Green Humanist

Musings on The Possible Return of the Draft

Last week, the House passed a defense bill that included both an absurd $895 billion for the military-industrial complex and a provision that will automatically register men ages 18-26 in the selective service. Selective service registration is currently voluntary, although men who fail to register may face $250,000 fines or 5 years in prison (yet there have only been 14 convictions for such non-registration since 1986). They may also be denied federal or local government jobs, or state-based student loans.

The last draft occurred in 1973 during the Vietnam War, and resulted in extreme civil unrest in the US. In 1975, President Gerald Ford removed men’s responsibility to register for the draft, but 5 years later President Jimmy Carter reinstated the requirement in a panic over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

The recent bill that passed the House has kicked up a storm of controversy, along with the Senate Armed Services Committee’s proposal that women also be required to register for the selective service.

The bill and the proposal to require women to register with the selective service have caused many Americans to wonder why these changes are happening now. Note that the proposal was only an item discussed in the SASC, not a bill presented to Congress.

One factor for why the House is moving forward with this legislation at this time is that voluntary enlistment in the army has dropped by 35% in the past 10 years, from 58,000 in 2013 to 37,700 in 2023. This decline has resulted in all branches of the military failing to meet recruitment quotas in recent times. Currently, the number of women enlisting each year has been holding steady at about 10,000.

A large number of young Americans don’t even meet the fitness, educational, and mental health standards for recruitment. It is perhaps for this reason that the think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) proposed in a recent report that the military relax its standards on these three factors to help met recruiting goals.

But we should circle back to the original question of whether there are further motives for changing the draft laws and proposing amendments to draft women. It is not impossible that the US government is considering what conflicts they would like to involve Americans in in the future and taking steps to ensure the supply of soldiers is sufficient.

Despite calls from some members of Congress, US troops have not been shipped to Ukraine to fight for NATO against Russia. However, there are US military personnel performing inspections in the country, and the BBC reported on a leak showing US special forces in Ukraine a year ago.

With the war in Ukraine likely drawing to a close, if there did happen to be a draft, the US would more likely send its troops to aid Israel in some way, or send them to a war with China. What’s that, you say? There is not currently a war between the US and China? The military-industrial complex is desperate for it to happen and will do anything to bring it into being. Raytheon’s shareholders need their bonuses!

If the US did try to bring back the draft, I think this would unleash a firestorm across the country, especially if women were drafted. This spring, a wave of protests against the genocide of Palestinians rocked the Establishment. I do not believe they thought that young people were capable of sustaining such a protest.

Now, imagine the protests if these individuals were told that they were going to be shipped off to fight on the Israeli side. I think the ferocity of the protests would multiply several times if the stakes became far more personal.

Furthermore, the parents of young people would get involved in the protests. Many modern parents devote more than two decades to trying to ensure the success of a kid. Few parents would let the government send their kid off to die in a war that the US has created or is funding.

Although I oppose the draft on the grounds that a government that does not represent its people cannot ask for their lives, I think that people would be more likely to pay attention to foreign policy both if the draft returned for men and if women were also drafted, and the protests against the draft would be even more widespread. In the end, this increased opposition would be beneficial to steering the US away from hawkish foreign policy.

People are accustomed to the idea of men fighting and being drafted, but I think that many in the country violently oppose the idea of the same thing happening to women. This opposition would make it far more difficult for the government to carry out its plans for sustaining wars abroad.

Interestingly, the magazine Military Times recently published an article talking about how “social media messaging could amplify perceptions of inequity or perpetuate disinformation from adversaries.”

According to the article: “A viral video of a pop star ripping up a draft notice, or a social media allegation that a local draft board is racist, for example, could quickly turn the tide of public opinion against drafting authorities.”

Yet the article continues to say that, “enlisting well-known sports figures or celebrities to promote responding to the draft as a civic duty could help the Defense Department and the Selective Service get in front of these obstacles.” Hmm, could we be seeing a preview of propaganda strategies in the future?

Yet at this point, we have gone into the realm of speculation, as the draft obviously hasn’t been used for recruitment yet. But I will engage in a little speculation in this blog at the risk of being proven wrong in the future. And if the draft does end up being reinstated, expect protests across the nation that this spring’s demonstrations were only a small sample of.

Brief History of the Pikes Peak Railway

Pikes Peak is one of Colorado’s fifty-three “fourteeners,” or mountains that have an elevation of at least 14,000 feet (4267 m). The mountain is named after an American explorer with a legendary name, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, although he himself never managed to get to the top of the mountain.

At 14,115 feet (4302 m) above sea level, Pikes Peak represents a daunting hike. The most popular trail to the summit is 13.5 miles (22.2 km) one-way. But for those looking for an alternative route, there are other options. There is a road to get to the top, but that is not very interesting.

There is also the Pikes Peak Cog Railway. After a trip to the summit in 1888, inventor Zalmon Simmons believed that there needed to be a better way to the top of the mountain. Therefore, he decided to fund construction of a railway. Construction began in 1889 and it opened a year later.

The grade of the railway was as much as 25%, so it needed to be built as a cog railway. This is a railway where a toothed rail is placed at the center, and the railway is equipped with cogs that interact with the teeth and help the railway up steep slopes. Only three such cog railways remain in the US, although they are common in Switzerland and other mountainous areas of the world.

The railway climbs a total of 6,320 feet (1,930 m) and is 8.9 miles (14.3 km) long. Originally, steam locomotives were used to get the train cars to the top of the mountain. During the Great Depression, however, financial pressures meant that the railway switched to more efficient diesel locomotives.

In the 60s, the railway started using self-propelled railcars, or Doodlebugs, as they are sometimes called in the US. An increase in demand for the railway meant that larger cars were used and passing points were constructed in the 70s. This new infrastructure allowed for 8 trains a day up the mountain, versus the previous three.

Yet by the time of its 100^th anniversary, the Pikes Peak Cog Railway was beginning to age, and components of the rail frequently deteriorated or broke. After it was clear that serious repairs were in order, the railway closed in 2018 for some updates.

The next year, crews completely ripped out most of the old rail infrastructure. The company that owned the railway negotiated with the town of Manitou Springs, where the railway begins, for $36 million in tax breaks over the next 50 years in exchange for the estimated $100 million for upgrading the railway. At the same time as the railroad was being refurbished, the town of Colorado Springs rebuilt the visitor center at the mountain’s summit.

The Pikes Peak Cog Railway reopened on 20 May 2021. Tickets have increased in price over the years, and are now $59 for anyone 13 and over, of $49 for kids 12 and under. There are also premium tickets available for those who want a seat next to the engineer at the front of the train. Although hiking to the top of Pikes Peak offers great awards, taking the railway will also give visitors some unforgettable views.

Cicadas in the Midwest (For Those Who Are Curious)

If you live in the Midwest US, this blog will not be news to you. But for anyone not in the know, a remarkable event is happening spring and summer in the middle states. Billions, or perhaps even trillions, of cicadas have now crawled from the ground and are screaming in the trees.

But this is a particularly interesting year for cicadas, because the 13-year and 17-year broods are emerging at the same time since 1803.

Fossils of cicada ancestors have been found from the Late Triassic period, and the modern form of the insects traces back to around 60 million years ago.

There are about 3,000 species of cicadas. The ones in the Midwest are around 1 inch (2.5 cm) in length. They have black bodies and bright red eyes. Unlike annual cicadas, the current cicada broods in the Midwest emerge only every 13 or 17 years. This strategy allows them to find safety in numbers. Furthermore, because they only emerge in huge numbers occasionally, it is difficult for any predator to specialize in eating them. Nevertheless, birds still prey on these bugs.

Only male cicadas make their characteristic noise to attract mates. The males die not long after mating. The females then fly up to a tree to lay their eggs and die not long afterwards. Cicadas make incisions in branches to lay the eggs, and this can damage smaller trees. For this reason, many Midwestern residents were advised to protect smaller trees. Drive through an average neighborhood in Illinois these days and you might see small trees covered with mesh netting to prevent cicadas from landing there.

Cicadas do not have mouths, only tubes to suck the fluid from plant stems. This means that they cannot bite. In addition, they do not have stingers or any poisons, so there is no particular reason to be afraid of them. But they can hurt you in other ways. The males are capable of producing buzzing as loud as 90-100 db. Walking under a tree of thousands of cicadas creating such noise can be deafening.

Cicadas only have a lifespan of 4-6 weeks. Although they are producing a lot of noise at the moment, their sounds will soon be silenced, and all of them will be gone by the end of June. Yet the eggs they laid in the trees will soon hatch and fall to the ground. The larvae will bury themselves 8 feet underground and survive by feeding from the liquid of tree roots. Then, in 13 or 17 years, they will emerge en masse again.

Cicadas most likely have an internal molecular clock that counts the passage of 13-17 years by keeping track of temperature fluctuations. Entomologists aren’t yet certain how this internal clock works. Scientists know for certain, however, that the final date of their emergence is triggered when the soil temperature reaches 65°F (18°C).

Looking out the window right now (mid-morning at the time of writing), I can see cicadas swarming the trees outside my windows. It’s an interesting sight that will be gone in just a few weeks. And the 13 and 17-year simultaneous emergence will not happen for another 221 years, making it a once-in-a-lifetime event to witness.

A Brief Overview of The Black Diamond Express

The Lehigh Valley Railroad (LVR) went into service in 1846 in the northeastern US. Its main purpose was to transport anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania to New York City and Philadelphia. By the end of the 19^th century, the LVR wanted to get into the passenger train business. There was demand for a route between Buffalo, NY and New York City, so that is where LVR constructed the line.

The hope for LVR was that this new line would draw the passengers that were currently using the New York Central Railroad or the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. To try to capture a share of the market, they decided that this train would be a luxurious one, and that it was imperative that the journey between the two cities only last around 9.5 hours.

The LVR had a naming contest for its new railroad to generate publicity prior to the opening. Out of 35,000 entries, LVR chose “The Black Diamond Express.” Coal, which the LVR was famous for delivering, is also called black diamonds. The winner of the naming contest received $25, almost $1000 in today’s dollars. Not a bad deal!

Trains on the Black Diamond Express were built with a dining car, two coaches for sitting in during the day, a baggage car, a library car, and an observation car. In its advertisements, the railroad advertised its first-class dining service, which included offerings of fine steak and seafood. The observation car had glass windows everywhere so that the passengers could see the majestic scenery of upstate New York. There were velvet plush chairs, smoking rooms, and lavatories for men and women.

On 18 May 1896, the eastbound train of the Black Diamond Express departed from Buffalo, and the westbound train left NYC’s station at the same time. Both made the journey to the opposite station in about 10 hours and 20 minutes. The average speed on the first run was about 44 miles an hour (71 kph).

The Black Diamond Express soon acquired the name “The Honeymoon Express” because many newly married NYC couples used it to travel from their city on the way to Niagara Falls.

Yet from the start, the Black Diamond Express was disadvantaged. The New York Central’s Empire State Express was a competitor that had built a more efficient route and could make the same journey in around 8 hours. In fact, in 1908 the Black Diamond ceased operating for a while due to costs massively outpacing revenue.

The Black Diamond Express also experienced a serious accident in 1911. A broken bridge caused one of the trains to derail, falling to the river bed 40 feet (12 meters) below. 29 people were killed and 62 were injured.

Not long after upgrading all cars to become air conditioned, LVR experienced a disaster on the Black Diamond’s line. Severe flooding in 1935 washed out many of the bridges, and repairs to the line cost $500,000 ($11.4 million in 2024 dollars).

LVR switched most of its trains from steam to diesel following WWII, and upgraded the Black Diamond Express’s locomotives in 1948. As diesel engines are more efficient at hauling heavy loads, but this decision was not enough to continue the viability of the line. The rise of the automobile meant that there was less demand for rail transportation between Buffalo and NYC than there had been in years.

Due to unprofitability, the line soon closed and the final Black Diamond Express ran on 11 May 1959. The tracks have been dismantled and few traces remain today of what used to be one of the US’ premier luxury intercity passenger trains. LVR itself merged into Conrail in 1976, so the original company that built the Black Diamond Express is also no longer in existence.

Julian Assange Wins Right to Appeal Extradition

On Monday of last week there was another update in the long ordeal of Julian Assange’s political prosecution. Assange has won the right to challenge a UK court’s decision to extradite him to the US.

Previously in February of this year a High Court in the UK debated whether Assange will be extradited to the United States. A UK court decided to extradite him back in 2022, and Assange’s lawyers have been fighting the decision since then.

The High Court then decided to adjourn the decision, saying that it sought further assurance from the US that Assange will be treated humanely when he is tried in the US. The Court finally released its decision on 20 May. Although it is absurd that the court did not block extradition entirely, at least the fact that they allowed Assange to challenge the extradition offers a glimmer of hope.

Assange’s lawyers will rightly argue in the appeal that their client’s First Amendment rights under the US Constitution are being violated. He faces a 175-year prison sentence if extradited to the US, although US officials have recently “assured” the UK Court that Assange would not face the death penalty if extradited. Oh, how gracious. How noble.

Assange is the first journalist in US history to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act (a WWI-era law used to prosecute political dissidents and peace activists), and he is not even an American citizen. Assange has already been held for 4 years in Belmarsh prison and has been the target of the US for 13 years. Despite not having been convicted of a crime, he has been held in this maximum security prison with few visitors allowed. Due to the psychological torture he has experienced, Assange’s health has long been on the decline.

One reason why Assange might be able to have the charges dropped against him is not because the justice systems of the UK or US live up to their names. Instead, because the American presidential election is this fall, the Biden administration might want to wash its hands of this controversy. Yet the damage has already been done, and the US has shown what it is willing to do to journalists who dare to speak out.

Researchers Create Self-Digesting Plastic

Single-use plastics infest many areas of our lives, and many plastics either aren’t recycled or are not made to be recyclable. The world produces 350 million tonnes of plastic each year, compared to just 2 million tonnes in 1950. From 1950-2015, only 6% of the 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic produced was recycled. Much of this plastic also ends up in the ocean, and seafood is now routinely contaminated with microplastics.

Unlike food waste such as banana peels or vegetable stems, there are few things in the natural environment that can break down plastics in a short time frame. Left to its own devices, it might take a plastic bottle hundreds of years to break down.

Huge behavioral and policy shifts will be needed to contend with the crisis of plastic pollution. Some nonprofits such as The Ocean Cleanup Project have experimented with ships that can remove plastics from the ocean. Technological breakthroughs will also be needed to reduce the impact of the single-use plastics that are so difficult to break away from.

Researchers at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego recently created a type of plastic that starts digesting itself once it is placed in soil and compost. The plastic is a type of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), which is found everywhere from shoes to ethernet cables.

Yet this is no ordinary TPU type. Within the plastic are spores of Bacillus subtilis, a bacteria that is found both in the soil and in our digestive tracts. Spores are an evolutionary adaptation of some types of bacteria that allow them to survive in harsh and inhospitable conditions. By using spores, researchers have overcome the problem of having the bacteria needed to degrade a material die before they are activated.

The researchers ran experiments where they tried composting the plastic in both a microbe-rich and microbe-sterile environment. They found that in both environments, the plastic was over 90% biodegraded within 5 months.

Another problem the researchers faced in the process was that the process of making the plastic killed the bacteria initially. Thus, they bred the bacteria to gradually develop tolerance to greater and greater temperatures until the spores could survive the plastic production process.

The water-repellant property of the spores also interacts with the polymer strands of the plastic to produce a tough material. Despite the addition of the spores, the plastic was not made more fragile compared to a base plastic.

By no means is this TPU variant the magic bullet to fix all of our plastic pollution problems. Technological breakthroughs are never enough to solve environmental solutions on their own. Yet as the issue of plastic pollution only grows by the year, any news about viable plastic alternatives is possible.

The next steps of this research should be to see how the plastics fare when put to the test in a variety of real-world situations. Is it easy for the spores to be accidentally activated and for the plastic to digest itself to early, for instance? What products are or are not suitable for being replaced with the spore-infused plastic? Researchers are also interested in speeding up the time of biodegradation. Although less popular as a quick tech fix, reductions in plastic pollution remain the best way of confronting the problem.

Florida’s Ban of Lab Grown Meat

On 1 May, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that banned the industry of lab-grown meat from the state. Lab-grown meat, also called cultivated or cultured meat, is meat that has been grown from stem cells taken from live animals. The cells grow in a medium and are then harvested and shaped into burgers, sausages, or other popular cuts of meat.

Governor DeSantis claimed that the bill was to protect the integrity of American agriculture and to block the agenda of elites that want to make people eat cultured meat and insects. Unfortunately, lab grown meat has become an item in the culture war, with its proponents being portrayed as evil elites and its opponents as valiant warriors defending the American way.

The fact is that there are not enough resources to sustain the American meat-intensive diet for 8 billion people, and the livestock industry is responsible for major water pollution and land degradation.

Right now, the cultured meat industry is more dream than reality. The Food and Drug Administration only gave approval to lab-grown meat in the US back in 2022, and the US Department of Agriculture approved it in 2023. In 2024, lab-grown meat has begun to get officially approved as safe in several more countries.

Within the US, lab-grown meat is only available in select upscale restaurants in a few cities of the US, such as San Francisco and Seattle. Upside Foods and Good Meat are the only two companies in the US that are selling this product. Some estimates suggest that lab grown meat could be a $25 billion industry in the US by 2030, but the hill to get there is steep.

One of the issues is scaling. It is easier to grow a small cut of meat in a little container than it is to grow large quantities in a commercially viable operation. In addition, purifying all of the ingredients needed to create a medium for the cells to grow on is still very energy intensive. The promise of cultured meat to be less energy intensive than regular meat has yet to be realized, although the land use is much less and the cells are not producing manure like a real animal would.

For those looking for a humane alternative to meat and absolutely cannot stomach the idea of delicious plant-based meats, cultivated meats could be a good alternative. No slaughtering is necessary to obtain the cells used for cultivation. But it will be some time before cultivated meat is available and affordable in supermarkets across the country.

Florida’s ban seems a bit silly in light of the fact that cultured meat is not even available for purchase in the state now. Yet Florida raises hundreds of thousands of cattle for slaughter each year, and farmers and ranchers no doubt see a potential threat to their business far on the horizon. Arizona is considering a similar bill banning cultured meat, likely for reasons both of future economic threats and current culture war stances. Yet regardless of these bills, cultured meat is not currently resulting in declining meat sales anywhere in the US. For now, those who want a cleaner, healthier, and more humane meat alternative must stick to plant-based options. And what’s wrong with those tasty products, anyway?

Growing Popularity of Grass Alternatives

What is America’s biggest irrigated crop? Is it wheat, soybeans, or possibly corn? In fact, it is grass. Turfgass lawns are present in neighborhoods, suburbia, and golf clubs across the US. Although corn is more widespread than lawns in the US (80 million acres versus 40 million acres, respectively), corn is rarely irrigated, whereas grass almost always has to be watered lest it die.

Although in many neighborhoods a perfectly green, manicured lawn is a sign of being a good neighbor and citizen, many individuals in the US have now begun to challenge that notion. Realizing the negative environmental impact of the fertilizers, pesticides, and water needed to create a cultivated lawn, many Americans are turning to alternative groundcovers.

One case of a couple switching to more natural cover and attracting the ire of their homeowner’s association made national news several years ago. Maryland residents Janet and Jeff Crouch decided to replace their grass lawn with a variety of native plants that attracted pollinators or provided food for birds. Such plants included sunflowers, coneflowers, and milkweed. Their lawn no longer required pesticides and fertilizers to thrive, and a variety of plants in general can help absorb water and reduce flooding in an area.

Yet in 2017, the Crouches received a letter from their homeowner’s association (HOA) demanding that they replace the plants on their lawn with grass or face fines or possible eviction. The Crouches filed a lawsuit against the HOA and won the right to keep their native plants in their yard. Their lawsuit also resulted in a new law being passed in Maryland that prevented HOAs from requiring grass on people’s properties.

Through the media attention their case received, the Crouches have urged other homeowners to replace their grass with native plants that support pollinators and other local animals. And indeed, a growing number of Americans are replacing their high-maintenance lawns with eco-friendly alternatives. The popularity of the “No Mow May” movement, where one avoids cutting grass in May to help bees, has also increased in recent years.

One popular alternative to grass is clover. Clover lawn videos on TikTok have received millions of views. Clover lawns only need to be mowed twice a year and require no watering except when they are growing initially and the roots haven’t established themselves yet. This form of groundcover also does not require fertilization and pesticides, and is a great alternative for those who still want a lawn of short groundcover for kids or dogs to play in.

Microclover is a subset of clover that has fewer flowers and also crowds out weeds. Creeping thyme, Pennsylvania Sedge, and fescue are other low-maintenance plants that are a close substitute for grass.

But for those that don’t need a short grass-like alternative, planting prairie grasses and flowers is another option. Although the installation of the prairie is hard work at first, after the initial planting maintenance drops to very low levels, especially compared to a grass lawn that must be frequently mowed and watered. When developing a prairie on one’s lawn, people should be careful to choose plants that are native to their particular state and will grow well without maintenance.

A final alternative to lawns is popular in arid areas of the US, and in some areas, is mandated: xeriscaping. Xeriscaping refers to the practice of designing a lawn so that it does not need irrigation. Often this practice involves using rocks and cacti to populate the area of a lawn.

One key factor that will be important in spreading the popularity of lawn alternatives is to remove the stigma associated with not having a perfect green lawn. It is often seen as a sign of laziness or unwanted eccentricity to choose to have anything another than a lush carpet of green grass. But with social media spreading information about the benefits of lawn alternatives, the change might slowly happen.

New York City’s 19th Century Elevated Railroad

By the mid-1850s, the city of New York was faced with severe traffic congestion. Engineers and city planners in the metropolis came up with a variety of different ideas to try to solve this problem. Last week’s blog covered an attempt to build a railway underground, an idea which would take several decades to come to fruition in New York.

Yet other people looked in the opposite direction to provide a solution to the city’s traffic congestion. Charles T. Harvey was an engineer who had previously worked on designing a shipping canal between Lakes Huron and Superior. He also had expertise in railroad construction, and suggested a new idea for transportation in New York: an elevated railway.

Harvey had been trying to garner support for his railway since the end of the Civil War, and in 1867 New York’s legislature approved his request to build a half-mile-long prototype along Greenwich Street.

Harvey wasn’t the first engineer to propose an elevated railway in New York City. An engineer in the 1850s proposed a bizarre railway that had the locomotives running on top of the track and pulling the passenger cars underneath. But Harvey was the first one to build any version of this method of transportation in the city. London has the distinction of operating the world’s first elevated railway when the track opened in 1836, but this one was built on a brick aqueduct. In contrast, Harvey’s version was built over existing railways.

Many were critical of the project before it had even started, worrying that the elevated would start many fires as embers flew from the locomotives. They also predicted mass traffic accidents as the locomotives running ahead scared horses on the ground. Finally, some also feared a collapse of the towers supporting the elevated railway.

Scientific American magazine wrote in 1872, “Everybody in New York wants rapid transit, but, strange to say, the moment that any body sets to work with a definite plan for its realization, they are vigorously opposed and the work prevented.” That was true of last week’s pneumatic railway as well as for Harvey’s elevated railway.

Nevertheless, in 1868 the prototype of the elevated railway was complete. It was supported by a network of iron beams, and the cars were pulled along by cables thirty feet (9 meters) off the ground. The cables were meant to reduce noise and sparks on the railway.

After successful test runs, an extended version of Harvey’s elevated railway opened three years later. But the doubters of the project had had some good reason to be skeptical of the method of transportation. The cables of the railway frequently broke, forcing passengers to climb back down to the street via ladder. Harvey’s company failed and his financial backers lost their money in a gold panic sparked by Jay Gould and James Fisk, two business tycoons of the Gilded Age., The individuals who took charge of the elevated railway decided to replace the cables with locomotives.

By 1872, the New York Elevated Railroad Company had opened a new elevated railroad that ran in the same Greenwich Street area, and within a few decades these railroads were transporting millions of passengers per year. The network of elevated railroads in New York City grew for some time.

But at the same time, residents of the city complained about the shadows cast by the tracks and the ashes spewed by the locomotives in the age before electrified trains. Also, people in apartment buildings weren’t thrilled with trains going right by their windows at all hours of the day.

Support for elevated railways in the city decreased further after the infamous Ninth Avenue derailment. On 11 September 1905, a train on an elevated railway took a curve too fast and crashed down into the street. Thirteen people died and there were 48 serious injuries.

The first subway in New York City opened in 1904, providing an alternative for transportation on elevated rail. Although there are still elevated railways in the outer boroughs of the city today, rail transportation in the city has largely moved underground.

New York’s 19th-Century Pneumatic Experiment: Its first Subway

In the late 1800s, many of the growing American cities suffered from a woeful state of public transport. The streets were terribly congested, and fights often broke out in the areas most prone to traffic jams.

One potential idea to alleviate the traffic congestion was to build a railway underground. One challenge of building underground railroads was venting the smoke and other toxic gases expelled by steam locomotives. Construction of what would become the London Underground had just begun in the 1860s, and the difficulty of maintaining clear air in the underground area was an obstacle for the engineers of the day.

Yet one man, Alfred Ely Beach, had an idea for moving heavy objects about underground without the use of steam locomotives. Atmospheric pressure and a system of large pneumatic tubes would be used in place of the locomotive that would usually pull the cars.

The idea was not without precedent. English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel had devised an atmospheric railway in the 1840s. The atmospheric railway was intended to work through the principle of atmospheric pressure. A tube would be placed in the center of the railway, and this tube would function as the vacuum. The train would be attached to the central tube via a piston. Ahead of the train were pumping stations where the air was drawn out of the tube. As a result, a pressure gradient was formed and the air rushing forward from behind the train would propel it forward. Although atmospheric railways had been attempted before, Brunel used new design principles to create his own version.

In the 1840s Brunel completed a stretch of atmospheric railway that ran from Exeter to Plymouth at the cost of £433,000. The pipes were 15 inches (38 cm) in diameter when the ground was level and 22 inches (56 cm) in diameter for the steeper parts. Pumping stations were placed every two miles, and using the principle of atmospheric pressure allowed the trains to travel at as much as 68 mph (109 kph)! Yet the atmospheric railway ended up being shut down due to technical difficulties,

Alfred Ely Beach was an American inventor and was a cofounder of the Scientific American magazine. In 1968, he received permission from New York’s state legislature to begin construction on his pneumatic railway. He created a company, Beach Pneumatic Transit Company, to manage construction of the operation.

To excavate the tunnel through which the trains would run, Beach used his own version of a tunneling shield. This was a relatively new invention at the time, and tunneling shields protect workers who are excavating a large area underground by supporting the tunnel. The pneumatic tubes of his railway involved air from massive fans being used to either shoot passenger cars down the tube or suck them back if the fans were reversed. Steam engines located at the surface moved the fans, eliminating the issue of engine smoke asphyxiating passengers.

Beach’s crews completed a small tunnel under Broadway from Murray Street to Warren Street and the pneumatic railway opened in 1870. The cars of the railroad had their own lightning and upholstered seats, and could seat up to 22 people. A great number of people rode Beach’s prototype of a pneumatic railway for the novelty of it. 400,000 people paid the 25-cent ticket fee and rode through the 300-foot (91-meter) railway in the few months that it operated.

Yet Beach ran into trouble when he tried to expand the railway. Existing railroad owners came together to lobby against Beach’s competitor company expanding its operation. A bill to try to authorize the construction of the railway was vetoed by New York’s governor. Finally, the Panic of 1873 caused investment to dry up, making the construction of a larger pneumatic railway impossible.

Beach abandoned his idea of a pneumatic railway, but his idea of moving things via pneumatic tubes inspired the pneumatic mail delivery system of New York in years past. Beach would go on to build the US’ first mail tube.

He had spent $70,000 of his own money to make the station for his railway look nice, including adding a piano, chandeliers, fountain with fish, and paintings. He later rented out the space as a shooting range and wine cellar.

And then, Beach’s experiment was forgotten to time. In fact, when construction was taking place for a subway line under Broadway, crews were astonished when they found the old tunnel, car, and tunneling shield of the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company. Some photos survive of these artifacts, giving an interesting insight into this largely forgotten history.