New York Times
December 11, 1999
Looking at the Transcontinental
Railroad as the Internet of 1869
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
After a freezing May night in 1869 at an isolated Utah settlement
called Promontory Summit, a crowd gathered to watch as a final iron
spike was driven into an unfinished railroad track. The spike and
silver hammer, both wired to a telegraph line, made an electrical
connection that sent a signal through the nation's network. It
proclaimed the completion of the transcontinental railroad whose
tracks wound through the Sierra Nevada, thrust across the central
plains and splayed across the East Coast. The impact of that rail
line on American life was foreshadowed in the pulse of electrical
current surging through a web of wires, easily overcoming distance
and weather. It set off the first simultaneous nationwide
celebration: in San Francisco and New York, at the moment of contact,
two cannons facing the Pacific and Atlantic fired shots, proclaiming
that the United States was also prepared to extend its newly united
presence outward.
Over a century later, that transcontinental project, completed
after decades of disease, accident, Indian attacks, bribery, stock
fraud and utopian dreams, still seems unusually resonant. For this
too is a period of technological transformation. Today's changes
don't require hammers and spikes or immigrant work crews' chiseling
through rock or forges turning out thousands of miles of rail.
Today's networks are extensions of that telegraphic signal, not of
the tracks beneath it. They involve telecommunications companies and
television cable companies, wireless telephones and computer
networks, electronic transfers of cash and stock and commodities --
the exploding world of the Internet.
And if the transcontinental railroad inspired grandiose hopes for
social transformation, the prospects for e-commerce, e-mail and
e-fraud have raised similar expectations and worries. An 1846
Cincinnati newspaper mocked the utopian claims that a railroad could
"create settlements, commerce and wealth"; the project's supporters,
the paper suggested, might as well be promising "to unite neighboring
planets in our solar system and make them better acquainted with each
other."
Do Internet visionaries predict anything less? This may be why
building railroads is getting some unusual attention, including a
large new 797-page chronicle of the construction of America's
transcontinental railroad, "Empire Express" (Viking) by David
Haward Bain. Railroads have always attracted hobbyists and
specialists; historians have also had a strong interest in the
railroad's impact on regional cultures. But the attention has
recently broadened, echoing the energies now being poured into
proliferating books about the Internet. A special series devoted to
railroads published by Indiana University Press deals with such
arcana as the Chicago South Shore Railroad and the now extinct "ghost
railroads" of Tennessee and Kentucky; the publisher is offering
railroad histories that have been unavailable for more than 30 years.
Current rail obsessions go even further: it is not just the objects
that entrance, it is the way that -- with Internet swiftness -- they
altered the surrounding cultural universe.
In England, argues an Oxford lecturer, Michael Freeman, in a new
book, "Railways and the Victorian Imagination" (Yale), the railroad
weakened the aristocracy, changed the geography and populations of
the cities, led to the beginnings of an organized stock market and
inspired a half century of art with its sublime energies. In the
United States, with fewer established institutions to change, Mr.
Bain's account suggests that the construction of the tracks may have
had as much impact as the trains running on them. A new kind of
American business took shape, ambitious in its scale and demands,
dealing with the government as both supplicant and partner. And the
creation of a newly "connected" country was not unrelated to the
Civil War that raged as construction began. Materials may have been
scarce and the government was often in crisis, but Lincoln (who had
worked as a lawyer for a railroad) saw the transcontinental as a way
of binding East and West, just as the war was fought to bind North
and South. The railroad was a new technology, an industrial version
of the "information superhighway" requiring continuous
innovation.
Railroads spurred extraordinary feats of engineering, as William
D. Middleton's recent book, "Landmarks on the Iron Road" (Indiana)
shows. Nature had to be resculptured; tunnels had to be dug and
bridges mounted over precipices. The transcontinental required an
800-foot-long, 63-foot-deep cut through a pass in the Sierra Nevada;
it was blasted through at the pace of a foot a day. The tracks also
passed along the edges of the rocky walls of a cliff 2,500 feet above
a ravine.
And the culture changed to accommodate the technology. There was a
new, specialized language (the rails introduced technical words like
"junction" and "buffer"), a new kind of literacy (reading timetables)
and a new sense of space and connection (in England train tracks
became the first examples of perfectly straight roads). Today we
cheer the wiring of schools and libraries, but in the 1840's in
England, railroad ABC's became common. ("S is the Station, with
bustle and din,/Where some folks get out, and others get in.") The
speed of these changes was also dizzying. In 1830 England had just
100 miles of track; by 1852 it had 6,600 miles. Between 1844 and
1847, Parliament authorized £250 million to be spent on
railroads; within 20 years the landscape and urban life of the
country were overturned.
In the midst of this there were also concerns (familiar to
computer users) about the creation of industry standards. Different
rail systems, built at different times by different companies to
different specifications, were not always compatible; passengers
often had to switch trains at midjourney. In the transcontinental
railroad, for example, existing lines were stitched together as the
network expanded; but the track's gauge -- the distance between the
rails -- had to be consistent (it was finally set at 4 feet 8.5
inches). In England, Parliament adopted the same standard, but some
railroads had 7-foot gauges, and many more sizes in between had
strong advocates. Mr. Freeman cites one 19th-century commentator (who
could seem to be arguing about computer operating systems) who noted
that even if a train line had a better standard in mind, "it could
never hold its own."
And commerce, of course, bullishly charged forward, accompanied by
extraordinarily volatile stock prices. Rail expenses were enormous:
it cost $640,000 (in 1860's dollars; about $13 million in today's
terms) to lay just one 20-mile segment of track for the
transcontinental. But the payoffs were as great as the risks.
Railroad stocks were sold cheaply -- and widely distributed as bribes
in Congress -- but they also created a new class of millionaires. In
England the greatest number of stock dealings in the 1840's was in
the trading of railway stocks; the frenzy was known as "Railway
Mania." In 1853, Charles Dickens described England's North Western
Railway Company in terms that are now reserved for a certain software
company in Redmond, Wash. The company, he wrote, "is wealthier than
any other corporation in the world," conveying more people in a year
than inhabit all of Scotland, and carrying goods that exceed the
annual trade of Belgium and Portugal combined.
Of course, since there were fewer regulations then, there was also
more overt stock manipulation. One of Mr. Bain's more chilling
stories is how Thomas C. Durant, one of the masterminds of the
American transcontinental railroad, floated a rumor that the new
tracks would connect to a railroad line he owned. The stock soared.
Durant sold his shares and quietly bought interests in another rail
line, then made a similar announcement. The first stock plummeted,
the second shot up. Durant sold yet again, bought back his old stock,
reasserted its value, and netted $5 million for his efforts.
But out of such machinations and their more noble counterparts the modern world took shape in a shockingly short time: stock markets were formalized, time zones were created, trade multiplied, cities expanded, distances shrank, impatience grew. A British observer in 1830 suggested that the railroads caused a "sudden and marvelous change" in perceptions of time and space, adding, "What was quick is now slow; what was distant is now near." Sounds familiar.