From Gizmodo:
How One Inventor Secretly Built a Pneumatic Subway Under NYC
Yesterday afternoon, Elon Musk revealed his plans for a system that could revolutionize transit. This isn’t the first time a private entrepreneur has taken on transportation in America, though. In fact, another wealthy businessman and inventor named Alfred Ely Beach attempted to do the same thing in New York, in 1869. Except instead of Hyperloops, he had pneumatic tubes.
Beach was the son of the wealthy owner of the New York Sun, and like his dad, he owned a publication: the then-young Scientific American. An inventor at heart, Beach patented all manner of ideas during his life, like a typewriter for the blind and an improvement to the cable car. But his most famous idea was the pneumatic subway. And while it’s novelty fodder for historians today, Beach’s idea had considerable traction in his own day—it even competed with the new-fangled elevator railway for funds.
New York of the 1850s and 60s was a nightmare to navigate: a rat’s nests of horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians, and delivery carts. Beach was interested in financing an alternative. His first idea was simple: Why not just build a second street, below the ground level, where horse-drawn streetcars could run unfettered? An alternative to animal power came from London, where the first underground subway was running on steam engines. Steam was clearly a better than horses—but Beach, perhaps through his work at Scientific American, had an even more radical plan in mind.Beach’s idea, which he patented in 1865, was relatively simple—especially compared to Musk’s 54-page thesis (though they share some core tenets, surprisingly). It centered on an underground system of circular, brick-lined tubes, at the ends of which would stand high-powered fans. Air pressure from each end would push a streetcar back and forth along the line—much like the pneumatic tubes that were being used to transport mail in 1860s London and New York. In fact, twenty years earlier, British inventor George Medhurst had actually built a prototype of a similar contraption—which he christened (with considerably more flare) the Atmospheric Railway....MUCH MORE
