A 3-cent stamp issued in 1952 on the 125th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the B&O Railroad brings Tom Thumb, Cooper Union, and McSorley’s Old Ale House to the fore as today’s #stampoftheday.
The stamp pictures the first American-built steam locomotive, and steam locomotives are important because in the early 1800s most railroads were generally horse-drawn wagons fitted with special wheels designed to ride on tracks in the middle of dirt roads. This was the approach embraced by merchants in Baltimore, who in the 1820s were losing trade to New York after the Erie Canal opened came together to establish the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company. The new firm, which was one of the world’s first commercial rail linesl aimed to build a horse-powered railroad from the port of Baltimore to a suitable point on the Ohio River. The first 26-mile section, from Baltimore west to Ellicott’s Mills (now known as Ellicott City), opened on May 24, 1830 .
Even as the new line went into service, inventors and entrepreneurs in England were replacing horses with recently developed steam-powered locomotives, which they were starting to export to the US. The new technology intrigued Peter Cooper, an inventor and businessman who had purchased 3,000 acres of land in Maryland because he believed the new railroad would make that land more valuable. However, construction of the new railroad was not going well. Worried that his investment would not pay off, Cooper decided to develop his own locomotive and then convince the owners of the B&O Railroad to use steam engines.
In the summer of 1830, Cooper built a four-wheel locomotive with a number of improvised parts, including the use of rifle barrels for boiler tubes. His newly designed locomotive was so small he called it the Tom Thumb. Supposedly, on August 28, 1830, as he was preparing the Tom Thumb for another test run, the driver of a passing horse-drawn car challenged him to a race. Accepting the challenge, the Tom Thumb quickly and easily pulled ahead. However, when a belt slipped off the blower pulley, the engine lost power, and the horse-drawn won the race. In spite of this, the Tom Thumb’s early lead showed how fast a steam-powered train could travel. The next year, the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road began testing steam engines. In the decades before the Civil War, the railroad expanded to what became West Virginia and during the war it was an important factor in the Union’s success. After the war, the B&O expanded westward into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and in the late 20th century, after several mergers, the B&O became part of the CSX Transportation network.
I have a soft spot in my heart for this story not only because I’m an infrastructure junkie but also because my father was a proud graduate of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the college that Cooper, who became one of the richest men in New York City, founded in 1848. Cooper Union was special because (until 2014) it was free in accordance with Cooper’s belief that an education “equal to the best technology schools established should be accessible to those who qualify, independent of their race, religion, sex, wealth or social status.”
My father attended Cooper in the late 1940s when he came back from Europe at the end of World War II to live in the Bronx with my mom, who he had married before he shipped overseas. He had been admitted to Princeton University and was supposed to start in Fall 1946. However, at the last minute, his admission was rescinded because so many veterans were returning to Princeton to finish their studies. Somehow he found out about Cooper. He not only got an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Cooper, he also was hired to teach there in the early 1950s, when he had competed his doctoral studies (but not his dissertation). But pay was low and he was starting a family. So in the mid 1950s he left Cooper to take a job in industry as a chemical engineer, which he did for three different firms until about 1970 when he became the founding editor of ChemTech, a magazine published by the American Chemical Society. But he always had a special loyalty and love for Cooper Union and would regularly break into school cheer, which, as best I can figure went as follows:
“E to the x – DY – DX
E to the x dx
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine
3 point 1 4 1 5 9
Square root, cube root, log of pi
Cooper Cooper let it fly!”
One more random aside. Like many Cooper students, my father sometimes had a beer and a bite at McSorley’s, the oldest continually operating bar in New York City. My father always spoke lovingly of the bar (though he never quite reconciled to the fact that in the early 1970s it finally dropped its more than century-long ban on women). When my brother turned 18, my father happily took him there. And though my brother had been there several times on his own, he let my father believe that he was the one to introduce this special place to his oldest son.
In the mid 1970s, Jake Levine, my best friend in high school, discovered McSorley’s and brought me there. In about 1975, after Jake, my late brother, and I attended a concert (with Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee) we asked Neil if he wanted to join us at McSorley’s. He refused, because, he said, “Dad would kill me if he found out I took you to McSorley’s before he did.” And, while he did drop us off, he also that when my dad took me there, I should pretend it was my first time in the hallowed bar. Jake and I went, of course and I often went there when I visited New York while I was in college. I don’t think I ever went there with my dad. But I love the fact that we both loved it. I can’t tell you why (and I can barely remember since I haven’t been there in years). But perhaps, it was something of what captured famed New Yorker essayist Joseph Mitchell who, in a famed 1940 article about the bar, wrote “It is possible to relax in McSorley’s. For one thing, it is dark and gloomy, and repose comes easy in a gloomy place. Also, there is a thick, musty smell that acts as a balm to jerky nerves; it is really a rich compound of the smells of pine sawdust, tap drippings, pipe tobacco, coal smoke, and onions. A Bellevue interne once said that for many mental disturbances the smell in McSorley’s is more beneficial than psychoanalysis.”
Lord know we could use a bit of that now.
Be well, stay safe, relax, fight for justice, and work for peace.