1859 - Transportation

Transportation

Suez Canal construction begins April 25 (see 1854). Ferdinand de Lesseps has financed the sea-level waterway between the Mediterranean and Red seas chiefly by selling stock to French investors, but he has sold a 44 percent interest for nearly $20 million to Egypt's khedive Mohammed Said. Some 30,000 Egyptian forced laborers start work at wages above prevailing rates and will be augmented by Arab, French, Italian, and Greek workers before hand labor is largely replaced beginning in 1863 by mechanical equipment brought from Europe to dig out nearly 2 cubic meters of earth each month (see 1869).

The ship Pomona goes down in the North Atlantic April 27, drowning all 400 aboard.

About 120 passsengers for the Peninsular & Orient steamship Emeu leave Suez for Aden November 20 with a caravan of 3,000 camels carrying mail and 716 chests of provisions, using the Overland Route established by the late Thomas Waghorn in 1837. The passengers ride across the desert in small two-wheeled spring carts, each holding six people and pulled by four horses; the £6 fare includes free carriage of baggage by camel. The 84-mile journey takes 16 to 24 hours including stopovers, and although cheaper transportation on donkeys or camels is available, going that way takes 20 to 30 hours.

The British clipper ship Falcon begins a new method of shipbuilding. Much smaller than the American clipper ships but longer lasting and more economical to operate, the Falcon is made of wooden planking on iron frames.

Engineer-inventor Isambard Kingdom Brunel dies at his London home in Westminster September 15 at age 53, having worn himself out building some of Britain's most noteworthy ships, rail lines, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, and wharves (he has been unable to delegate authority); engineer Robert Stephenson dies at London October 12 at age 55, having built the six-arch iron Tyne River bridge (using James Nasmyth's steam hammer to drive the foundations) and the long-span Britannia Bridge across the Menai Strait in North Wales.

The Italian states still have only 1,759 kilometers of railway track (see 1839).

The Chicago and North Western Railway is incorporated following a takeover of the assets of the bankrupt Columbus, Hocking Valley and Toledo Railway, which are merged with the 4-year-old Chicago, St. Paul, and Fond du Lac, with former Chicago mayor William B. Ogden as president (see 1864).

The Louisville & Nashville Railroad completes 187 miles of track between the two cities October 27 and scheduled train service begins a few days later (see 1850). Work on the line had languished, but former secretary of the treasury James Guthrie, now 62, has spent the last 2 years promoting and financing the L&N, which has cost $7,221,204.91 but will be profitable almost from the start. It will have 269 miles of track by 1861, will reach Memphis in late 1865, and within 80 years will be operating more than 5,000 miles of track in 13 states of the South, with 60 percent of its traffic coming from bituminous coal mines in Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, and Illinois.

Montréal's Victoria Bridge opens in December to span the St. Lawrence River and enable the 7-year-old Grand Trunk Railway's trains to reach Portland, Maine, during the long winter season. Work on the $6.6 million bridge has required as many as 3,040 men, 144 horses, four locomotive engines, six steamboats, and 72 barges, and workmen discovered the remains of 6,000 Irish immigrants who had died of typhus en route to, or soon after arriving in, Canada from 1847 to 1848. Inaugural ceremonies for the bridge will be held next summer, with Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, making his first visit to a British colony.

Brink's Express has its origins in a Chicago horse-and-wagon service started by a Vermonter who in 1891 will begin moving bank funds and payroll money to launch a business that will grow into the leading U.S. armored-truck money-transport company (see robbery, 1950).