1874 | Transportation
Transportation
London's Liverpool Street Station opens February 2 on a site once occupied by the city's Bethlehem (Bedlam) Hospital. Built for Great Eastern Railway, it has 10 platforms.
Sen. William Windom, 47, (R. Minn.) heads a committee that proposes a government-built, government-operated double-track freight line between the Mississippi Valley and the eastern seaboard that will prevent railroad companies from charging exorbitant freight rates (see 1877; farmers, 1873).
A patent on a "water closet for railway cars" is issued February 10 to Chelsea, Massachusetts-born inventor Lewis H. (Howard) Latimer, 25, whose father was a slave who fled to Boston from Virginia in the 1830s. Young Latimer joined the Union Navy at age 16, returned to Boston in 1865, and has learned mechanical drawing while employed as a draftsman by the patent attorney firm Crosby and Gould (see communications [telephone], 1876; energy [carbon filament for incandescent bulb], 1881).
Pennsylvania Railroad president J. Edgar Thomson dies at Philadelphia May 27 at age 66, having built a network of lines connecting Philadelphia with cities as distant as Norfolk, Virginia, and Chicago (he leaves his estate in trust to fund the St. John's Orphanage, the income to be used for the education and maintenance of young women whose fathers were killed while working on any railroad); inventor and former Reading Railroad president Asa Whitney dies at Philadelphia June 4 at age 82.
The first bridge to span the Mississippi at St. Louis is tested July 2 by seven 50-ton locomotives loaded with coal and water that chug slowly across from one bank while another seven chug across from the opposite bank, pausing at the slender junctures of the three cantilevered arches on the steel arch Eads Bridge (see 1867). Some 300,000 residents and visitors crowd the levee to witness the collapse of "Eads's Folly" but the bridge holds all 700 tons. The crowd cheers, a 3-day celebration ensues with parades, band concerts, and speeches culminating in a $10,000 fireworks display, and the Eads Bridge opens to traffic July 4 with a 100-gun salvo. The world's first steel bridge and the first to have such long arches (its central span is 520 feet long), it has cost $9 million (and the lives of 13 divers). Its construction has required the work of some 2,000 men, and its success will lead to the ascendancy of rail transportation over steamboat transportation in the Mississippi Valley.
The Southern Pacific Railroad reaches Anaheim outside Los Angeles, providing a link to the 5-year-old transcontinental rail line and enabling local farmers to sell their oranges, walnuts, and other produce to markets nationwide. Collis P. Huntington hopes to extend the line along a coastal route through part of the 110,000-acre Irvine Ranch (see 1864), but Huntington by some accounts antagonized James Irvine at San Francisco in 1849, allegedly by cheating at a small-stakes poker game. Irvine refuses to negotiate, and Huntington files suit in federal court. He argues that part of the ranch's boundaries remain under federal domain, but the court will rule in Irvine's favor 4 years hence (see 1888; agriculture, 1878).
Belgian-born U.S. inventor Charles Joseph Van Depoele, 28, demonstrates the practicality of electric traction (see trolley, 1885).
New York City gets its first electric streetcar. Invented by Stockbridge, Mass.-born engineer Stephen Dudley Field, 28, it is the first car anywhere to be run successfully with current generated by a stationary dynamo: one wheel picks up current carried by one of the rails. Conveyed to the car's motor, it flows back to the other rail via a second wheel, insulated from the first, and is returned to the dynamo, but the system is hazardous and presents no immediate threat to the horsecar (see 1888).
The first chain-driven bicycle has two medium-sized wheels of equal diameter. Designed by H. J. Lawson with a chain-driven rear wheel, it is easier to mount and steer than the high front-wheeled "penny-farthing" introduced by James Starley 4 years ago, has a decided advantage in terms of stability over what will be called an "ordinary," and is safer (see 1885; Starley, 1876).