Early Subways: London, Boston and New York City

choi

America’s first subways | Boston Loves New York; What America learned about building subways. Economist, Feb 15, 2014
www.economist.com/news/books-and ... ston-loves-new-york
(book review on Doug Most, The Race Underground; Boston, New York, and the incredible rivalry that built America’s first subway. St Martin's Press, 2014)

Note:
(a) “'It’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.' The Whitneys and, when they dropped out, their successors, learnt a lot from the London Underground. This, the world’s first subway, was trapped for years in steam-age technology. Passengers complained that their trips were dark, dank and dangerous, that the foul air left them coughing 'like a boy with his first cigar.'"
(i) What does this phrase mean: 'The second mouse gets the cheese'?  Yahoo Answers, Feb 14, 2009
answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090215161302AAQOqkf
(Jacinta: "The first mouse gets clobbered by the mousetrap; the second mouse gets the cheese. It's a comeback to 'the early bird gets the worm'")
(ii) London Underground
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground
was private (1863-1933( and public since.

Quote:

"The system's first tunnels were built just below the surface using the cut and cover method. Later, circular tunnels – which give rise to its nickname the Tube – were dug through the London Clay at a deeper level.

"The world's first underground railway, it opened in January 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon using gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives.

(b) "Thanks to the genius of Thomas Edison, the subways in New York and Boston were well lit. They were also clean. Although Mr Most gives due credit to Edison he also celebrates Frank Sprague, an inventor of efficient electric motors. According to Mr Most, Sprague deserves to rank alongside Edison and the Brunels, England’s father-and-son transport engineers."
(i) Thomas Edison, in 1880 for incandescent light bulb, discovered "a carbonized bamboo filament that could last over 1,200 hours." Wikipedia
(ii) Frank J Sprague
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Sprague
(1857-1934; "One of Sprague's significant contributions [as an employee] to the Edison Laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, was the introduction of mathematical methods. Prior to his arrival, Edison conducted many costly trial-and-error experiments. Sprague's approach was to calculate using mathematics the optimum parameters and thus save much needless tinkering"/  in 1888 installed the first successful large electric street railway system in hilly Richmond, Virginia; in 1892 founded an electric elevator company, which ws sold to Otis in 1895)
(iii) Frank J Sprague. IEEE Gobal History Network, undated.
www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Frank_J._Sprague
(" In 1874, at the age of seventeen, Sprague became a midshipman")

That means he entered Naval Academy in 1874.

(iv) Compare:
San Francisco cable car system
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_cable_car_system
("1873- ; is the world's last manually operated cable car system. * * * The cable cars are pulled by a cable running below the street, held by a grip that extends from the car through a slit in the street surface, between the rails. Each cable is 1.25 inches (3.175 cm) in diameter, running at a constant speed of 9.5 mph (15.3 km/h), and driven by a 510 horsepower (380 kW) electric motor located in the central power house")
(v) The methodology of tunneling shield is still used today, in soft soil.
(A) Marc Isambard Brunel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Isambard_Brunel
(1769-1849; His most famous achievement was the construction of the Thames Tunnel; section 5 Thames Tunnel: Brunel's invention provided the basis for subsequent tunnelling shields used to build the London Underground system)

You do not have to understand section 5; just keep it in mind before proceeding to (B)- below.
(B) tunneling shield. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/609360/tunneling-shield
("The problem of tunneling under a river had defied the engineering imagination for centuries because of the difficulty of preventing mud and water from seeping in and collapsing the tunnel heading. In 1818 Marc Isambard Brunel, an émigré French naval officer in England, observed the action of a tiny marine borer, the shipworm, whose shell plates permitted it to bore through timber and push the sawdust out behind it. Brunel built a giant iron casing, or shield, that could be pushed forward through soft ground by means of screw jacks, while miners dug through shutter openings in the face. Brunel’s shield, rectangular in plan, was successfully employed in driving the world’s first underwater tunnel, under the Thames at London, 1825–42")

* There is no need to read the rest of this Britannica page. The takeaway is a cylinder-like "iron casting, or shield" (a photo is shown in the (A) Wiki page) is jammed through the mud AHEAD, little by little.
(C) Tunnel Shield Beneath City. PBS, undated (under the heading "The Tunnel Challenge)
www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/tunnel/challenge/sand/shield.html
(D) Assignment Discovery: Shield Tunneling, HowStuffWorks Videos, Oct 15, 2008.
videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/29896-assignment-discovery-shield-tunneling-video.htm