Power Trip: The Story of Energy

Dr. Wachs

Most people in cities lived at very, very high density.

Dr. Webber

There was a need for people to get from place to place, from home to work, from work to the store, from the store back to home, and that kind of thing. So we first had horse-drawn public transit vehicles introduced in the 1830s or 40s. We think of horsepower, that literally comes from how many horses you would need to move something. And in Brooklyn and Manhattan at its peak there was a hundred to 200,000 horses moving people and goods around the city. And with horsepower comes horse manure. And so now you had this huge pollution problem. And horse manure was all over the streets and dead horse carcasses were all over the streets.

Dr. Samaras

Each horse producing 15 to 30 pounds of manure a day times a couple hundred thousand horses and you have a big problem. The streets were a hellscape. The flies and the smells and what would happen when it rained and people walked through it. You would need approximately 250 of today's garbage trucks to move all this horse manure out of the city every day. It became very difficult to get everyone around just by horses and horse-drawn carriages because the horses would generate so much manure, it was hard to solve the mass transportation problem. It was pretty clear to the politicians at the time that if we're gonna keep growing, we're gonna have to move to some sort of rapid transit. The 1800s were a period of very rapid technological innovation in transportation. The City of New York was growing but most of folks were living near where they worked and they were living in downtown Lower Manhattan. It wasn't until the omnibus, which is a horse-drawn stagecoach, was able to move some commuters a little bit further north than Lower Manhattan.

Narrator

In the middle of the 19th century, New York City had become a crowded mess. There were many proposals for a public transportation system. The first attempt at an underground system was developed by an inventor, Alfred Beach, in 1869, running on pneumatic power. His idea was that air pressure from massive blowing fans would push a streetcar back and forth along an underground line. After only two years, the pneumatic tunnel closed and the idea of an elevated train won out followed by the subway.