1873 | Transportation
Transportation
Service begins January 1 on a new Mexican railroad between Veracruz and Mexico City as the legislature gives out concessions to railroad and telegraph-line builders in an effort to modernize the country (see political events, 1846). British capital has built the rail link that connects the capital to the coast.
Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central gains control of the rail line between New York and Chicago by leasing the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, formerly headed by his son-in-law Horace F. Clark (see 1869; Clark, 1872), but Clark dies at New York June 19 at age 57 after heading the Union Pacific for less than a year and Jay Gould acquires his first Union Pacific shares (see Vanderbilt, 1877).
The Hoosac railroad tunnel is completed in the Berkshires of Massachusetts after 22 years of construction with hand tools and nitroglycerin blasting. It will remain for some years the longest tunnel in the world.
Wall Street's financial panic deals a heavy blow to Ben Holladay, who acquired the Russell, Majors and Waddell transcontinental freight firm in 1862, made a fortune before selling out in 1866, and has sold his steamship interests to finance a new Oregon Central Railroad. His German bondholders will force Holladay out of the company in 1876, and he will be financially ruined.
San Francisco's cable streetcar (the world's first) goes into service August 1 on Clay Street hill. London-born engineer Andrew S. (Smith) Hallidie, 37, has seen some horses killed when they slipped on wet pavement trying to pull a wagon up a hill; he has persuaded the city fathers to install the "endless-wire rope way" that he patented in January 1871 to cope with the hilly streets that defy San Francisco's eight horse-drawn lines. Huge steam-engines atop the hill generate power to pull the cars, and San Francisco will install additional cable-car lines until there are 175 miles of them (the figure will later shrink to just eight); Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, and Omaha will follow suit (see 1894; Sprague, 1888).
The Calcutta Tramway Company begins service in the Indian city with horse-drawn cars; it will introduce electric traction in 1899.
Rochester, New York, lawyer George B. (Baldwin) Selden, 27, experiments with internal combustion engines in an effort to develop a lightweight engine that will propel a road vehicle that is more efficient than the "road locomotives" now used in some farm jobs (see 1876; energy, 1860; 1866).
The White Star liner S.S. Atlantic runs aground April 1 off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The 420-foot steamship founders, and 502 of her 931 passengers are lost.