The London Underground had been completed - the world’s first subway system - was completed in 1863, but it was plagued by the dirty soot of its steam-powered trains. Alfred Beach promised something similar, and yet entirely different for New York City. But his dreams for the future of transportation would be mired in the politics and economics of the present.
The appeal of one strange object, which achieved dizzying popularity in my lifetime, and today lives on mostly for nostalgia, is not so difficult to explain. All you need to do is turn one on and wait.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.