Technology and Culture

Robert C. Post

On the cover of this issue, one sees two men in suit coats standing beside a section of cable railway track and conduit, the part that would normally be underground. Their names are Frederick Wood and John Fowler, and the building in the background is the operating headquarters for an enterprise that employs them as general manager and superintendent, respectively, the Temple Street Cable Railway in Los Angeles, California. More about Wood and Fowler and their railway in a moment, but first, something about the building that cannot be seen on the cover but is visible here, the primary firefighting system: a ladder and a row of barrels filled with water. In case of fire, someone was supposed to run out the door, scurry up the ladder, and overturn the barrels, thereby soaking the shingles.

Not a terribly effective countermeasure? Probably not, although it was better than nothing at all to protect a building quite vulnerable to fire. Inside there was an 85-horsepower Corliss steam engine, a maze of winding machinery (of the sort familiar to anyone who has visited the cable railway powerhouse in San Francisco), tanks of fuel oil, oily rags everywhere, fire hazards galore. As far as we know from the archives of the local newspapers, however, the ladder-and-water-barrel system was never put to the test during the sixteen years that the powerhouse remained in operation, from 14 July 1886 until 22 October 1902.

So, back to the Temple Street Cable Railway, and a little prehistory. In 1867, a London-born inventor named Andrew Hallidie had patented a system for hauling ore out of mines by means of an endless “wire rope.” His subsequent application of the “Hallidie ropeway” to impelling urban streetcars is an oft-told tale that is recounted definitively in George Hilton’s The Cable Car in America (1971). Cable cars operated first (and last) in San Francisco, but there were lines in twenty-seven other American cities, from San Diego to Providence. And there were some very extensive networks, notably in Chicago, where for most of the 1890s the Chicago City Railway operated several hundred trains (a grip car and one or more trailers) to accommodate morning and evening commuters. Cable railways were largely a U.S. phenomenon, there being only a handful of systems elsewhere—six in the British Isles, two in Australia, and one each in Lisbon, Paris, and Dunedin, New Zealand. Best adapted to wide streets with long tangents (more than half the lines were in new, rapidly growing cities west of the Mississippi), they outperformed streetcars drawn by horses or mules in several important respects: speed, safety, and cleanliness.

Fig. 1 Frederick Wood and John Fowler pose with a section of track and cable conduit, which would normally be underground. Here it rests on the surface in order to reveal the workings of their new system for gripping the cable from the side rather than from the top. While this had marked advantages, it was nowhere near capable of saving their Temple Street Cable Railway from ultimate extinction. (Author’s collection.)

Although cable railways eventually proved uneconomical compared to electric trolleys, which came to dominate urban transit during the first half of the twentieth century, for about two decades after their advent in San Francisco in 1873 they were an attractive option in places where land developers (often the leading players in the development of street railways) confronted steep hills. Hilltops could more appealingly be termed “the heights,” a potential location of upscale residential neighborhoods. Los Angeles was still quite a small town in the mid-1880s, but it was on the verge of the first of its many land booms, which would double its population from 25,000 to 50,000 in five years. The surrounding terrain was mostly flat and readily subdivided, except immediately to the west of the civic center, where Bunker Hill loomed, and beyond that was a neighborhood called Angeleno Heights. These western hills were still sparsely populated in late 1884, when a representative of Hallidie’s Pacific Cable Railway Company opened an office in L.A. and set about consolidating the energies and finances of locals aiming to transform Angeleno Heights into a streetcar suburb. Temple Street was the one main thoroughfare heading westerly, but its gradients were unsuited to horsecars. Practical electric trolleys were as yet an unrealized dream. Cable cars seemed ideal.

When construction of the line began in December 1885, the Bank of California in San Francisco held the mortgage, and there was a credible claim that engineering standards would be “superior to any outside San Francisco” (construction of a nearby line on West Second Street had been quick-and-dirty, and it was put out of business after only a short time by a washout). The new line eventually stretched a little over three miles between the intersection of Spring and Main streets in downtown Los Angeles and Hoover Street at the western city limits, where it made a connection with a steam railway to Coleville that was owned by the scion of a New York publishing fortune, James McLaughlin (Coleville was later known as Hollywood). Residential development along the cable car line was in the hands of a syndicate controlled by two men, Walter Maxwell and Prudent Beaudry. Maxwell had married local money in the 1870s; one of the best downtown business addresses was the Lanfranco Building, and Maxwell’s wife’s maiden name was Amelia Lanfranco. Beaudry was an old-timer, having emigrated from Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, in 1852; he later served a term as mayor. When it came to promoting real estate, both men knew the tricks of a trade that would flourish in Los Angeles. One of their circulars read so:

Bear in mind that this property is in the Hills
And on the line of the Cable Railway System
Have a house in the Hills!
Stop paying rent in the valleys!

By 1890, ten trains, each comprising a grip car and trailer, were providing transit not only for new residents in the hills but also for excursionists headed toward Coleville, and for a time the Temple Street Cable Railway was the best patronized streetcar line in town. Business fell off after the Los Angeles Cable Railway (LACR) completed a line on West Seventh Street that terminated at Westlake Park and cut into the excursion business. But the Temple Street line would remain a solid proposition overall, certainly in comparison to the Second Street line and even in comparison to the LACR, which was overbuilt in the interest of the construction companies that were involved and would be out of business by 1896, after only seven years of operation.

Which brings us back to the photo. While the LACR was chronically mismanaged, the Temple Street line was in the hands of experts. In 1892, the year the picture was taken, Frederick Wood (at left) published a remarkable technical treatise titled On the Temple Street Cable Railway in Los Angeles California, replete with illustrations of various devices he had designed along with John Fowler, including a wheel-operated double-jaw side grip that was different from what Andrew Hallidie had devised for San Francisco and obviated the need for a turntable at each end of the line. When they had the photo taken, Wood and Fowler were demonstrating how their system worked, with its cable slot offset to one side, evidently trying to interest some visiting street railway entrepreneurs in adopting their new design. But, alas, no matter how capable and ingenious these two men may have been, by 1892 they were on the verge of being cast into a backwater by devices that would overcome the last remaining problems with Frank Sprague’s electric streetcars, with their spring-loaded trolley pole underrunning an overhead wire. Hilton dedicates his book to Sprague with a quote from Lewis Carroll:

“It’s very rude of him,” she said,
“to come and spoil the fun.”

An ironic facet of Wood’s treatise was the spotlight it cast on the heavy expense of cable railway engineering—apparent in many ways, but most obviously in the necessity for a conduit set below grade with cast-iron yokes to carry the cable over and around a complex array of pulleys and sheaves, all requiring hand maintenance via access hatches in the pavement. With the development, actually the perfection, of trolleys equipped with General Electric controllers and Westinghouse motors—whose rails could merely be spiked to ties lined up along a dirt street—the economics of cable railways became impossible.

Trackage for trolley cars cost as little as $10,000 per mile. The investment in the Temple Street line’s three miles exceeded $300,000, including six-inch redwood planks for lining the conduit, six thousand 200-pound yokes, and two prodigiously heavy cables running in each direction from the powerhouse near the midpoint of the line—one 12,388 feet long, the other more than 20,000 feet. These had a life expectancy of less than two years, and nearly every element of the winding machinery—which was ponderous and delicate at the same time—likewise wore out quickly. Then there was the startling loss of efficiency in the transmission of power: the machinery and weight of the cables alone consumed 84 percent of the energy produced by that Corliss engine, with only 16 percent actually serving the purpose of impelling streetcars. No wonder the search for something better never flagged, even when Hallidie’s first cable cars proved themselves on Clay Street in San Francisco, then on Sutter, California, Geary, and Market.

Each of these lines was a success initially, and so was the Temple Street line in Los Angeles. Wood and Fowler had reason to feel rather proud of what they had accomplished. Bankruptcies and reorganizations became a way of life for urban railways generally, and no less so in L.A. than any other place. The $2.5 million invested in the LACR had to be completely written off as the system gave way to trolleys before any of the construction debt was amortized. Financial failure awaited the Temple Street Cable Railway, too, but not until it had turned a nice profit for several years. The company defaulted on its bonded indebtedness in 1897, however, and then went into receivership three years later. Shortly, the foreclosed property was acquired by Henry Edwards Huntington, who ultimately would monopolize all of the city’s street railways, and in 1902 it became the last of L.A.’s former horse- and cable-car lines to be electrified.

And forty-four years after that, it was also one of the first electric trolley car lines to be abandoned in favor of diesel buses, in 1946, a year after Huntington’s heirs sold his Los Angeles Railway to a syndicate called National City Lines. That transaction spawned one of the most durable of all urban myths, a myth perpetuated in myriad forms but perhaps most famously in the storyline for the prizewinning 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—in which the dastardly Judge Doom, who could just as well have been named General Motors, reveals his “epic plan” for motorizing metropolitan Los Angeles even though it meant wrecking “the best transportation system in the world,” as Doom’s adversary Eddie Valiant puts it. But that’s another story.

This photo tells a story of two men who were enthusiasts for a transportation technology that they had capably refined. Did they suspect, even in 1892, that it might have a limited future? Maybe. They are not smiling. But, as Hilton has pointed out, people involved with technologies that are facing decline—be it cut nails or cable cars—are most often in a state of denial. One wonders whether the men at General Motors who have filled their basket with so many eggs bearing names like Suburban, Escalade, and Hummer have a sense of apprehension as the company looks toward its centennial in 2008.

Bob Post was born during “Transportation Week,” so proclaimed by the mayor of Los Angeles in honor of the arrival of the city’s first PCC cars, the modernistic design that enthusiasts for street railways believed would be their salvation. His books include Street Railways and the Growth of Los Angeles (1989) and Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology (2006). He tells the other story mentioned in the next-to-last paragraph in “The Myth behind the Streetcar Revival,” which appeared in the May 1998 issue of American Heritage.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology