Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

COMMONLY KNOWN BY THE ASSUMED NAME OF GEORGE PSALMANAZAR

In it, he left all his possessions to his faithful housekeeper, Sarah. He also directed that some money be set aside to publish the memoir that he had left in his desk; he said it would provide a full accounting of his misdeeds.

Then, George begged to be consigned to oblivion:

I desire that my body, when or wherever I die, may be ... conveyed to the common burying-ground, and there interred in some obscure corner of it without further ceremony or formality than is used to the bodies of deceased pensioners where I happen to die, and at about the same time of the day, and that the whole be performed in the cheapest and lowest manner. And it is my earnest request, that my body not be enclosed in any kind of coffin, but only decently laid in what is called a shell of the lowest value, and without lid or other covering which may hinder the natural earth from covering it all around.

He was to be laid in the earth like a pauper, the grave unmarked. Nobody knew where George Psalmanazar had come from. Now, nobody was to know where he had gone. It would be as if the man had never existed.

Two years later, his Memoirs of ---were published; they have never been reprinted since. In them, he admits everything. But there was one secret that the man who called himself George Psalmanazar took to his obscure grave, one

that more than three centuries have failed to prize from his grasp.

His real name.

THE PNEUMATIC UNDERGROUND

Cryptic invitations arrived at the City Hall offices of Boss Tweed and his cronies earlier in the week:

UNDER BROADWAY RECEPTION To State Officers, Members of the Legislature, City Officials, and Members of the Press:

You are respectfully invited to be present on Saturday, February 26th, 1870, from two to six o'clock P.m., at the office of the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company, 260 Broadway, corner of Warren street.

JOSEPH DIXON, Secretary A.e. BEACH, President

Those looking out their windows at City Hall would have good reason to be puzzled. The corner of Warren and Broadway was not far up the street, and there was scarcely any sign of activity--nothing, that is, other than the usual cacophony of plodding delivery vans, packed horse-drawn trams, and yelling street urchins. The building in question was a mere clothing store; it could hardly fit the mayor's staff, let alone the entire city's press corps.

And underground ... well, there wasn't any underground.

Was there?

That Saturday afternoon, when the first journalists and politicians arrived at the premises of Devlin and Co. Clothiers, it didn't look like much of a place for a grand reception. But they were quietly ushered down the back steps, into what had been the cellar of the store.

It was not a cellar now. An amazed reporter for the New York Herald described the scene that unfolded before him: "Descending an ordinary basement "dive"

under Devlin's clothing store, visitors found themselves in a comfortable office, and a few steps lower there was a kind of Aladdin's cave opened to view ...."

The crowd filed through a doorway to find a reception room, 120 feet long and ablaze with gaslit chandeliers, spread out before them. Fine paintings hung upon the walls, lavish tables of champagne and hors d'oeuvres had been laid out, a fountain glittered with its stock of goldfish, and sumptuously upholstered couches awaited the visitors; in one corner a piano was playing, its notes echoing through the subterranean lair. But the crowd could also hear the distant rumble of traffic--for twenty-one feet over their heads was Broadway, where thousands of New Yorkers traipsed and drove by, utterly unaware of what was right under their feet.

Beyond the edge of this cavernous room, brilliantly lit up, lay something that no New Yorker above or below had seen before: a subway car.

Their host was ready for them. He was a dapper fellow in his mid-forties with a carefully groomed mustache, and instantly recognizable: Alfred E. Beach, the owner and publisher of Scientific American magazine. He patiently guided the bewildered elite of the city around the cavern. What you see before you, he explained, is an atmospheric railway: "The Pneumatic Dispatch consists of a railroad track enclosed in a tube, the cars being driven by atmospheric pressure. The car, in effect, is a piston, moving with the tube."

He showed the crowd a single handsomely built railway carriage; the tracks that it sat upon disappeared into a brightly lit and whitewashed circular tunnel that gently curved away into the distance, into the bowels of the Manhattan earth. A keystone over the tunnel bore a carved inscription: PNEUMATIC TRANSIT. 1870.

But where was the locomotive?

"A tube, a car, a revolving fan! Little more is required. The ponderous locomotive, with its various appurtenances, is dispensed with, and the light aerial fluid that we breathe is the substituted motor."

Those still scratching their heads at this were led up a few steps to view a massive machine housing festooned on the outside with elaborate frescos. The Aeolor, Beach called it. A glance inside revealed its purpose: it was a gigantic steam-powered fan. It was all very simple, really--the subway car they had seen in the cavern below fit snugly into a tunnel in which it was pushed along by the force of wind, just like a sailboat. Only, as Beach pointed out, "a car mounted upon a track is moved much easier than a boat upon the water, because the vessel encounters great resistance displacing the water, while the car merely has to overcome the friction of its wheels."

The return journey was easily arranged. Just run the fan in reverse, and the resulting vacuum drew the car back again.

More guests showed up as the afternoon progressed, each emerging dazed through the doorway into the cavern now filled with the city's elite, all chatting and drinking, and leaning upon the piano in an enormous space that should have been nothing but thousands of cubic feet of dirt and rock. Alfred Beach was the center of attention, leading his guests all around the subway station that he had built entirely in secret. Guests were amazed and delighted; champagne glasses were raised and, as the New York Times wryly put it the next day, "the

"health" of the tunnel was not forgotten."

After a while, Beach gathered his first adventurous group of passengers together. Holding on to their champagne glasses and their hats, the crowd watched as the Aeolor wind machine built up to a roar, the doors closed on the tunnel tube, and the car slid out of sight. The first subway in America had officially gone into service.

The ride took only seconds; at the end of it, the passengers stepped out to find themselves at another subway station. They were now by the corner of Murray Street.

At this point, it might have started to dawn on the passengers just what Beach had really done. Not only had he built a subway without telling anyone, he had run it beneath City Hall. It is hard enough today to imagine what an insane enterprise this was: how, working in the dead of night and without permits, could one man build a working subway line under Manhattan's busiest street, right next to City Hall itself, and all without a single neighbor ever catching on to it?

But Beach had done it.

He was not the first to build an atmospheric railway, though. That honor belonged to others an ocean and a decade away.

Although it has undergone a renaissance of late, Battersea is not the most scenic of London locations; it was no accident that Pink Floyd once chose it

for the grim postindustrial cover art of their album Animals. During the Industrial Revolution, though, there was no better place to build a power station, a massive smokestack, or any other hulking behemoth of iron and brick to grab a capitalist's fancy. Where else, then, for the Pneumatic Dispatch Company to lay down a quarter mile of cast-iron pipe?