The improvements in woollen, iron, and miscellaneous manufacturing had perhaps not been quite as great, but were remarkable notwithstanding. Power and automatic machinery were the order of the day. The Corliss engine got 23 per cent. more heat and energy from a given amount of coal than had ever been obtained before it was invented. Instead of the twenty-five days which the first transatlantic steamer required for the passage from America to England, many vessels now went from New York to Liverpool in considerably less than six days, or at an average rate of more than twenty miles an hour. The speed of passenger trains on the main railways had doubled. So had the weight of the freight-car load and the amount of freight which an engine could pull. The newest locomotives weighed nearly or quite one hundred tons each.
In 1869 a submarine cable was laid which joined the United States to the continent of Europe. It extended about 3,050 miles, from Duxbury, Mass., to Brest, France, via the Island of St. Pierre, south of Newfoundland. The company owning the cable was chartered by the waning empire of Louis Napoleon. In 1875 a new cable was stretched between the United States and Great Britain. It was called the United States Direct Cable, and at first operated in opposition to the original one. The rates for cable messages were greatly reduced in consequence. The price, once ten dollars a word, fell in anticipation of the competition to fifty cents, and to twenty-five after the competition actually began. The two Anglo-American lines were subsequently united.
Cornelius Vanderbilt.
The year 1869 witnessed the junction of the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific Railway, forming a continuous railway line between the Atlantic and Pacific shores. The last rail was put down on May 12th, and on the 15th trains began to run. This work had been in process of construction ever since 1863. It traversed the Rocky Mountain range at an elevation of 8,243 feet above sea-level. The Northern Pacific Railway Company was chartered by Congress in 1864. The road was not completed till August, 1883, nor opened to traffic before September. Its length from Duluth to its then terminus on the Columbia River, Washington, was 1,674 miles. The Southern Pacific and the Atlantic and Pacific, both traversing the Rockies, soon followed. Still another line, the Great Northern, connecting St. Paul with the extreme Northwest, was opened in 1893. The country’s total railway mileage in 1885 was 128,967 miles; in 1893 it was 170,607 miles.
In the same years with the opening of these continental lines began the consolidation of the older ones into great systems. The New York Central had already been formed out of sixteen different fragments, but the process of consolidation in a large way may be said to have been instituted by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1869, when he joined the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern with the New York Central, thus placing under a single administration the entire route from New York to Chicago. The first train pierced the Hoosac Tunnel, in Western Massachusetts, February 9, 1875, completing another artery between East and West. The tunnel passed through the Hoosac Mountain, a distance of four miles and three-quarters, and had been in process of boring, though not continuously, about fifteen years.
The Big Loop on the Georgetown Branch of the Union Pacific, Colorado.
Charles F. Brush.