Alfred Ely Beach

Alfred Ely Beach: The Secret Subway Under Broadway

On 26 February 1870, New Yorkers paid twenty-five cents to walk down into a white-brick tunnel beneath Broadway and found a waiting room with chandeliers, a grand piano and a fountain full of goldfish. At one end sat a cylindrical carriage upholstered for twenty-two passengers. A gigantic fan blew it down the tunnel, then reversed and sucked it back. It was the first subway ever built in New York, it had been dug in secret over fifty-eight days, and the man who paid for it had told the authorities he was laying pneumatic mail tubes.

A Newspaper Family

Alfred Ely Beach was born on 1 September 1826 in Springfield, Massachusetts, into the press. His father, Moses Yale Beach, owned the New York Sun; his brother Moses S. Beach became a newspaper publisher who backed Abraham Lincoln, and another brother, William Yale Beach, went into banking. Alfred was educated at Monson Academy, now Wilbraham & Monson Academy. On 30 June 1847, at twenty-one, he married eighteen-year-old Harriet Eliza Holbrook.

He could have inherited the Sun. Instead he went after something odder and, as it turned out, more lucrative.

Scientific American and the Patent Machine

With Orson Desaix Munn, Beach acquired *Scientific American* and spent the next fifty years as its editor and publisher, building it into the leading popular science journal in the United States. But the magazine was only half the business. Alongside it Beach and Munn ran a patent agency, Munn & Co., which grew to file roughly three thousand patents a year and whose clients included Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Morse.

The arrangement was close to a perfect machine. Inventors read *Scientific American* to see what was being invented; when they had an idea of their own, they walked into the offices of the men who published it and asked for help patenting it. Beach spent half a century sitting at the exact point where American invention passed through on its way to becoming property. Nobody in the nineteenth century had a better view of what was coming.

The Inventor

He was not merely an observer. Beach built an early typewriter designed for blind users, which won a gold medal at the New York Crystal Palace exhibition in 1853. He devised a cable traction railway system. And he developed a cylindrical tunnelling shield — a hooped iron frame pushed forward through soft ground while workers excavated at the face and lined the tunnel behind them — at around the same time James Henry Greathead was arriving at his own version in London. The shield is the ancestor of every tunnel-boring machine now in use, and it is the reason Beach could dig under a busy street without collapsing it.

Digging Under Broadway in Secret

Beach obtained his first charter in 1868. Openly proposing an underground passenger railway would have meant a fight he could not win: New York's transit franchises ran through Tammany Hall, and William M. "Boss" Tweed expected to be paid. Beach declined to pay him. So the charter he pursued described pneumatic tubes for carrying mail and parcels, and the tunnel was constructed covertly through 1869 and 1870.

The finished demonstration line was modest and immaculate: about three hundred feet under Broadway between Warren Street and Murray Street, roughly the length of a football field, twenty feet down, eight feet wide, lined in white brick. The car seated twenty-two in upholstered comfort under chandeliers. What impressed visitors most was the absence of everything they associated with rail travel — no smoke, no cinders, no sparks. Within a year around four hundred thousand people had ridden it, and Beach gave the fares away, directing the proceeds to the United Home for Orphans of Soldiers and Sailors.

Tweed, and the Panic

A three-hundred-foot novelty was never the point. Beach wanted a real system, and for that he needed state authorisation and outside capital. He got neither. Property owners along the route objected. Albany was reluctant to hand a monopoly on underground transit to a single private company. And Beach himself put the blame squarely on Tweed for blocking the expansion. Then the Panic of 1873 destroyed the investment market, and that was the end.

The tunnel was sealed and forgotten so completely that when subway builders broke into it in 1912 the discovery was reported as an archaeological find — though photographs exist of men standing inside the abandoned car as early as 1899. New York would not open a working subway for more than three decades after Beach's.

The Beach Institute

The most consequential thing Beach did with his money had nothing to do with tunnels. He founded the Beach Institute in Savannah, Georgia, the first school in that city erected specifically for the education of African Americans. In the post-war South that was not a safe or uncontroversial thing to build, and it is the achievement of his that has aged best.

Beach died of pneumonia in New York City on 1 January 1896, aged sixty-nine. His son Frederick Converse Beach took over *Scientific American*; his grandson Stanley Yale Beach became an early figure in American aviation.

Why Alfred Is Called a Genius

The case for Beach rests on a rare combination: he was a genuine inventor and simultaneously the best-positioned reader of other people's inventions in America, and he used each capacity to feed the other.

The specific quality is synthesis under commercial constraint. Beach's tunnelling shield was real engineering, independently arrived at alongside Greathead's. His pneumatic subway drew on propulsion ideas already in the air; what he did with them did not: he recognised that the obstacle to underground transit in New York was not technical but political, and he engineered around the politics as deliberately as around the geology. Digging a passenger railway under Broadway while holding a mail-tube charter, in fifty-eight days, without the city noticing, is a feat of organisation and nerve at least as impressive as the shield. And the goldfish and the grand piano were not vanity: Beach understood that New Yorkers thought of underground travel as something between a sewer and a grave, and he built a room designed to change their minds.

The honest counter-case is substantial. Beach lost. His system never expanded past three hundred feet; pneumatic propulsion was a dead end that could never have moved a city's worth of passengers; and the subway New York eventually built owed him nothing directly. His fortune came from a patent agency and a magazine, which is to say from other people's genius as much as his own. Nobody in the sources calls him a genius; they call him a publisher and an inventor. What is fairly claimed is foresight — he was right about what New York needed roughly three decades before the city agreed with him.

Legacy

Beach's tunnel is gone, swallowed by the subway system that arrived a generation too late to be his. *Scientific American*, which he ran for fifty years, is still publishing. The Beach Institute still stands in Savannah. And every time a tunnel-boring machine grinds forward under a city, it is doing, at enormous scale, what Beach's shield did by hand beneath Broadway in the winter of 1869.

Achievements

• Educated at Wilbraham & Monson Academy