On the morning
of Monday, March 12, 1888,
the east coast of the United
States from Virginia to Maine
awoke to the most severe
blizzard in American history.
Four feet of snow
fell from the skies,
and fierce winds
created snowdrifts
up to 50 feet high.
The Blizzard of 1888
crippled the entire Northeast
and shut down all of the streets
and all the transportation
in the cities.
It forced a lot
of soul searching
and thinking about
how cities moved and lived
and breathed and operated.
With over 400 dead and citizens
left scared and angry,
the blizzard underlined
a transportation crisis
that had been escalating
for decades.
In a booming economy,
cities were flooded
with thousands of immigrants
and rural Americans
seeking opportunity
in a newly mechanized world.
The problem is that
everybody's crowded
into a fairly small area.
The available
modes of transportation
are slow and cumbersome.
The city is growing,
but the transit system
isn't growing with it.
America was in danger of choking
on its own progress.
In no place was the problem
more overwhelming
than the nation's
most congested city, Boston,
where nearly 400,000 people
packed into a downtown
of less than a square mile.
There are almost 8,000 horses
in Boston
pulling the trolley railways
around the city.
It is a cacophony of noise,
dust, horse manure, smells,
in the downtown area,
extremely congested.
As America struggled to address
its transportation crisis,
leaders in Boston pursued
a radical solution.
But their race to build
the nation's first subway
would clash against political
gridlock, selfish businessmen,
and a terrified citizenry.
The idea of a subway in Boston
was an enormous risk.
It was a breathtaking jump
into the unknown
and that can't be
underestimated.
This was a jump
into the unknown.
In early 1882, a young American
naval officer on leave
walked the crowded streets
of London.
Frank Sprague,
just 24 years old,
had heard of the world's
first subway,
the London Underground.
Hailed as an engineering marvel,
he wanted to see it for himself.
As he descended from the street
down the steps into darkness,
he could hear the roar
of the trains thundering
through the tunnels below.
In 1863, when the
London Underground opened,
it was a coal-powered steam
engine running underground.
The subway coming through
London's tubes
was spewing dark soot, and
smoke, and sparks into the air.
One journalist who rode
on the London subway
compared it to standing next to
someone blowing cigar smoke
in your face
for the entire time.
It was just a miserable
riding experience.
Sprague, an aspiring inventor,
thought there had to be
a better way.
It was the age
of electrical invention--
the light bulb, the telephone,
the dynamo--
and Sprague,
having studied electricity
at the Naval Academy,
was full of ideas.
Frank Julian Sprague
is a driven person.
A colleague once said
of Frank Sprague,
"It seems as though he had wires
coiling and uncoiling
inside of him."
He was constantly in motion.
Sprague had spent a year at sea
with the navy,
inventing in his head.
It's very cerebral.
He keeps a notebook.
And in the notebook he draws
all these schematics,
all these blueprints,
all these drawings;
he sketches out these ideas.
There are armatures.
There are new, improved versions
of arc lighting.
There are electric motors.
And the notebook is...
you can almost feel the energy--
it vibrates, it really does.
He senses that this new force,
electricity,
it seems almost limitless
in its potential.
And above all he senses
that electricity can move things
if people can learn how
to harness it and put it to work
in the form of electric motors.
With his frequent trips
underground while in London,
Sprague came up
with a revolutionary plan:
He sketched out a subway system
where electricity
would supply the power.
It would be conducted to the
trains from an overhead source,
through a motor, and then
back to the rails below.
Sprague was so confident
in his idea
that he immediately applied
for a patent.
In this era, late 19th century,
electricity is magic
and it has a magical
set of effects.
But also there's a great deal
of anxiety that went
with the magic of it.
It's invisible,
it's very powerful,
it can kill you
but you can't see it,
so there's all sorts of...
of anxieties.
You've got potency
and invisibility.
You can argue the science,
but the fear is there.
As cities across America were
being wired for electricity,
newspapers reported
on horrific accidents.
Sprague's vision for a subway in
America depended on the public
overcoming its fear of this
unsettling power source.
Convincing Americans
that traveling underground
was a good idea would be
an even more daunting challenge.
There was an enormous
fear of going underground
in this restricted environment.
One of the health considerations
at the turn of the century
was tuberculosis
and pulmonary disease.
And people were just concerned
that living, traveling in this
underground environment
could be very detrimental
to health.
The underground is scary
for two reasons.
One is the association
with death.
We just know that
in the underworld
we are getting closer
to another realm.
But the underworld is also scary
because it's not friendly
to human life--
never was, never will be.
Everything you do down there
has to be done with engineering
to enable humans to survive.
You put those two together
and you can see why people
are afraid of the underworld.
