A Civil War Soldier And Other People Who Maybe Saved My Life Today

I was on a train today that hit a deer, causing the brakes to fail. This was a disaster, but only for the deer. The braking system on a train has been designed so that damaging the brakes, in almost any way, causes them to become always on until they can be fixed. So the train simply came to a gentle stop. The train engineers fixed the problem in less than half an hour, and I was back underway. I didn't even miss my flight, which is why I've made the questionable decision to write about mechanical failures while on an airplane.

The airplane also has wifi, so now I'm on Wikipedia trying to find the people I need to thank for the fail-safe.

The Engineer

Fortunately for this project, the main inventor of the brake system on trains got super rich off of it, so he's a familiar name and easy to research. George Westinghouse was born in New York in 1846. His father owned a machine shop, so Westinghouse got some very early experience in engineering. He was considered a natural talent. He also seems to have been a natural mensch. At 14, he tried to enlist to fight in the Civil War. His parents made him wait until he was 16. He first joined the New York National Guard, then the Cavalry, and finished out the war as a naval engineer.

With the Union saved, he almost went to Union College. It's a good thing he didn't; Westinghouse was incredibly productive his whole life. We'd all be poorer for it if he'd wasted even a few years. He was 19 when he patented his first invention, an early steam engine. At 21, he invented, among other things, a device for re-railing derailed train cars. He was 23 when he demoed the first version of the invention that saved me today: the railroad airbrake.

The can opener was invented 80 years after the invention of the can. Reading that, it's hard not imagine some implausible slapstick scenario with people throwing cans down a hill or something. Actually, most people had a hammer and chisel handy, so it was an awkward span of time, but not that silly. But when you read that the train brake was invented long after the train, the slapstick image that might pop into your head is 100% correct. Each individual car had a separate mechanical brake, so to stop the train, brakemen had to run across the top of the train and stop each one by hand, as quickly as possible so that cars didn't crash into each other.

"Why didn't they fall off?" They did. A lot. Thousands of people a year died or were severely injured.

"Wouldn't that be too slow to stop trains from colliding?" Yep.

Version 1 of the Westinghouse brake was pretty simple. The locomotive had an air compressor and air tank, connected to series of pipes and hoses that ran the length of the train. One switch sent a burst of air through the whole thing, stopping every car virtually simultaneously. Already a marked improvement.

However, this system had a serious flaw. If it was damaged on one of the cars, that car and all of the ones ahead of it were now a runaway train. If two cars became decoupled, same deal. The airbrake didn't fail safely. So Westinghouse, and a company he formed around the existing brake, worked on a slightly more complex version. Every car had its own tank, and instead of having air pressure trigger the brake, air pressure was what disabled the brake. So if anything went wrong, the pressure would drop and the car would slow, then stop.

And that's basically how all train brakes work to this day. We've added more redundancies and such, but the basic idea is still the version 2 Westinghouse brake of the early 1870s.

And then he just kept right on inventing stuff and plowing the proceeds into more R&D. Improved railroad signaling, safer use of natural gas, and then pioneering the adoption of alternating electrical current, which meant a long war with Thomas Edison and his insistence on direct current. He defeated Edison through the savvy business trick of actually paying Nicola Tesla for his work, which made him a friend and ally for life.

Westinghouse, in fact, was a great employer all around, especially by the low bar set by other tycoons of the period. He was the first industrial employer to give people the weekend off. Also, he was just as careful and innovative in factory safety as he was in railroad safety, and gave great benefits, often at his personal expense. If someone he employed invented something, the company owned the patent, but the actual inventor got the credit--a common system today, but unusual then. Labor organizer Samuel Gompers is said to have said that if every employer was like Westinghouse, there'd be no need for unions.

According to Westinghouse, though, I could have just stopped this article a paragraph or two in. In 1904, he wrote

If some day they say of me that with the airbrake I contributed something to civilization, something to the safety of human life, it will be sufficient.

So while I could list a few more accomplishments and good deeds, I'll honor his wishes and stop there. And I could look into how much of this was deceptive rich guy propaganda, but it seems churlish and also I'm on a plane.

The Congressman and the Unions

Safety inventions aren't enough. Since most employers are not, in fact, like Westinghouse, they need to be incentivized to create safe conditions. One critical piece of legislation that made U.S. railways safer for workers, and therefore indirectly for U.S. passengers like me, was the Federal Employers' Liability Act of 1908, championed by Congressman Henry D. Flood of Virginia.

Flood was born months after the Civil War, in Appomattox, the place where it officially ended. So he didn't fight on the opposite side from Westinghouse, though his father did.

Here's where I'd normally search the Congressional Record for Flood's speeches, but that seems to be glacially slow on the plane wifi at the moment. That's congress for you, I guess. Since he was a Virginia Democrat before the parties realigned, though, I have a feeling I might not love everything he did. But, again, I'm not going to bite the hand that feeds me.

Organizers like Samuel Gompers were also important in the drive to get the problem to the attention of lawmakers and ensure the resulting law had actual teeth.

The Judge

It is also not enough to have safety inventions and safety laws. You need lawyers and judges to actually enforce them, usually in lawsuits by victims of accidents. One of the key early moments in corporate liability was a dissenting opinion by William S. Andrews, a New York judge, supporting the plaintiff, Helen Palsgraf, who had been injured in a bizarre bit of disaster dominoes.

Palsgraf was waiting for a train in Brooklyn when another train started to leave. A man who has never been identified ran to catch the train and jumped on board with the help of multiple members of the crew. In the process, he dropped his bag, which contained fireworks. Which went off. Either the blast itself, or the panicking passengers who understandably thought the train was exploding, knocked over a coin-operated scale that was on the platform, and it landed on Palsgraf.

Palsgraf seemed okay at first, but due to the mental trauma and probably undiagnosed physical trauma, she suffered long-term effects. While she ultimately lost the case, with the railroad arguing that they had no foreseeable duty of care to her, Judge Andrews's dissenting opinion used reasoning that's helped other people win similar cases: you can be negligent even towards people you have no relationship to. We all owe each other a certain degree of caution and conscientiousness.

Fun fact! Andrews's great granddaughter is the noted biologist Nancy Andrews, whose work studying how the body regulates its iron content has helped me personally as well. Thanks, Andrewses!

Etc.

Maybe I'll come back to this and trace it further--there's plenty of work left in the chain before it gets to my train ride. Plenty of conscientious people implementing and refining systems, doing the largely thankless work of preventing disasters, and not even getting rich in the process. I picked these three because they had Wikipedia pages and I wanted to express my gratitude while it was still fresh.

I think I'm a happier person the more I remember to be grateful. A train being delayed could easily have made me grumpy, if this perspective hadn't occurred to me, or if the conductor hadn't given the detail that it was a brake hose that broke. I suspect this is secretly a valid perspective for most minor inconveniences--they would have been much, much worse but for the work of centuries.

(I’m going to try to post this from the plane, rather than land and edit it, because if this plane crashes after I write this it would be really funny.)

Edit (May 5th): I’ve left this as-is other than to add a preview image and insert this line so you know I still aten’t dead.