Alfred Ely Beach

Alfred Ely Beach ( born September 1, 1826 in Springfield (Massachusetts ); † January 1, 1896 in New York City ) was an American inventor, publisher and patent lawyer. He published the magazine Scientific American. He also developed the Beach Pneumatic Transit. This was around the first ( unsuccessful ) attempt to build a subway in New York.

Biography

Beach first worked in the publishing of his father Moses Yale Beach. In 1846 he bought and his partner Orson D. Munn, founded earlier by Rufus Porter in popular science magazine Scientific American. Both gave the magazine out until the day she died. Their descendants led this tradition until the year 1948. Munn and Beach also founded a successful Agency for patents. Beach had some of his inventions patented, including a forerunner of today's Braille typewriter. After the Civil War, he ran in the Savannah Beach Institute, a school for freed slaves, which is home to the Arts Foundation of King - Tisdell Cottage Foundation today.

To relieve the Broadway by the ever-increasing volume of traffic, hit Beach before the construction of a subway. Unlike others, he preferred pneumatics Drive, not about steam locomotives, as they opened in 1863 Metropolitan Railway in London have been used successfully. After he had received in 1869 from the State of New York a concession, he began building a 95 -meter-long pneumatic tube line under Broadway, between Warren Street and Murray Street.

During construction, he decided summarily to set up a Vorführstrecke for the transport of people rather than a pneumatic tube line. The Beach Pneumatic Transit was opened on 26 February 1870. Beach was planning to extend the tunnel and build a real subway. But political opposition and an economic crisis in 1874 forced him to abandon the project. In addition, the convenient se locomotion principle proved to be impractical and technically too complex. The tunnel fell into disuse and was finally destroyed in 1912 during the construction of the BMT Broadway Line.

Beach died on New Year's Day 1896 at the age of 69 years of pneumonia.