My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year

by George Francis Train

I recall an incident during my visit to London on this occasion which aptly illustrates the want of suggestiveness on the part of Englishmen. They are content to go along in old ruts, provided only they be old enough. Frank Fuller was the contractor for the Crystal Palace, and a problem arose, in the construction, as to what to do with a certain beautiful and aged elm that had been an object of reverence and stood in the way of the proposed building. It had finally been decided to cut it down, in order to get it out of the way.

"What!" said I, "cut it down—this exquisite tree?" Some one remarked that the authorities did not wish to cut it down, but it stood directly in the way of the great palace, and would have to be sacrificed. "The palace is here for time," I said, "and this tree may be here for eternity. Spare the tree." "But how?" they asked. They were bewildered—did not have a thought of what to do, except to hew down the venerable tree. "Build your palace around it," I said. This simple device had not occurred to them, but it saved the elm.

Mr. Fuller was so pleased by the suggestion, that he began asking me about hotels in America, and proposed that I undertake the building of an American hotel in London. I said that some time I should, perhaps, try the experiment, but that for the present my shipping business would keep me fully occupied.

I might as well mention here, although it is not in its chronological order, my later experience in trying to establish an American hotel in London. It was seven years after the exhibition when the question of an American hotel came up again. I had worked up the plan very thoroughly, and had some of the most prominent and influential men in England as directors of the proposed company. We had, also, obtained options on several acres of desirable land in the Strand as a site. In the board of directors was Lord Bury, private secretary of the Queen, son of the Earl of Albemarle; Mark Lemon, of Punch; and others. The only obstacle to our success was the passage of a bill through Parliament authorizing us to occupy the land. The hotel caused a great sensation in London, and there was much talk of it as a daring and not altogether agreeable invasion of England by Americans. On the other hand, there was much commendation, and George Augustus Sala, the leading editorial writer of the Telegraph, wrote a letter in which he mentioned my name as a guaranty that the hotel would be built and would succeed, as, he said, I had succeeded in everything.

Matters were well advanced, and it looked as if we should have the hotel. I wanted it constructed along distinctly American lines, and sent to Paran Stevens to get from him the plans of his three hotels, the Revere House in Boston, the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, and the Continental in Philadelphia. We had everything in readiness, when the news came that the bill had failed in the House of Lords by sixteen votes, although the House of Commons had passed it. I came as near as that to building the first American hotel in London. Fifty years later, the Hotel Cecil was built, a half century after I had suggested the idea and perfected the plan.

My experience in Saratoga had revealed to me the want of suggestiveness and resource in men in general. They will continue doing the same thing in the same old way generation after generation, without taking thought for improving methods in the interest of economy, of time, and of money. I have, from time to time, suggested a large number of little improvements, mechanical or other devices, for which I have never taken out patents or received a cent of profit in any way. I shall bring together here a few of these suggestions, made at different times and in different countries.

I used to go to the old cider-mill at Piper's, about a half mile from our farm. We went in an ox-cart, filled with apples. When we got to the cider-mill, all we had to do was to pull out a peg, and the apples would roll out into the hopper of the mill.

When I came to New York years afterward I was astonished to notice that there were a half-dozen men around every coal-cart, unloading the coal. I thought of the ox-cart, the peg, and the hopper, which I had used thirty years before. I suggested the use of a device for letting the coal run from the cart into the cellar, but could not get any one to listen to the proposition. Now, years after my suggestion, all of these carts in New York and other large cities of America have small scoops running from the cart to the coal-hole, and a single man unloads the cart by winding a windlass and lifting the front end of the wagon. In London they still keep up the old, clumsy, and expensive method of unloading with sacks. The English are in some things where we were a century ago.

Once in London I was astonished to see a man, after writing something with a lead-pencil, search through his pockets for a piece of india-rubber with which to erase an error. He had lost it, and could only smudge the paper by marking out what he had written. I said to him: "Why don't you attach the rubber to the pencil? Then you couldn't lose it." He jumped at my suggestion, took out a patent for the rubber attachment to pencils, and made money.

When Rowland Hill, the great English postal reformer, introduced penny-postage into England, he found it necessary to employ many girls to clip off the stamps from great sheets. I took a sheet of paper to him, and showed him how easy it would be by perforation to tear off the stamps as needed. He adopted my idea; and now a single machine does the whole work.