular track at his home in Hoboken.
His son, Robert Livingston Stevens, a very gifted engineer, however, made fundamental contribution to the technology of railroads. It was the younger Stevens who developed the rail, T-shaped in cross section, that has been the basic design of railroad rails ever since. He also discovered that rails laid on wooden cross ties with gravel between them made the most satisfactory roadbed. And he invented the railroad spike to hold everything together.
The Erie Canal’s success stimulated the minds of the business communities of other eastern port cities. Baltimore, which had been growing rapidly, wanted to assure further growth by tapping into the burgeoning western market that the Erie Canal was rapidly tying to New York. But the geography of the Appalachians made a canal to the West from Baltimore impossibly expensive. So it was decided to use the aborning technology of the railroad, employing horses as the power source.
On July 4, 1828, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, turned the first shovelful of earth for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The ceremonies were a curious mixture of the old and the new. Carroll himself was ninety-one and insisted on still wearing the knee breeches of the days of his prime, although they had gone out of fashion three decades earlier. Although the B&O was to be privately financed, its beginning was publicly celebrated and the vast procession leading to the ceremony was arranged by craft and profession, like the medieval guild parades of English cities. But the technological undertaking being solemnized was as new as could be and would make a new economic world in a mere generation.
Carroll sensed it. “I consider what I have just now done,” he told the crowd, estimated by the newspapers at fifty thousand, “to be among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if indeed, it be even second to that.”
ONCE THE LIVERPOOL and Manchester Railway showed the practicality of the railroad, railroad projects were begun in many parts of this country, usually as short, local lines intended to connect a town to a part of the existing water-borne transport system. Many canal projects were converted to railroads, which had many advantages over canals. They were easier to build, could be built nearly anywhere and over most terrain, and could operate all year round.
They multiplied rapidly. In 1830 there were only 23 miles of railroad track in the country. By 1840 there were 2,818 miles; by 1850 there were 9,021. By the time of the Civil War, 30,626 miles—two-thirds of it in the North, significantly—laced the country together into what was increasingly an economically cohesive whole. This had profound consequences, for the railroad knitted what in the eighteenth century had been an infinity of local markets into an increasingly integrated national market. “Two generations ago,” marveled Arthur T. Hadley in his classic work of economics, Railroad Transportation, published in 1886, “the expense of cartage was such that wheat had to be consumed within two hundred miles of where it was grown. Today, the wheat of Dakota, the wheat of Russia, and the wheat of India come into direct competition. The supply at Odessa is an element in determining the price in Chicago.”
As the railroads made larger markets possible, they made larger industrial enterprises possible as well. But they had consequences that reached far beyond such direct economic effects. Wherever they went railroads brought economic activity into being, and cities and towns sprang up along the lines and especially at their intersections. In Europe the railroads connected existing cities. In America, in many cases, they midwifed them into existence.
And railroads were extremely capital-intensive, costing in the early days about $36,000 a mile on average at a time when $1,000 a year was a middle-class income. The first railroads were paid for by people living near the rights-of-way who were likely to benefit directly, just as the Liverpool and Manchester had been financed.
But the securities issued locally soon made their way to capital markets, especially to what was rapidly becoming the largest one, in Wall Street. And when larger railroads were envisioned, as they soon were, the securities were often floated in these markets from the beginning. In 1835 only three railroads had their securities regularly quoted in the newspapers. By 1850 there were thirty-eight. By the middle of that decade railroad stocks and bonds accounted for more than half of all the negotiable securities in the country, while volume on Wall Street rose by a factor of ten.
And railroads required enormous quantities of industrial goods: locomotives, freight and passenger cars, rails, cross ties, spikes, and bridge members, to name just a few. At first, nearly all these had to be imported from England. But as the American demand for these commodities grew, more and more American entrepreneurs began to supply them, driving the Industrial Revolution in this country more than any other single force.
In 1828, the year of the B&O groundbreaking ceremony, a budding industrialist from New York, Peter Cooper, and two partners bought three thousand acres of land in Baltimore and built the Canton Iron Works. He hoped that the B&O would be a steady source of business, as well as a means of bringing supplies such as fuel and iron ore. The B&O, however, was soon near bankruptcy. The line had discovered it could not make money using horses, but its thirteen miles of track had such sharp curves that George Stephenson, seeing the map, declared that the curves were too sharp for trains to be pulled by steam locomotives.
Cooper, a very gifted mechanic as well as a first-rate businessman, knew the great engineer was wrong. “I’ll knock together an engine in six weeks,” he said, “that will pull carriages ten miles an hour.”
He found some old wheels that would serve and rigged them to a platform. He had a steam engine he had built for an earlier project sent down from New York and bolted it to the platform, along with a boiler. Connecting the boiler and the engine, however, was a problem. What plumbing was available in this country at the time was made of lead, which could not stand up to the pressure and temperature of a steam engine. So Cooper took a couple of old muskets, sawed off the barrels, and used them as piping.
The result was the first commercial locomotive built in America. Very small by later standards, it was later given the nickname of the Tom Thumb, after P. T. Barnum’s famous midget. However small, it worked just fine, and on its first run it pulled a carriage loaded with forty people at speeds up to eighteen miles an hour, a breathtaking pace at the time. (Several of the passengers brought along paper and pencil and wrote down coherent sentences to disprove the then widely held belief that people’s brains couldn’t function at such speeds.)
POWERED BY STEAM, the Baltimore and Ohio began to prosper. The line was steadily extended, reaching Harper’s Ferry on the Potomac in 1834, and the Ohio River in 1852. Peter Cooper’s ironworks also prospered, as did the city of Baltimore. When Cooper sold out a few years later, he took B&O stock in payment at $45 a share, stock he later sold for $235 a share.
There could be no better illustration of the economic synergy that is so characteristic of any major new technology as its effects ripple through an economy. The railroads made it possible to travel farther and faster and cheaper than ever before. Andrew Jackson had needed a month to travel by coach from Nashville to Washington for his inauguration in 1829. Thirty years later the trip could be made easily, and far more comfortably, in three days.
But the railroads also greatly stimulated manufacturing, mining, travel, and commerce in general. And the railroads simply thrilled the people of the day, who sensed immediately that they were in a new era, one beyond the comprehension of earlier times. “It’s a great sight to see a large train get underway,” nineteen-year-old George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary in 1839. “I know of nothing that would more strongly impress our great-great grandfathers with an idea of their descendant’s progress in science…. Just imagine such a concern rushing unexpectedly by a stranger to the invention on a dark night, whizzing and rattling and panting, with its fiery furnace gleaming in front, its chimney vomiting fiery smoke above, and its long train of cars rushing along behind like the body and tail of a gigantic dragon—or like the devil himself—and all darting forward at the rate of twenty miles an hour, Whew!”
But it also induced a sense of misgiving and unease, especially in the older generation. By 1844 Philip Hone, forty years older than Strong, wrote, “This world is going too fast. Improvements, politics, reform, religion—all fly. Railroads, steamers, packets, race against time and beat it hollow…. Oh, for the good old days of heavy post coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!”
Philip Hone’s use of the phrase “the good old days,” is the earliest recorded. He had been born in 1781, into a world that was technologically, economically, and socially very similar to the world his parents had been born into, and even the world of his great-great-grandparents. But thanks to the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, he had lived to see a new economic universe. Every generation since has lived through a similar experience, and it has become a commonplace to live long enough to see the technological world of one’s youth slowly vanish as we age. But to Philip Hone’s generation, it was a new, exciting, but sometimes frightening experience.
Print makers such as Currier and Ives exploited the nostalgia, publishing romantic images of a neat and tidy preindustrial world that had never, in fact, existed. Novelists as well wrote of a comforting if largely fictional lost world. Dickens, born in 1812, the most popular novelist of his time, never mentioned the railroads and telegraph that so characterized the new economic world he lived in.