1877 | Transportation
Transportation
Cornelius Vanderbilt dies at New York January 4 at age 82, leaving a fortune of $105 million (relatively little goes to his 38-year-old widow and his eight daughters, but his son William Henry, 55, receives $90 million and his four sons receive $11.5 million among them, all in stock; see 1873). Vanderbilt has laid new steel rails and built new bridges to cut running time on the New York Central between New York and Chicago from 50 hours to 24 (see 1902).
The U.S. Supreme Court rules March 1 that a state has the power to fix freight rates for intrastate traffic and for interstate traffic originating within its borders (Peik v. Chicago and North Western Railroad Co.). A later decision will limit state regulation to intrastate shipments, exempt the much larger volume of freight that crosses state lines, and weaken the farmers' victory in the Peik decision (see 1886; Interstate Commerce Act, 1887).
Shovel maker Oliver Ames, Jr. dies at North Easton, Massachusetts, March 9 at age 69, having served as president of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1868 to 1871. Much of his vast fortune has come from returns on his railroad investments and from supplying shovels, swords, and other equipment under government contracts during the Civil War. His nephew and namesake becomes the driving force behind Oliver Ames & Sons; now 46, Oliver Ames III has rivaled his late father, Oakes, as a financial speculator, paying 25ยข per share to buy stock at auction in the Central Kansas branch of the Union Pacific and later selling it to Jay Gould at $250 per share when the latter was consolidating the UP with the Kansas Pacific; former Chicago and North Western Railway president (and first mayor of Chicago) William B. Ogden dies at his Fordham Heights, New York, estate August 3 at age 72; Callao, Lima & Oroya Railroad builder Henry Meiggs at Lima, Peru, September 29 at age 66 after a series of paralytic strokes, leaving the world's highest railroad incomplete, although it has "broken the back of the Andes" with 67 tunnels and dizzying viaducts. His tunnel under Mount Meiggs at an altitude of 15,658 feet remains an engineering marvel (see 1871; Grace, 1890).
The first U.S. cantilever bridge carries trains across the Kentucky River near Harrodsburg. Designed by Charles Shaler Smith for the Cincinnati Southern, the $377,500 bridge tested April 20 has three spans of 375 feet each. Incorporated in 1869 as a municipally owned railroad and under construction since then, the Cincinnati Southern begins operations July 23 and will complete its 350-mile line to Chattanooga in 1880, with 27 tunnels (see "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," 1880). It will repay its original $20 million cost many times.
Boston entrepreneur Albert Augustus Pope, 34, converts his Hartford, Connecticut, air-pistol factory into the first U.S. bicycle factory (see Starley, 1876). Pope's Columbia bicycle with its high front wheel will be popular for more than a decade until safety bicycles make it obsolete, and Pope will soon be grossing $1 million per year (see 1896; safety bicycle, 1885).
Nikolaus A. Otto and Eugen Langen at Cologne obtain a patent for a "silent engine" that incorporates the theoretical advantages of a four-stroke cycle (see 1867). It is the first working model of what will become the modern automobile internal-combustion engine.