Man Destined to Revolutionize Street
Railway Traffic Unwittingly Caused
Prospective "Angel" to Flee.
Frank J. Sprague, formerly president of the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers, founder of the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor
Company, and builder of the Richmond trolley line, was, in 1883, a
lieutenant in the American navy. A future with a moderate amount of
success was assured, and fame was possible. He was determined, however, to
devote his attention to the study of electricity as a motive power. At
that time there did not exist a single mile of trolley-line.
His friends vainly tried to dissuade him. He went to work with Edison to
increase the knowledge of motors he had already acquired in the navy. He
remained a year at Menlo Park and then organized the Sprague Electric
Railway and Motor Company. It was capitalized at one hundred thousand
dollars with nothing paid in. He was vice-president, electrician,
treasurer, and man of all work, and was to get fifty dollars a week
whenever the condition of the company warranted it.
One small room was both business office and laboratory. He earned a little
money by building motors, and this enabled him, in 1886, to begin a series
of experiments with motors of twelve horse-power. Officials from the
Manhattan Elevated were interested in the trials, and one day Jay Gould
came to see the new motors that could drive a truck along sixty feet of
track.
The day Gould visited him, Sprague resolved to test the motor to the
utmost. In suddenly reversing the current, an excess blew out the
safety-catch, causing a big noise and a blinding flash of light. Gould
gazed a moment, then hurried from the room and never came back.
Sprague was somewhat discouraged, but his confidence came back when
Superintendent Chinnock, of the Pearl Street Edison station, offered him
thirty thousand dollars for a one-sixth interest in the company. The offer
was refused, though at the time Sprague did not have money enough to pay a
month's board.
"Well," said the surprised Chinnock, "you're a fool!"
A few days later a successful trial was made before Cyrus W. Field, and
Chinnock came back with an offer of twenty-five thousand dollars for a
one-twelfth share. This was accepted, and later another twelfth was sold
for a slightly higher price. The motors used in these experiments were the
forerunners of the thousands now used on the trolley systems all over the
world.
The first big public exhibition was given in August, 1887, and the New
York _Sun_ said next day:
They tried an electric car on Fourth Avenue yesterday. It
created an amount of surprise and consternation from
Thirty-Second Street to One Hundred and Seventeenth Street
that was something like that caused by the first steamboat
on the Hudson. Small boys yelled "Dynamite!" and "Rats!" and
similar appreciative remarks until they were hoarse. Newly
appointed policemen debated arresting it, but went no
further. The car horses which were met on the other track
kicked, without exception, as was natural, over an invention
which threatens to relegate them to the sausage factory.
All that happened only nineteen years ago. To-day the trolley-lines of the
country employ more than seventy thousand men.
The same year Sprague's company got the contract for the building of the
Union Passenger Railroad at Richmond, Virginia. The methods were still
primitive, but the success was unequivocal. The hills of Richmond, up
which the mule, dragging a little car, had hitherto toiled, were now
easily surmounted by smoothly running cars that could attain fair speed,
and which operated with almost perfect precision.
The utility of the trolley road had been demonstrated on a large scale,
and the old horse-car lines were equipped as speedily as possible for
electric traction; new roads, embodying the new principle, were built, and
hundreds of other roads were projected.
The stock of the Sprague concern, which went begging in 1885 and a twelfth
of which could be bought for twenty-five thousand dollars two years later,
went soaring, and the question of capital for the carrying out of
experiments or for equipping projected lines, could now be had for the
asking.