thumb|250px|Childhood home of Alfred Ely Beach, built by his father in 1846

Alfred Ely Beach (September 1, 1826 – January 1, 1896) was an American inventor, entrepreneur, publisher, and patent lawyer, born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is known for his design of the earliest predecessor to the New York City Subway, the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which became the first subway in America. He was an early owner and cofounder of Scientific American and Munn & Co., the country's leading patent agency, and helped secure patents for Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other innovators. A member of the Union League of New York, he also invented a typewriter for the blind and a system for heating water with solar power.

Early years

225px|thumb|[[Scientific American in 1845, a magazine that was a major force for the diffusion of innovations during the 19th century]]

Beach was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and was the son of a prominent publisher, Moses Yale Beach, owner of the New York Sun and member of the Yale family.

Charles Yale's brothers-in-law were Commodore Holland Newton Stevenson, and John McAllister Stevenson, a Yale graduate and board director of the Pittsfield Electric Street Railway Company in 1892, which operated electric trolley cars, replacing horsecars. His three nephews and his great-grandnephew, Rev. Brewster Yale Beach, all attended Yale University.

Alfred worked for his father at the "Sun" until he and a friend, Orson Desaix Munn, decided to buy Scientific American, a relatively new publication, becoming the early founders of that company.

Scientific American is now the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, and has featured prominent scientists over time such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, and Thomas Edison. They reported the invention and patent of Abraham Lincoln relating to his device that intended to help boats navigate shallows.

On June 30, 1847, at 21, Alfred married 18-year-old Harriet Eliza Holbrook.

Munn & Co.

thumb|Munn & Co. in 1859, patent office headquarters in Washington, next to the [[United States Patent Office]]

In 1846, Munn and Beach established a prominent patent agency within Scientific American named Munn & Co., in synergy with the scientists featured in the magazine who wanted to patent their inventions. The magazine's patent department eventually filed about three thousand patents a year, forcing Beach to split his time between New York and Washington, defending the patents of the inventors in court. During its peak years, Munn & Co., as the patent agency of Scientific American, prosecuted about one third of all the patents issued by the US Patent Office. By 1924, they had filled more than 200,000 patents, representing about 15% of all the patents filled in the United States, and was partly responsible for the rapid growth of the US patent system. He received his first charter by the legislature in 1868, four years before Commodore Vanderbilt's attempt to build a subway in New York. Beach created his own enterprise using pneumatic tube technology, naming it the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company, and made himself its President. This idea came about during the late 1860s, when traffic in New York was very difficult, especially along its central artery of Broadway, crowded with pedestrians and horse carriages. Beach was one of a few visionaries who proposed building an underground railway under Broadway to help relieve the traffic congestion. The inspiration was the underground Metropolitan Railway in London, but in contrast to that and others' proposals for New York, Beach proposed the use of trains propelled by pneumatics instead of conventional steam engines, and construction using a tunnelling shield of his invention to minimize disturbing the street.

Beach used a circular design based upon Marc Isambard Brunel's rectangular shield, which may represent the shift in design from rectangular to cylindrical. It was unclear when or who transitioned tunneling shield design from rectangular to circular until The New York Times wrote an article describing the original Beach tunneling shield in 1870.

thumb|[[London Pneumatic Despatch Company, inspiration for Beach's mail system]]

thumb|right|Plan of the patent of [[Beach Pneumatic Transit mailing system with pneumatic cars used to deliver packages through an underground railroad network]]

Beach was also interested in pneumatic tubes for the transport of letters and packages, another idea recently put into use in London by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company. He refused to bribe corrupt politician "Boss" Tweed to have his proposal approved. Instead, he built the tunnel in secret during the night, carting away the dirt under the cover of darkness, with the city officials at City Hall just across the street. His thinking was that once the public saw the completed subway, the politicians would not dare to stop him. It is most interesting to note that Beach's tunnel design was likely the first cylindrical tunnel design ever used in the Americas and built using a design inspired by James Henry Greathead's successful shield patents in London for construction of the Tower Subway project. Greathead invented and built his own design of a shield as the contractor for that project, under Peter W. Barlow who was the engineer. Since Beach was a patents lawyer, it is likely he discovered the 1869 Greathead patent and the patent application by Barlow from 1864, using an imitated Barlow's patent design for engineering the PTS tunnel design.

thumb|Illustration of the Broadway underground railway (1872) by New York Parcel Dispatch Company

To build a passenger railway he needed a different franchise, something he lobbied for over four legislative sessions, 1870 to 1873. Construction of the tunnel was obvious from materials being delivered to Warren Street near Broadway, and was documented in newspaper reports, but Beach kept all details secret until the New York Tribune published a possibly planted article a few weeks before opening. The Mayor of New York, Abraham Oakey Hall, grew suspicious and sent an aide over to the construction site with a written order to inspect Beach's work, but his workers blocked the inspectors.

When it was finished, after 58 successive nights, it became New York City's first underground subway. Beach hosted a gala on February 26, 1870, to which he invited city and state officials, enraging "Boss Tweed" for not having profited from the venture, and for challenging his monopoly on streetcars. In less than a year, Beach's underground system was used by 400,000 people, and he requested his line to extend to Central Park, with an injection of 5 million dollars in capital, hoping to get financiers such as John Jacob Astor III in the venture. By the end of 1871 Tweed's Tammany Hall political machine was in disgrace and from then on Beach, in an effort to gain support from reformers, claimed that Tweed had opposed his subway. The real opposition to the subway was from politically connected property owners along Broadway, led by Alexander Turney Stewart and John Jacob Astor III, who feared that tunnelling would damage buildings and interfere with surface traffic. Bills for Beach's subway passed the legislature in 1871 and 1872 but were vetoed by Governor John T. Hoffman because he said that they gave away too much authority without compensation to the city or state. In 1873 Governor John Adams Dix signed a similar bill into law, but Beach was not able to raise funds to build over the next six months, and then the Panic of 1873 dried up the financial markets.

It ran for a total of about 300 feet, first around a curve to the center of Broadway and then straight under the center of Broadway to the south side of Murray Street. The former Devlin's building was destroyed by fire in 1898. When the subway tunnel closed down, Beach rented out the space as a wine cellar, and later as a shooting range and a storage vault.

The profits made by Beach from the subway were given to charities, promising to donate all the money raised to the United Home for the Orphans of Soldiers and Sailors.

In 1912 workers for Degnon Contracting excavated the tunnel proper during the construction of a subway line running under Broadway, discovering the old tunnel and the old station that was buried underground. They also discovered Beach's old tunnelling shield and remains of Gotham's original subway car. The new tunnel was completely within the limits of the present day City Hall station under Broadway, near the old City Hall station. The British pneumatic tube also failed to attract much attention and eventually fell into disrepair and disrepute in spite of the fact that Royal Mail had contracted to use the tunnels. Ultimately the English experiment failed due to technical issues as well as lack of funds.

Beach's designs for US Postal Mail Service

<gallery widths="180px" heights="180px">

US Pneumatic Dispatch Company, proposed by Alfred Ely Beach, 1868.png|US Pneumatic Dispatch Company, proposed by Alfred Ely Beach, 1868

The Pneumatic Dispatch, taking letters from the lamp-post, designed by A. E. Beach, 1868.png|The Pneumatic Dispatch, taking letters from the lamp-post

The Alfred Ely Beach Plan of Dispatching Letters for a Branch Station.png|The Alfred Ely Beach Plan of Dispatching Letters for a Branch Station

Proposed Postal Tube Lines in New York City, Alfred Ely Beach, 1868.png|Proposed Postal Tube Lines in New York City

</gallery>

Death and legacy

215px|thumb|"Men of Progress", published by [[Scientific American and Munn & Co. in 1862, showing American inventors Samuel Morse, John Ericsson, Elias Howe, Samuel Colt, Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear, Peter Cooper, etc]]

thumb|215px|The [[Beach High School|Beach Institute, founded by Alfred Ely Beach for newly freed African Americans]]

Much of the Beach subway story was recalled as precedent by Lawrence Edwards in his lead article of the August 1965 issue of Scientific American, which described his invention of gravity-vacuum transit. Beach's story is also featured in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.

The Beach Tunnelling shield, similar to the 1864 English patent idea of Barlow's, was used in the construction of the Grand Trunk Railway, headquartered in Montreal, Canada's first St. Clair Tunnel between Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario. This tunnel opened in 1890. His hydraulic shield system was also used in the excavating of the underground railway tunnels in London and Glasgow, the North River Tunnels and other construction works.

Beach's pneumatic system was the first air-powered train in America, a concept that would be proposed once again about 150 years later by billionaire Elon Musk, rebranded as the Hyperloop. The team Hyperloop II of the Hyperloop pod competition sponsored by SpaceX also used Beach's pneumatic concept and made the pneumatic vehicle more efficient.

After the Civil War, Beach founded a school for freed slaves in Savannah, Georgia, the Beach Institute, which is now the home of the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation. It was the first school in Savannah erected specifically for the education of African Americans, and was built by Freedmen's Bureau, at the initiation of President Lincoln, and was managed by the American Missionary Association. Alumni include Mayor Otis Johnson and Senator Regina Thomas.

Beach was also a member of the Union League Club of New York, an abolitionist society that supported the policies of Abraham Lincoln.

He had a son named Frederick Converse Beach, who invented a photolithographic process and ran Scientific American, and a grandson named Stanley Yale Beach, who worked for the magazine as well but also became an aviation pioneer, and an early financier of Gustave Whitehead, the contested first maker of a powered controlled flight before the Wright brothers.

Both were Yale graduates, having graduated from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School.

References

  • Alfred Beach's Pneumatic Subway and the beginnings of rapid transit in New York by Joseph Brennan
  • Alfred Ely Beach – Beach's Bizarre Broadway Subway Klaatu's detailed background article, explaining the technical and political details of the project.
  • NEW YORK'S SECRET SUBWAY – American Heritage
  • "Pneumatic Transit" Animation by Abby Digital