Alfred Ely Beach
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Alfred Ely Beach (September 1, 1826-January 1, 1896) was an inventor, publisher and patent lawyer.
Beach was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and was the son of a prominent publisher, Moses Beach. Alfred Beach worked for his father until he and a friend decided to buy Scientific American, a relatively new publication.
Beach announced that the magazine would help obtain patents for American investors, a move that launched his career as a patent lawyer and helped his magazine grow into a prestigious publication. Beach also patented some of his own inventions, notably an early typewriter designed for use by the blind. However, Beach's most famous invention was New York City's first subway.
The corrupt rule of Tammany Hall in New York City had left the city's streets in very poor shape and traffic congestion, particularly in the Broadway area, was a nightmare. Beach wanted to build a subway under Broadway to help relieve the traffic congestion. A subway had been built in London, but it used steam engines and was somewhat inefficient. Using two of his inventions, a hydraulic tunneling machine and a pneumatic subway, Beach proposed a new type of subway that relied on pneumatics.
Boss Tweed, the leader of Tammany Hall, would not allow Beach to build the subway, in part because it would threaten the city's streetcar franchises, which gave money to Tammany Hall. Beach refused to bribe Boss Tweed so he decided to build the subway secretly.
He and his backers built the subway under Broadway entirely at night. The construction required 58 nights of digging just to build the tunnel, but the subway was finally completed, and it was opened to the public on February 26, 1870. Boss Tweed was furious. Beach wanted to build a larger subway for the city and attempted to pass a transportation bill in the state legislature that would allow him to start the project. The transportation bill passed the legislature, but was vetoed by the governor, a member of Tammany Hall. Beach continued trying to get the transportation bill passed until a new governor finally signed it in 1873. However, Beach no longer had the financial backing or the public support for the project.
Beach spent the rest of his life starting a school for freed slaves and creating a Spanish language science magazine. He died of pneumonia on January 1, 1896 in New York City at the age of 69.
Nearly a century later, in the late 1970s, his work on the first New York Subway was immortalized in the Klaatu song Sub-Rosa Subway.