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The New York Times · February 15,
1940
The Metropolitan Section of the American Society of Civil
Engineers is to unveil in the near future in the City Hall station of
the B. M. T. a bronze tablet in honor of New York City's first subway
and of its creator, Alfred Ely Beach, editor of The Scientific
American. In 1870 Beach surreptitiously drove a short tunnel under
Broadway from Warren to Murray Street with a shield of his own
invention, carted away the dirt by night and finally startled his
fellow-citizens by taking them for rides underground in a brightly
lighted eight-foot car which had a seating capacity of twenty and
which was alternately blown and sucked from one end of the line to the
other. Though he had demonstrated the practicability of this, the
first subway in the United States, we had to wait thirty-four years
before the present Lexington Avenue line was opened. Beach had opposed
the construction of the elevated railways that long disfigured the
city. The panic of 1873 made it impossible to proceed with the
underground line that the Legislature chartered his company to build
from the Battery to Columbus Circle.
Beach was no idle dreamer but an eminently practical
inventor. A generation ago we would have said of him that he was ahead
of his time. Today we speak of "cultural lag," meaning that he foresaw
real needs and tried to meet them, whereas his day and generation,
like ours, lacked the social mechanism to keep pace with technological
innovation.
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