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.
WORK WAS TOO EASY.
That Was Why the Man Who Was to
Build the Subway Resigned His
Position as a Municipal Clerk.
John B. McDonald, the builder of the New York City Subway, began work in the New York office of the Registry of Deeds. The work was easy and the pay was fairly good. On the whole, it was just such a place as thousands would look upon as highly desirable. McDonald thought otherwise, and during his spare time he studied hard at scientific subjects. He had been in the place a year when he came home one night with the announcement:
"I've thrown up my job."