Paved Roads & Public Money. Richard DeLuca
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in this project; Laura Smith at the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut for guiding me through the labyrinthine archives of the New Haven Railroad; Patty and Bruce Stark, Cecelia Bucki, Guocun Yang, Matt Warshauser, Kit Collier, and fellow members of the Association for the Study of Connecticut History for welcoming into their midst a freelance historian hungry for peer support, and for providing opportunities to share my research as it progressed; the management team of the Connecticut Department of Transportation who took the time to talk to me about their work and their world, including James P. Redeker, Commissioner; Robert Card, Finance Administrator, Thomas J. Maziarz, Chief of Policy and Planning, and Richard Armstrong, Principal Engineer; the staffs of the Connecticut State Library, the Connecticut Historical Society Museum, and the Law Library at Quinnipiac University; and Suzanna Tamminen, Director and Editor-in-Chief of Wesleyan University Press for her patient support of this project. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge my longtime friend and fellow planner, David Martineau, to whom this book is dedicated. Our friendship is one of the joys of my life and incontrovertible proof that the best things in life can never be planned. And as always to Phyllis, my wife of nearly fifty years, for whom no amount of thanks can ever be sufficient. Your sudden passing soon after this manuscript was completed was a supreme tragedy. My consolation is knowing that your love continues to make my life possible.
Paved Roads and Public Money
Introduction The Bicycle Leads the Way
The conversion of energy into motion is at the heart of all transportation. Indeed, the history of transportation—from the horse-drawn wagon and wind-powered sailing ship to automobile and the jet-powered aircraft—can be thought of as the discovery through time of different sources of energy and the invention of the means to convert that energy into a mode of transport. In much the same way that the technology of coal-fired steamboats and locomotives transformed the nation in the nineteenth century, so would gasoline-powered automobiles and airplanes in the twentieth century. While the advent of steam power was contemporary with the idea of internal combustion, the evolution of the internal combustion gasoline engine followed a long and circuitous route through the workshops of numerous nineteenth-century inventors on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, Gottlieb Daimler developed the first horseless carriage using an internal combustion engine in 1883. In America, the Duryea Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, did not produce this country’s first viable horseless carriage until 1895. But from these modest beginnings the early auto age soon developed. Yet a generation before the accomplishments of Daimler and the Duryea Brothers, an interim mode of transport helped lead the way toward automobility: by developing technology integral to automotive design, by sparking a popular desire for independent travel, and by creating a public outcry for better roads. This frequently under-appreciated member of the transport revolution was none other than the man-powered, pedal-driven, mechanical horse called the bicycle.
A Celebration of Progress and Technology
With the Centennial Exposition of 1876, progress and technology came to be seen as inseparable aspects of American culture.
From May to November of 1876, the city of Philadelphia hosted a grand celebration of industry and science larger in size and broader in scope than previous industrial fairs held in London or Paris. The International
Exposition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of Soil and Mine—as the Centennial Exposition was officially known—was America’s first of such a caliber, held to commemorate the founding of the republic in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall a century before. Situated on several hundred acres of parkland along the banks of the Schuylkill River among “deep-wooded ravines, groves of century elms and oaks and immense meadows,” the fairgrounds contained more than one hundred buildings filled with exhibits of all kinds representing the arts, science, and technology produced in dozens of American states and territories, and fifty foreign nations. Before the fair ended, nearly ten million visitors from around the country and the world would tour the exhibits, brought to the fairgrounds on the final leg of their journey by the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the nation’s largest. To accommodate such a large number of visitors, the railroad constructed a new branch line to the fair, several storage sidings, and a large gothic-style station just outside the fair’s main entrance gates.1
The workhorse of the industrial revolution being celebrated at the fair—the one piece of technology that made the growth and prosperity of the nineteenth century possible—was the steam engine. It was the coal-fired steam engine that powered the mills and factories that made the manufactures on which the nation’s economy depended; and it was steam power that propelled the riverboats, coastal steamers, and railroads that brought raw materials to the factories and distributed the finished products to wholesalers around the nation via a railroad network, which by 1876 extended into the heart of communities large and small from coast to coast.
It was appropriate, therefore, that the one exhibit that became symbolic of the fair as a whole was the Corliss Steam Engine, which stood like a giant at the very center of Machinery Hall, itself one of the largest buildings at the fair where the finest in machinery from around the world was on display. Built by the Corliss Company of Providence, Rhode Island, and used to provide power for hundreds of exhibits in Machinery Hall, the Corliss engine was the largest steam engine in the world. Standing thirty-five feet tall and weighing seven hundred tons, it required sixty-five railroad cars to transport its component parts to the fair for final assembly. One flywheel alone measured thirty feet in diameter and weighed more than fifty tons. The steam generated by the engine’s twenty boilers created a total of two thousand horsepower, which was distributed to individual exhibits in all four quadrants of the hall via a network of shafts and belts that totaled more than a mile in length.2
The Corliss Engine became the symbol of the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia. Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register, 1876
Clearly the size and power of the Corliss Steam Engine—like the size and scope of the fair of which it was the centerpiece—was meant to suggest the size and power of the new American republic. While still in the process of settling the western half of a nation that now extended from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean—and only recently rid of the curse of slavery that had plagued the country’s reputation since its founding—America was fast becoming one of the great nations of the world. As President Ulysses S. Grant commented on opening day, during the past one hundred years Americans had not only settled a new nation through “great primal works of necessity … felling forests, subdividing prairies and building dwellings factories, ships, docks, warehouses, roads, canals [and] machinery”; they had also come to rival “older, more advanced nations in law, medicine and theology; in science, literature, philosophy and the fine arts.”3 In truth, the Centennial Exposition of 1876 celebrated far more than the founding of a new nation. It marked the arrival of that nation on the world stage.
By relating the founding of the nation to the progress made through the application of American ingenuity and technology, the Centennial Exposition of 1876 also celebrated the idea of technological determinism in American culture. Promoted in the early days of the republic by Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton, technological determinism equated the nation’s growing economy—so essential to its very survival as a nation—to the machine-based system of manufactures and factory-based system of production developed by American businessmen. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the spread of technological inventions had sown deep into the subconscious minds of most Americans the idea that progress and technology were one and the same. A popular lithograph by Currier and Ives sold at the fair commemorated this belief in visual form. Titled “The Progress of the Century,” the lithograph depicted scenes of steam-powered technology—a large printing press, a steamboat, and a steam locomotive—while a man seated at an electric telegraph was busy sending a message that read, “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.”4
By 1876, the belief that economic prosperity and advances in technology went hand in hand had become an important