6 Transportation Revolution

The transportation revolution in the United States began when Americans taking advantage of features of the natural environment to move people and things from place to place began searching for ways to make transport cheaper, faster, and more efficient. Over time a series of technological changes allowed transportation to advance to the point where machines have effectively conquered distance. People can almost effortlessly travel to anywhere in the world and can inexpensively ship raw materials and products across a global market.

But this technology is not ubiquitous, and it is not necessarily democratic. As a famous science fiction writer once said, the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. Modern transportation infrastructure is controlled to a great extent by large corporations, but the benefits of transport are depended on by everyone. And transportation technology itself requires specific conditions such as abundant, cheap, portable energy in the form of fossil fuels, and public infrastructure created by our own and foreign governments, that even those large corporations depend upon but don’t control.

When we think of transportation, it is natural to think first about going places. Getting on a plane in one hemisphere and getting off on the other side of the world is a life-changing opportunity which was unavailable to most people as little as a generation ago, and unthinkable two generations ago. But more crucial to our daily lives than the freedom offered by world travel is the cargo from the other side of the world that reaches us quickly in the holds of jets and more slowly but in almost unimaginable volume in containers on ships. The global transportation of foods, raw materials, and finished goods goes virtually unnoticed in our daily lives, but makes our contemporary consumer lifestyle possible.

Although even the early stages of the transportation revolution allowed people like seventy-year old Achsah Ranney, from Chapter Five’s Supplement, to travel regularly between her children’s homes in Massachusetts, New York, and Michigan, the more significant change was the ability of her sons and of other Americans to move freight from place to place. The ability to effectively ship food and other goods to where they were needed allowed people to stay put, and even to concentrate themselves in cities in a way they had never been able to do before. The growth of eastern cities depended just as much on the transportation revolution as did the building of new cities in the west.

As we have already seen, early Americans made amazing journeys with very primitive methods of transportation. The people who crossed Beringia and settled North and South America were able to cover startlingly long distances on foot. European explorers crossed dangerous oceans to visit the Americas in tiny ships. Human and animal power has been used extensively throughout American history, and is still used today to reach remote areas off the grid. But it is clear that improvements in transportation technology have been among the most powerful drivers of change in our history. And the transportation revolution has certainly changed our relationship with the American environment.

Technological improvements to ocean-going ships in the fifteenth century made European colonialism possible in the first place. Ships became bigger, faster, and safer. More people and goods could leave the safety of coastal waters and cross the oceans, and the places these improved ships connected became centers of trade, population, and wealth. This pattern of growth repeated itself as new technologies were developed to help Americans expand across the continent.

As we have seen, American colonists depended on trade with England and with the sugar planters of the West Indies to make their outposts in New England and Virginia successful. But from the beginning of the American Revolution to the conclusion of the War of 1812, relations between the new nation and Britain were tense and trade suffered. If it had not found a way to ship people and goods to and from its own frontier, the United States would have remained a coastal nation focused on ports like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The barely-remembered Whiskey Rebellion of 1791, when George Washington led United States troops against American farmers in western Pennsylvania, was really about transportation. Farmers west of the Appalachian mountains could not easily haul wagon-loads of grain to eastern markets, so they turned their harvests into a more portable product by distilling grain into whiskey. The farmers believed the government’s excise tax on distilled spirits had been instituted to drive them out of the whiskey business for the benefit of large Eastern distillers. Since they had few other sources of income, the tax was a serious issue for westerners. Luckily, the incoming Jefferson administration repealed the tax in 1801 and increasing Ohio River shipping provided new outlets for western produce.

Rivers were the first important routes to the interior of North America. The Ohio River, which begins at Pittsburgh and flows southwest to join the Mississippi, helped people get to their new farms in the Ohio Valley and then helped them carry their farm produce to markets. The Ohio River Valley became one of the first areas of rapid settlement after the Revolution, along with the Mohawk River Valley in western New York. The importance of river shipping is illustrated by the fact that over fifty thousand miles of tributary rivers and streams in the Mississippi watershed were used to float goods to the port of New Orleans. The dependence of western farmers on the Spanish port also explains why New Orleans was a considered strategic city by the United States in the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory had actually begun as an attempt to buy the city of New Orleans, and Andrew Jackson’s defense of the port during the War of 1812 was vital to insuring the success of western expansion.

Early westward expansion depended on rivers, and towns and cities built during this era were usually on a waterway. Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Paul all owe their locations to the river systems they provide access to. Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee utilize the Great Lakes in the same way. These lakeside cities exploded after the Erie Canal opened a route from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and allowed New York to overtake New Orleans as the nation’s most important commercial port. The 363-mile Erie Canal was so successful that another four thousand miles of canals were dug in America before the Civil War.

Steam technology changed the nature of transportation. Until steam engines were put on riverboats, shipping had depended on either wind and river currents or on human and animal power. Goods could easily be floated south from farms on the nation’s rivers, but it was much more difficult and expensive to ship products against the rivers’ currents to the frontier. Flatboats and rafts accumulated at downstream ports, and were often broken down and burned as firewood. Steam engines made it possible to sail upstream as easily and nearly as quickly as down, causing an explosion of travel and shipping that radically changed frontier life.

Steam engines were a product of early European industrialism. The first steam patent was granted to a Spanish inventor named Jerónimo Beaumont in 1606, whose engine drove a pump used to drain mines. Englishman James Watt’s 1781 engine was the first to produce rotary power that could be adapted to drive mills, wheels, and propellers. Robert Fulton, an American inventor who had previously patented a canal-dredging machine, visited Paris and caught steamboat fever. Fulton sailed an experimental model on the Seine, and then returned home and launched the first commercial American steamboat on the Hudson River in 1807. The Clermont was able to sail upriver 150 miles from New York City to Albany in 32 hours. In 1811, Fulton built the New Orleans in Pittsburgh and began steamboat service on the Mississippi.

The other transportation technology enabled by steam power, of course, was the railroad. But railroads were even more revolutionary than steamboats. In spite of their power and speed, steam-powered riverboats depended on rivers or occasionally on canals to run, but a railroad could be built almost anywhere. Suddenly, the expansion of American commerce was no longer limited by the routes nature had provided into the frontier.

America’s first small railroads had actually been built on the East Coast before a steam engine was available to power them. Trains of cars were pulled by horses and looked a lot like stage-coaches on rails. But after Englishman George Stephenson’s locomotives began pulling passengers and freight in northwestern England in the mid-1820s, Americans quickly switched to steam. The first locomotive used to pull cars in the United States was the Tom Thumb, built in 1830 for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Although Tom Thumb lost its maiden race against a horse-drawn train, Baltimore and Ohio owners were convinced by the demonstration of steam technology and committed to developing steam locomotives. The railroad, which had been established in 1827 to compete with the Erie Canal, already advertised itself as a faster way to move people and freight from the interior to the coast. Adding steam engines accelerated rail’s advantage over canal and river shipping.

Over 9,000 miles of track had been laid by 1850, most of it connecting the northeast with western farmlands. The Mississippi River was still the preferred route to market from Louisville and St. Louis south. But Cincinnati and Columbus became connected by rail to the Great Lake ports at Sandusky and Cleveland, giving the northern Ohio Valley faster access to New York markets. Detroit and Lake Michigan were also connected by rail, making the long steamboat trip around the northern reach of Michigan’s lower peninsula unnecessary.

By 1857, rail travelers could reach Chicago in less than two days and could be almost anywhere in the northern Mississippi Valley in three. On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, Chicago was already becoming the railroad hub of the Midwest. The Illinois Central Company had been chartered in 1851 to build a rail line from the lead mines at Galena to Cairo, where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers joined. Galena is also located on the Mississippi on the northern border of Illinois, but rapids north of St. Louis made transporting ore on the river impossible, illustrating the advantage of rails over rivers. A railroad line to Cairo, with a branch line to Chicago, would also attract settlers and investors to Illinois. Young Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln helped the Illinois Central lobby legislators and receive the first federal land grant ever given to a railroad company. The company was given 2.6 million acres of land, and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas helped design the checkerboard distribution of parcels that would become common for railroad land grants. The map below shows the extent of the land the government gave to the Illinois Central Company, which a few years later showed its gratitude by helping to finance Lincoln’s Presidential campaign against Douglas.

The North’s advantage over the Confederate South in railroad miles and the Union Army’s ability to move troops and supplies efficiently had a definite impact on the outcome of the Civil War. In the years following the war, the shattered South added very little railroad track and repaired only a small percentage of the tracks the Union Army had destroyed during the war. While railroads languished in the South, rail miles in the North exploded. In 1869, the West Coast was connected through Chicago to the Northeast, when the Union and Central Pacific Lines met at Promontory Point Utah on May 10th. The building of a transcontinental railroad was made possible by the Pacific Railroad Act, which President Lincoln had signed into law in 1862.

It has often been argued that a national infrastructure project as large as a transcontinental railway could never have been built without government assistance. The West Coast and western territories needed to be brought into the Union, some historians have argued, and the only way to achieve this was with government-supported railroads. Ironically, the same people who make this argument usually also claim that it would have been disastrous for the government to have owned the railroads it had made possible with its legislation, loans, and land grants. An undertaking of this scope and scale, they say, requires that corporations be given monopolies and grants of natural resources and public credit. These arguments make it seem inevitable that giant corporations taking huge gifts from the public sector were the only way for America to move forward and build a rail network. However, history shows that this was not the only way a national rail system could have been built.

There are numerous examples of rail systems built and managed by the public sector in foreign countries, especially during the nineteenth century when nearly every rail system outside the United States was state-owned and operated. However, for the sake of simplicity we will restrict the comparison to the United States. The Northern Pacific Railway, a private corporation chartered by Congress in 1864, built 6,800 miles of track to connect Lake Superior with Puget Sound. In return, the corporation was given 40 million acres of land in 50-mile checkerboards on either side of its tracks. Not only did the Northern Pacific rely on the government for land and financing, the railroad used the services of the U.S. Army to protect its surveyors and to move uncooperative Indians out of its way. When the Northern Pacific’s proposed route cut through the center of the Great Sioux Reservation, established by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the corporation pressured the government to break the treaty. George Custer announced that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills after an 1874 mission protecting Northern Pacific surveyors, and Washington let the treaty be disregarded by both the railroad and the prospectors. The Indians responded with the Great Sioux War of 1876, which culminated in the Battle of Little Big Horn, where Custer and his Seventh Cavalry were wiped out by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse leading a force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. But although the Indians won the battle, they lost the war. Less than a year later, Sioux leaders ceded the Black Hills to the United States in exchange for subsistence rations for their families on the reservation.

In contrast, Canadian-American railroad entrepreneur James Jerome Hill built his Great Northern Railroad line from St. Paul to Seattle during the last decades of the nineteenth century without causing a war and without receiving a single acre of free public land. The Great Northern bought land from the government to build its right of way and to resell to settlers. Hill claimed proudly that his railway was completed “without any government aid, even the right of way, through hundreds of miles of public lands, being paid for in cash.” The Great Northern system connected the Northwest with the rest of the nation through St. Paul, using a web of over 8,300 miles of track. And because Hill only built lines where traffic justified them rather than adding track just to collect free land, the Great Northern was one of the few transcontinental railroad companies to avoid bankruptcy in the Panic of 1893.

Regardless of the ways they were financed and built, the proliferation of railroads caused explosive growth. Chicago was a frontier village of 4,500 people in 1840. When Lincoln helped the Illinois Central receive the first land grant in 1851, the city’s population was about 30,000. Twenty years later Chicago was the center of a rapidly-growing railroad network, and the city held ten times the people. In 1880 Chicago’s population was over 500,000, and ten years later Chicago had over a million residents. We will take a closer look at the changes railroads brought to Chicago in a Chapter Seven.

America’s transportation revolution did not end with steamboats and railroads and was not limited to public transportation technologies. The development of the automobile ushered in a new era of personal mobility for Americans. Internal combustion engines were inexpensive to mass produce and much easier to operate than steam engines. With the development of automobiles and trucks around the turn of the twentieth century, it no longer required a huge capital investment and a team of engineers to purchase and operate motorized transportation. Even the workers on Henry Ford’s assembly lines could aspire to owning their own Model Ts, especially after Ford doubled their wages to $5 a day in January 1914.

Engineers had experimented with building smaller machines using steam engines, and there were several examples in Europe and America of successful steam-powered farm tractors, trucks, and even a few horseless carriages. But internal combustion engines delivered much greater power relative to their mass, allowing smaller machines to do more work. The first internal combustion farm tractor was built by John Froehlich at his small Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company in 1892. Others began applying internal combustion to farm equipment, and between 1907 and 1912 the number of tractors in American fields rose from 600 to 13,000. Eighty companies manufactured more than 20,000 tractors in 1913. After an auspicious beginning, Froehlich’s little Iowa company grew slowly and began building farm tractors in volume only after World War I. The Waterloo company built a good product, and was acquired by the John Deere Plow Company in 1918. Deere remains the world leader in self-propelled farm equipment.

The first internal combustion truck was built by Gottlieb Daimler in 1896, using an engine that had been developed by Karl Benz a year earlier. World War I spurred innovation and provided a ready market for internal combustion trucks that were much less expensive than their steam-powered rivals. By the end of the war gasoline-powered trucks had overtaken the steam truck market. Most large trucks now burn diesel fuel rather than gasoline, using a compression-ignition engine design patented by Rudolf Diesel in 1892.

Internal combustion trucks and tractors, like cars, allowed people to go farther, carry more, and do more work than had been possible using human and animal power. And they were much more affordable than comparable steam-based vehicles and easier to build at a scale that encouraged individual use and ownership. Trucking eventually challenged rail transport, especially after the development of semi-trailers and the Interstate Highway System. Although the first diesel truck engines only produced five to seven horsepower, they advanced quickly. Indiana mechanic Clessie Cummins built his first, six-horsepower diesel engine in 1919. The business bearing his name is now a global corporation doing $20 billion in annual business, mostly in diesel engines. Cummins’s current heavy truck engine is rated at 600 horsepower.

The economic trade-off of internal combustion for the farmers and teamsters who first adopted it was that speed and power came at a price. Where horses and oxen were readily available in farm communities and were cheap to maintain, tractors and trucks were a substantial investment. And unlike horses and oxen, tractors and trucks needed to be fueled with petroleum that made them dependent on a faraway industry. However, this dependence was not inevitable. Henry Ford and Charles Kettering, the chief engineer at General Motors, had both believed that as engine compression ratios increased, their companies’ engines would transition from gasoline to ethyl alcohol. We are all aware that the shift to ethanol did not happen, but why it did not is less well-known and may surprise you.

Most history books faithfully repeat the inaccurate story that Edwin Drake’s famous 1858 oil strike in Titusville Pennsylvania came just as the world was running out of expensive whale oil. Actually, there was a thriving market for alcohol fuel in the mid-nineteenth century United States. Ethanol was price-competitive with kerosene, and unlike kerosene it was produced by many small distillers, creating widespread competition that would continue to drive down prices. Unfortunately for ethanol producers and fuel consumers, the alcohol fuel industry was wiped out when the Lincoln administration imposed a $2.08 per gallon tax on distilled alcohol between 1862 and 1864. A gallon of Standard Oil kerosene still cost only 58 cents, so kerosene took over the American fuel market. Of course, after kerosene became the only available fuel, Standard Oil was free to raise prices as it saw fit.

But ethanol still had its advocates. The very first American internal combustion engine, built in 1826 by Samuel Morey, had used grain alcohol because it was inexpensive and readily available. Nearly a century later, Henry Ford’s Model T was designed to be convertible between kerosene, gasoline, and ethanol. General Motors chief engineer Kettering was convinced it was only a matter of time until ethanol became the fuel of choice.