How I Came to Invent Roadtown.
In my business as a dealer in patents I became acquainted with all manner of inventions and inventors. I found that most inventions were worthless, that a very few were practical and were promoted and utilized in the usual fashion. Another group I found to be practical and workable in themselves, but not available for use because their adoption would throw into the junk heap millions of dollars worth of old machines, and hence they were bought up and “shelved” by the vested interests. And still another group could not be utilized because they would require new franchises which men with little capital could not purchase of the political franchise jobbers. To these were added a last lot of inventions that could not be utilized to anything like their full capacity because they could not be fitted into the crude mechanism of the present style of city construction.
So I began to dream of new conditions in which some of these shelved inventions might be utilized to ease the burden of life for mankind. One plan after another was abandoned until the idea occurred to me to lay the modern skyscraper on its side and run the elevators and the pipes and the wires horizontally instead of vertically. Such a house would not be limited by the stresses and strains of steel; it could be built not only a hundred stories, but a thousand stories or a thousand miles—in short, I had found a workable way of coupling housing and transportation into one mechanism, and a human way for land-moving man to live—I would not cure the evils of congestion by perfecting congestion as is the case with the skyscraper—I would build my city out into the country. I would take the apartment house and all its conveniences and comforts out among the farms by the aid of wires, pipes and of rapid and noiseless transportation. I would extend the blotch of human habitations called cities out in radiating lines. I would surround the city worker with the trees and grass and woods and meadows and the farmer with all the advantages of city life—I had invented Roadtown.
CHAPTER II
A NEW CONCEPTION OF TRANSPORTATION
WHEN I use the word transportation in relation to Roadtown I do not mean what the term usually implies. You often hear the expression, “our transportation systems,” but your conception of its meaning is limited to railroads, boats and street cars. The other crude links in our transportation system are invariably called by other names such as trucks, carts, delivery wagons, dumb-waiters, elevators, etc. It is true that these last named links are sometimes referred to as transportation devices, but not as a part of a comprehensive system of transportation.
Roadtown transportation includes all the links in the system of transportation automatically coupled into one system. This is what I mean by a new conception of transportation.
The functions of housing and transportation are fully coördinated by Nature in the individual animal—legs are her vehicle of passenger transportation, talons and arms are her freight system, the animal body is the house. Housing and transportation exist together, being mutually interdependent. They are inseparable, the building is worthless without transportation and conversely there would be no need for transportation without the house.
There is no better illustration of the need for a proper combination of transportation and housing than that of the human body. The baby’s first task is to learn to use its transportation devices, otherwise its house or body is useless. Life is full of lessons of the necessity of the harmonious combination of the functions of transportation and consumption. The monkey was provided with means for transporting himself up the banana tree and an efficient means of getting the banana from the stalk to his mouth. Gold carried from mines in Peru to a jewelry shop in Madrid; men carried from their homes in Brooklyn to their offices in Wall Street; food carried from a farm in Canada to a dining-room in a Boston hotel; gas carried from retorts to the burner in a parlor chandelier; electricity carried from the generator in Niagara to the motors in Rochester; a pound of steak carried by the delivery boy to the basement of your house and pulled up in a dumb-waiter; a letter carried by a postman; the song of a Prima Donna sent scintillating through the air by a wireless phone—all these things and a million others are but a civilized man’s arms and legs—his means of transportation.