Race Underground, The (1988)

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[wind howling]

NARRATOR: On the morning of Monday, March , ,

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 feet high.

DOUG MOST: The Blizzard of

crippled the entire northeast

and shut down all of the streets

and all of the transportation in the cities.

It forced a lot of soul searching

and thinking about how cities moved, and lived,

and breathed, and operated.

NARRATOR: With over 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.

CLIFTON HOOD: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 , people packed into a downtown

of less than a square mile.

STEPHEN PULEO: There are almost , 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

CUDAHY: 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.

NARRATOR: In early , a young American naval officer on leave

walked the crowded streets of London.

Frank Sprague, just 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.

MOST: In , 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

DALZELL: 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.

NARRATOR: Sprague had spent a year at sea with the navy,

inventing in his head.

DALZELL: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

ROSALIND WILLIAMS: In this era, late th 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 k*ll 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

BRIAN CUDAHY: 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.

WILLIAMS: 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.

NARRATOR: By , Frank Sprague had landed what he thought

was his dream job when he was recruited

by the celebrated inventor Thomas Edison.

At Edison's lab in New Jersey, Sprague hoped to begin work

on electric motors and railways.

Edison had other plans,

assigning him to his construction department

to work on central power stations

for his vast lighting systems.

MOST: What Sprague would often do is he would go on these assignments

for Thomas Edison,

but at night, and on weekends,

and in any waking moment he had when he was not doing something

for Edison, he was working on his motor.

NARRATOR: Eventually, Edison did ask Sprague

to work on motors for his company.

But the young engineer knew that anything he designed

would have Edison's name on it.

In April of ,

less than a year after joining Edison's team,

Sprague was forced to decide between staying on with Edison

and risk giving up ownership of his motor ideas,

or venturing out on his own.

DALZELL: Sprague knows that if he develops a motor at Menlo Park,

even if Edison has been only peripherally involved,

the result will be hailed

as Edison's latest, greatest invention.

That's not what Sprague wants at all.

NARRATOR: Sprague resigned.

Within months he was displaying

a variety of his groundbreaking electric motors

at the International Electrical Exhibition in Philadelphia.

Sprague's motor's different from any other electric motor

at the time because it was what Sprague called

a self-regulated motor.

And what that meant was

it was able to bear different size loads at the same speed.

So it could carry ten pounds, or pounds, or pounds

and lift it at the same speed.

It made Sprague's electric motors

much more attractive for potential users,

particularly in fields like industry

where you're powering crude elevators,

or you're powering railways.

NARRATOR: Even his former boss was impressed.

"His is the only true motor," Edison told a reporter.

Such high praise from the world-famous inventor

was invaluable in giving Sprague an edge over his competitors.

One month after the Philadelphia exhibition,

he launched the Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company

and began promoting his ideas across the country.

His potential customers included transit moguls

in America's largest and most congested cities.

MOST: Frank Sprague knew that

in order for a motor to succeed,

in order for his business to succeed,

he was going to need a big client.

He was going to need someone to take a chance on him.

NARRATOR: In , in a narrow alleyway between two brick buildings

off East th Street in Manhattan,

Sprague nervously attached his electric motors

to a railroad flatcar.

Sprague's potential investor that day

was one of the top ten richest men in America.

Jay Gould owned more railroad track and telegraph lines

than anyone in the country.

He also had a controlling interest

in the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company,

and was in a search of a new way to power his trains.

If Sprague could convince Gould

that his electric motor was the answer,

it would change the young engineer's life.

HOOD: One of the ways you made money in the United States

in the Gilded Age, was to invest in new technology.

That's true of steel.

It's true of oil.

And it's also true of mass transit.

So who's making decisions about where the transit lines go,

when they're built, what kind of technology they have?

By and large, it's private industrialists.

It's capitalists.

It's the people who have a lot of money.

NARRATOR: Sprague positioned Gould at the front of the flatbed car,

hoping the vantage point would give him a more thrilling ride.

[metal creaking, high-pitched tone]

MOST: Sprague pushed the lever to move the car forward.

In his zeal and confidence to show Gould just how smooth

his motor could power this train car,

he probably became a little overzealous

and pushed his motor too hard.

And what happened was as Jay Gould was standing

on this streetcar,

a burst of sparks shot out right by Gould's legs.

And Jay Gould went running off and said, "Never on my railway

will we use this crazy new form of energy."

Here's Gould, who would be perfectly willing

to take million dollar risks in building railways

across the United States,

but electricity was such a new thing

that when there was an expl*si*n and a flash on the streetcar,

it scared Gould to death.

And Gould wanted nothing to do with Sprague.

NARRATOR: By the end of ,

Frank Sprague was running out of money

to conduct his tests and had to face the reality

that no one was interested in his electric motor.

What he didn't know, was that miles to the north

his ideas had caught the attention of one

of the biggest transportation kings in the country.

On March , Henry Whitney, president of the newly formed

West End Street Railway Company,

arrived at the Massachusetts State House in Boston.

Years earlier, Whitney began purchasing

tracts of land along Beacon Street,

a carriage road in the wealthy suburb of Brookline

that led straight into the downtown.

Whitney had invested his fortune in real estate

and owned almost four million square feet of land.

If transit lines could reach the desirable suburb,

his property values would skyrocket.

MARK GELFAND: The development of Boston, as in most other cities,

was largely in private hands.

And these developers of large tracts of property recognized

that their profitability

depends upon making these areas accessible to the downtown area.

And so there is a direct and crucial link

between development and transportation.

NARRATOR: Boston was bursting at the seams.

Its population had more than doubled since the Civil w*r,

to nearly ,.

The city's horse-drawn street railways were overwhelmed,

carrying more than million passengers a year.

ASHA WEINSTEIN AGRAWAL: The streets were absolutely packed every day

with all these hundreds of thousands of people

pouring into the downtown.

So you really had just this incredible mass of people

in a very small area.

NARRATOR: Seven street railway companies aggressively competed

for passengers in Boston's downtown.

MOST: Each of them has their own routes and fares.

And it was this crazy, convoluted system.

If you wanted a streetcar in you would raise your hand

and all these different cars might race to pick you up.

[streetcar bells ringing]

The term "transit system"

implies that there's a coherence.

I think it implies that there is a kind of public service.

And I don't think that's how

most transit operators view this.

It's the profit motive that determines the quality

and the amount of service.

NARRATOR: At the State House, Whitney boldly proposed

the consolidation of all seven street railway companies

into one large transit system, which he would control.

His argument was for efficiency,

but he knew that by controlling all the lines,

he would be positioned to do as he pleased

with his suburban expansion.

I think there was actually a lot of support in many ways

from the larger public.

You might think, "Oh, a monopoly.

People aren't going to like this," but there was a sense

that it was actually very inefficient

to have so many different street railway companies

that they were competing for passengers.

NARRATOR: Whitney suggested that to rid

the congestion strangling the streets,

it was necessary to construct tunnels beneath the city.

MOST: It caught everyone by surprise

this idea of a tunnel.

It was exciting, it was scary, it was a big deal

for Henry Whitney to suggest that.

But he threw out a third thing,

which really caught people's attention,

which was acknowledging that the horse had seen its day

and that perhaps the electric motor was, in fact,

the future of urban transit

and the way that Boston needed to go.

And he put himself on the line with this idea

that the electric motor, which until that point

still was not a really proven technology,

but something that he had seen, and believed in,

and felt like it could work.

NARRATOR: The Massachusetts General Court granted Whitney the right

to consolidate Boston's streetcars and the permission

to build a subway if he desired.

His West End Street Railway Company now controlled

, street railway cars and miles of track,

making it the largest transit system in the world--

bigger than anything in London, Chicago, or New York.

But Whitney's biggest challenge remained:

finding a way to replace the , horses

that were grinding Boston's streets to a halt.

In the summer of , Frank Sprague was desperate.

He needed to find a place to demonstrate his electric railway

on a large scale.

He found it in an unlikely place.

The Richmond Union Passenger Railway Company in Virginia

asked Sprague to build

a complete electric railway system.

miles of track, a -horsepower electrical plant,

and overhead lines to carry electric current to cars

and motors.

He had just days to construct it and wouldn't get paid a dime

until the system was up and running.

Experts said it couldn't be done:

the Richmond hills were too steep

and Sprague's motor wasn't powerful enough.

DALZELL: People have tried to set up a railway system

using the existing technologies of the period--

horse-drawn railways.

But Richmond is a horse k*ller.

That's an awful way to put it

but, the topography, the landscape, it's just brutal

to try and make this thing work using horses.

NARRATOR: It was a massive risk.

But Sprague was forced to bet his company

on the near impossible project.

"Failure in Richmond," Sprague said,

"meant blasted hopes and financial ruin."

MOST: It was a contract that no one in their right mind

would ever sign, essentially being asked

to build this on spec.

But Sprague at that point was close to desperate.

He needed money.

His experiment with Jay Gould had failed.

He did not have an investor.

He needed his project to succeed

and he needed it to succeed soon.

DALZELL: Unfortunately, shortly after he signs the contract

he is stricken with typhoid fever.

And it takes over a month of convalescence

to really bring himself back into working shape.

When he does visit Richmond he is profoundly discouraged.

The conditions are much more challenging

than he had imagined.

The first set of rails that's laid down

is completely unsuitable.

The whole thing looks like a disaster.

NARRATOR: Sprague's crew spent weeks rebuilding the entire system

of tracks.

To help prevent the motors from disengaging

over the bumpy terrain, Sprague would test out

his innovative wheelbarrow mount,

a design he had been working on for years.

CUDAHY: What was unique to Sprague was his ability

to design a mounting,

so that the motor could move up and down while it remained

meshed with the gear on the axle.

It was a significant breakthrough.

NARRATOR: He was confident the motors would stay on the streetcars,

but he didn't know if they could scale

Richmond's steep hills.

Sprague set up a trial run at night, hoping no one

would see a potentially embarrassing failure.

DALZELL: The car scales the hill

and comes down the other side,

makes a turn,

climbs another hill that's even steeper.

Sprague has no idea what's going to happen.

The car makes it to the top.

And as it does the motor locks up.

Sprague realizes what's happened.

He's actually burned out the motor.

NARRATOR: Sprague needed more power.

With the -day deadline looming,

he scrambled to re-design the motors with larger gears

and have them fabricated by a machinist in Rhode Island.

When they finally arrived, Sprague got the streetcars

running without any burnouts.

As the weeks slipped away, Sprague and his engineers

worked round the clock,

tackling one technical problem after another.

"I am completely overwhelmed with work,"

Sprague wrote to a friend, "so much so

that I hardly know whether I stand on my head or my heels."

Finally, on May , , after investing $, of his own,

the Richmond system was up and running.

DALZELL: Richmond is a real turning point.

Sprague was able, on the basis of Richmond's performance,

to show people real data.

This is what the railway system in Richmond earned

before it was electrified.

This is what it earned after.

This is how much money you can make.

[train bell ringing]

NARRATOR: The day after the Richmond contract terms were satisfied,

Frank Sprague wrote to Henry Whitney in Boston.

"We are ready to run commercially,"

reported the young engineer, hoping to convince

the world's largest streetcar owner to buy in.

[whistle blows]

Whitney agreed to travel to Richmond,

his head full of questions and doubt.

CUDAHY: Whitney had misgivings when he got to Richmond.

This is a rural Southern city

without the concentration of business,

without the narrow streets that Boston had.

MOST: At about midnight, Whitney's brought to the bottom

of a steep hill.

And at the bottom of this hill

Frank Sprague has lined up streetcars.

DALZELL: He's never tried this before.

He talks to the electrician at the power plant and he says,

"Give her all you've got and don't let up."

The lights actually get lower because the strain on the system

is so... is so intense.

And slowly each one started up, one right after the other.

The power station didn't blow out.

Fuses didn't blow.

The cars could all run at the same time.

NARRATOR: Sprague's brash demonstration and risk had paid off.

Whitney was impressed, and headed back to Boston

with the intention of electrifying his entire system

of streetcars.

CUDAHY: There's certainly no doubt

that his demonstration to Whitney and its success

was an important turning point

in the history of mass transit in America,

and in the history of mass transit in the world.

HOOD: There's a search for a practical

mechanical mode of transportation.

And what Frank Sprague's invention means is that

we've ended that search, that we've found it.

It's a big distance from this little railway in Virginia

to the Boston subway,

but you can envision going there now.

NARRATOR: Upon his return from Richmond,

Henry Whitney immediately contracted Sprague to supply

electric cars to his West End Street Railway Company.

Whitney envisioned passengers gliding smoothly

along Beacon Street into and out of downtown Boston,

but it would not happen easily.

Key to Sprague's innovation were the overhead wires

supplying power to the streetcars.

Boston's city leaders, however,

would not allow them to be installed.

CUDAHY: Electricity was seen as a very, very dangerous

form of energy,

particularly when wires would break

and they'd fall to the ground,

people would touch them and be electrocuted.

So people had to be convinced that electric-powered streetcars

were a safe way to travel.

NARRATOR: To persuade city officials,

Whitney arranged for a test ride.

With Sprague driving,

the electric streetcar sped up to miles per hour,

propelling the lawmakers faster

than they had ever traveled before.

Exhilarated by the ride,

Boston leaders granted Whitney permission

to install the overhead wires.

He then moved forward with plans to build a central power station

in Boston's South End that would be the largest in the world.

With its chimney feet high,

it was the tallest structure in Boston,

feet higher than the Bunker Hill monument.

MOST: Just like Frank Sprague was a big thinker,

Henry Whitney had this vision and this passion.

He really believed he could be a change agent for how people

moved about and how the transit system operated.

He made people re-think how their city could look

and could function.

NARRATOR: Electrification commenced rapidly and profits were soon

rolling in for the West End Street Railway Company.

In just five years,

more than % of the system was electrified,

and overhead, wires lined the city streets.

Despite the monetary success of the West End,

the electric trolleys proved so popular,

the streets were clogged worse than ever.

CUDAHY: When Whitney signed a contract with Sprague,

to electrify the West End Street Railway,

it wasn't the end of a problem.

It made a problem worse.

And as the cars made their way into downtown Boston,

down Boylston Street, turned onto Tremont Street,

it just got more crowded, and more crowded, and more crowded.

Streetcars were pouring into downtown Boston.

Electrification made it easier to continue to expand

the streetcar system farther and farther out,

but there were a lot of safety concerns.

These electric streetcars are more dangerous

than the older horse-drawn ones, and more pedestrians

are getting k*lled by streetcars.

NARRATOR: Despite the chaos on the streets,

Henry Whitney's bold subway idea had been languishing

for the past four years.

That changed on the evening of January , .

That night, Henry Whitney hosted a banquet

for influential real estate developers

at the exclusive Algonquin Club.

Also in attendance was Boston's newest mayor, Nathan Matthews.

In his inaugural address earlier that day,

Matthews pledged to deal aggressively

with the rapid transit needs of the city.

"I believe the city government should grapple

with this problem," he said, "rather than leave the matter

entirely to the interested action of private corporations."

AGRAWAL: Mayor Matthews was genuinely trying to improve the efficiency

of the way the city government worked.

And he very much is an example of the good government

reform movement,

arguing that we need to make government

more in the public interest.

It should not be the system of patronage,

people trading favors.

MOST: Nathan Matthews looked at Henry Whitney and started to wonder,

"Maybe he's never going to build a subway."

And that's when I think Matthews started to get frustrated

and really dig his heels in to try to take back

the streets of Boston from Henry Whitney and say,

"These are city streets,

"and I'm going to be the one to make the big decisions about

what we do, and how we do it, and when we do it, not you."

NARRATOR: In speeches, Whitney explained that it was simply too expensive

for the West End to build a subway.

"I have, personally, no desire for anything

"that I can make out of the underground road," he said.

"It is so full of dangers,

I am free to say to you that I shrink from the task."

GELFAND: This is an era in which cities and states are prepared

to make significant investments in infrastructure.

Matthews recognizes that in some respects,

the very well-being and future of the city is at stake

in terms of its transportation needs.

and that it may go against his grain to embark upon

such a project as this,

which offers the possibility of tremendous waste and corruption

but, nonetheless, is so essential to the city's future

that it must be undertaken.

NARRATOR: By June, Matthews had followed through with his promise

to take back the streets, and convinced lawmakers

to form the Rapid Transit Commission.

Its objective was simple:

study the problem of congestion and offer a solution.

After public hearings and ten months of study,

the commission published a massive report.

All options were on the table,

including something many deemed unthinkable:

a subway through the heart of the city,

and beneath the Boston Common.

♪

PULEO: The Boston Common is considered

almost a sacred place to Bostonians,

and has been since the city was essentially founded in .

And it has been used throughout Boston's history

as a community gathering spot.

There was sort of

a pledge made by city fathers at the time

that the Boston Common area would be kept free

of any roadways, free of any development,

and would be open space.

Its very name, the Boston Common,

means it's for the common wealth, for the common good.

It is a place for all Bostonians to be able to gather.

"You're going to dig up the Boston Common to build

some sort of a silly thing that we've never heard of before?"

People were horrified.

There was a lot of opposition to it.

NARRATOR: "Save the Common" became the battle cry of outraged citizens.

Letters poured in from across the country.

Americans demanded not a single shovel disturb

the sacred soil of the Boston Common.

Protests were so passionate that an exasperated Matthews

brought in two former park commissioners to defend

the urgent need of a subway.

The young mayor also fought off plans

for an elevated train system downtown,

like the one running in New York.

HOOD: Elevated railways

block the sun.

And so you've got entire avenues

that are perpetually in a kind of twilight.

The other thing is elevated trains were filthy.

They're run with steam locomotives

and they vent cinders, smoke, black soot,

and that settles on the city.

One of the little tricks-- a PR trick you might say--

is that someone superimposed photographs of a New York

steam-powered elevated train running down Tremont Street.

And when people saw that

they said, "Well, that's no good either."

NARRATOR: When the elevated plan was voted down,

Matthews saw his chance

and intensified his advocacy for a subway.

Armed with data from the Rapid Transit Commission report,

he argued that a subway would cut transit time

by two thirds to one half,

and that streetcars traveling underground

would not be crippled by inclement weather.

The Boston subway was not a foregone conclusion,

not by a long shot.

There was tremendous resistance,

first by the merchants in downtown Boston.

There was a petition at one point where , businessmen

in Boston opposed the subway.

There was going to be streets torn up, sewer systems affected,

water lines affected, wires, electrical lines affected.

Secondly, folks felt like traveling underground

was very close to the nether world,

that you were getting closer to the devil,

that you were taking this great risk in God's eyes

by traveling on a subway.

NARRATOR: The debate had dragged on for months and Matthews was fed up.

He had done everything he could to reassure Bostonians.

He explained that the subway

would not cut through the Common,

it would only encroach upon its edge,

the $ million project would provide desperately needed jobs,

the air underground would be safe to breathe.

"The facts of the matter simply are," Matthews proclaimed,

"that the streets of Boston

"are no longer highways for public travel,

"they are simply yards for the storage of cars.

The time has come for action."

On July , , Bostonians went to the polls

to vote on the city's transportation future.

By the narrowest of margins, the subway plan was approved.

On the morning of March , ,

light snow dusted the hats and overcoats of a dozen men

standing in a quiet corner of the Boston Common.

With little ceremony, a shovel was driven into the ground

and the transformation

of the nation's public transportation system began.

The .-mile subway route would be built in two phases.

The first phase was L-shaped,

cutting through the heart of the city.

Beginning at the southwest corner of the Boston Common,

workers would dig east

to the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets,

before tunneling beneath Tremont

to the base of the historic Park Street Church.

The second phase would run from Park Street along Tremont

to North Station.

Before excavation could begin,

every tree in the historic Boston Common was accounted for,

and elms relocated.

[rustling sound of a tree falling]

MOST: Barely a month into the project, a worker was bending down

to pick up what he thought was a twig.

They realized after studying it a little more closely

that it was in fact not a twig,

and was a piece of a human skeleton.

It was a bone.

PULEO: It turns out that this was the site

of a Revolutionary graveyard, a burial ground,

and that the construction had disrupted that,

and everybody is taken aback by that.

There's real concern, "What are we going to do about this?

We need to handle this in a... in a reverential way."

NARRATOR: In the coming months, city workers identified bodies

and carefully reinterred them in a common grave.

PULEO: This gave ammunition to the opponents of the subway,

about this religious issue

that man was not meant to travel underground.

And this was almost symbolic of the fact

that we shouldn't be doing that,

that God had a hand in this,

in the discovery of this graveyard

because He didn't want us to do that.

NARRATOR: "They have sacrificed the Common,"

one Boston newspaper bemoaned, "and now it seems that the dead

are not to be allowed to rest quietly in their graves."

MOST: They were being asked to put their faith in these engineers

and just trust them that this would be safe.

We're going to build something underground,

under the streets,

and the street's not going to collapse on us,

and the subway's going to be safe.

And it was a big leap of faith for people to accept it,

to embrace it.

CUDAHY: There had been underground aqueducts.

There had been some underground tunnels.

But this was a major construction novelty

to build a steel and concrete structure beneath city streets.

It was basically a work that was done by men with picks,

and shovels, and wheelbarrows.

NARRATOR: Hundreds of Irish and Italian laborers

worked for cents an hour.

They began to muscle their way deep into the Earth.

First, ten feet of the trench was excavated,

the dirt tossed into carts and hauled away by horses.

As the trench deepened, workers installed

eight-inch-thick wooden braces against the walls

to prevent collapse.

Large derricks hoisted up dirt-filled skips

and dumped the soil onto small steam trains

that carried it away.

Steel I-beams were erected as sidewalls

and laid across the top,

serving as the roof of the tunnel.

[clanging]

Above ground, masons finished the roof by laying brick arches

atop the beams prior to being covered again with soil.

A concrete foundation was poured,

and then covered with crushed stone on which the steel tracks

and wooden ties would be laid.

But not everyone was pleased.

PULEO: During construction of the subway

there is tremendous chaos in Boston.

There are still above ground trolleys that are moving.

There are merchants whose... the front of their stores

are blocked by construction and by workers.

So there is this enormous disruption,

as you would imagine with any public works project,

but think of one in a core city where you're now attempting

to go underground for the first time ever.

WILLIAMS: That kind of heavy digging

was not typically seen in the cities.

I think it had to have been something of a shock

to see this degree of excavation and also just to look down

into these holes and wonder what's going on down there.

NARRATOR: On the morning of March , , police officer Michael Whalen

detected the smell of gas

at the intersection of Tremont and Boylston streets.

It had been lingering for months as workers rerouted

the gas lines beneath the streets.

This day, however, the smell was stronger than usual.

As Whalen stood in front of the Hotel Pelham,

three crowded streetcars rounded the corner.

Trolley caught Whalen's attention

He looked down as its wheels screeched over the rails,

causing sparks to fly in the air.

[train brakes squealing]

On board the trolley, passengers gagged from the smell of gas.

[loud expl*si*n]

[glass shattering]

The massive expl*si*n ripped through the intersection.

The shattered windows of the Hotel Pelham

showered Officer Whalen in glass.

[bell ringing]

MOST: It sent both of these cars, which were filled

with probably close to a hundred passengers in all,

straight up into the air in a huge ball of fire.

It was a massive expl*si*n and those cars came crashing down

to the earth in a ball of flames.

NARRATOR: "A number of persons dashed up to an electric car,"

one passenger recounted, "and to their horror

found that the conductor was burning alive."

In all, ten people were k*lled from the blast,

and more than gravely injured.

The media's coverage of the expl*si*n turned into

a public relations nightmare for city officials.

They now had to scramble to convince the public

that riding underground on the subway's electric trolleys

was indeed safe.

MOST: Was the tunnel damaged?

Did it crack?

Was it destroyed?

Nobody knew for sure right after the expl*si*n.

People were reminded of the fact that,

"We're going to be riding on a train in a dark tunnel

surrounded by all of these gas lines."

PULEO: The city and the state go to great lengths to explain

that it was an accident,

that a worker had mistakenly ruptured a gas pipe,

which is what caused it, that is was not a natural gas issue.

The subway was completely safe.

NARRATOR: Work on the subway proceeded apace,

but nobody knew for certain if the city's PR campaign

registered with a public already skittish

about traveling underground.

MOST: September , , it was a beautiful morning.

It was bright and clear.

And in a New England-like fashion,

Boston was not prepared to do a huge celebration

to announce the opening of its subway.

There were no speeches planned.

There were no big marquees, or giant signs,

or anything like that.

It was really just another day in Boston.

NARRATOR: The first streetcar, driven by the veteran

West End motorman Jimmy Reed,

left the Allston train shed at : a.m.

At each stop, more and more people crowded

onto car number until it was over capacity.

Passengers excitedly waved American flags as they rode

the first subway car in their country's history.

It pulled up right to the crest of Arlington Street

where it was going to go underground and into the tunnel.

The first subway car just clanged its gong

and just went down the ramp, and everybody who was

on the subway car stood up, glimpsed ahead to see

what they could see, and in fact someone

in the back of the car yelled, "Down in front!"

NARRATOR: "The passengers had packed themselves in like sardines,"

noted the <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Boston Globe,</span>"And, yelling like wild animals,

dipped down the incline for the underground run."

CUDAHY: The headline in many papers was,

"People Leave the Face of the Earth."

And they left the face of the earth and they went under it.

People would previously leave the face of the earth

in a condition where they wouldn't return

to the face of the earth.

They'd be buried.

Now people were traveling beneath the ground

and emerging later.

MOST: People were just struck by how dry it was,

and how clean the air smelled, and how it looked.

It just looked beautiful, and sparkling, and white.

There had been a lot of reasons to still be skeptical,

and cynical, and fearful.

All the things that people had been afraid of,

those fears washed away in that moment.

They went to a lot of trouble to light these areas.

That's bringing the sublime into the underworld.

That's making you feel, "I'm safe.

Nothing's going to harm me."

NARRATOR: Despite lingering fears and doubts,

curiosity and excitement prevailed.

City officials were shocked at the day's final numbers:

, people rode the underground rails of the subway

on Boston's first day.

PULEO: It was like a light switch went off once the subways

began running.

All of those above-ground trolleys

in the downtown area are gone.

It accomplishes exactly what it's supposed to do.

It alleviates congestion in the city of Boston, and it creates

a transportation grid and framework for the city

for years and years to come.

NARRATOR: In its first year of operation, million passengers

rode the Boston subway.

And the once-frightening idea of riding a train underground

became a part of daily life in cities across America.

Within ten years of Boston's unceremonious opening day,

New York and Philadelphia opened their own subways

with more American cities soon to follow.

GELFAND: The decision to build a subway is remarkable in demonstrating

how Americans were willing to try something new

and place their bets on the future.

That they understood that technology was reshaping

their world and electricity, the tremendous potential of it,

is going to be unleashed here in the subway system.

NARRATOR: Frank Sprague's electrification of Richmond triggered a boon

for the young engineer as he acquired over half

of the electric railway contracts in the country.

His company, however, lacked the capital

to compete with larger electrical manufacturers

that were quickly expanding.

One year after Sprague's demonstration in Richmond

set the standard for electric railway systems across America,

he was bought out by Edison General Electric Company.

Shortly thereafter, Sprague's name was removed

from all the equipment he had developed

and replaced with the Edison name.

MOST: Frank Julian Sprague lived in the shadow

of one of the great inventors of all time,

which is Thomas Edison.

And I think because of that he never quite got the due

and recognition that he really deserved.

But Frank Sprague played as important a role

in the development and growth of cities

as any person in our history.

His motor is one of the most important contributions,

right there alongside Henry Ford's vehicle

and the Wright brothers' plane,

as one of the most important engineering achievements

of our time.

♪♪