I have been thinking about this curious Chicago & Alton Ry. advertisement built around a photograph of a woman running the locomotive under the supervision of the engineer.
Look at this ad from page 11, first one. This link should open right to it. It is a 1905 ad for the Chicago & Alton Ry.
I have a different take on this photo. I think it was staged on a roundhouse track, rather than being a photo of a real event on a main line passenger train. Look carefully at the engineer. He is fully seated on the seatbox with the woman between him and the cab wall. In the few steam locomotive cabs I have been in, that seatbox is barely wide enough for one person. If this was a photo of a real event she would either in his lap or, much more likely in my opinion, be on the seatbox and he would be standing on the deck.
I suspect the photo is some version of a double exposure. I am not camera savy enough to sugest how the photographer did it.
I think the woman is intended to represent an adventurous passenger who asked for and got a cab ride, not a wife or girlfriend. My main reason for this conclusion is that the woman is wearing her good clothes. A wife or girlfriend would be attired in clothes appropriate to a steam locomotive cab, probably in a spare set of his coveralls.
Why the Alton would run such an add is a puzzler, but as you point out the world was a far different place then. Perhaps they were trying to say that travel was an adventure, but a safe one. I agree that I could have been intended to show “hospitality and a willingness to share the railroad experience with the curious, but uninformed public.”
Who is silly enough to believe that all change is progress?
I don’t think it is a “Photo” at all. It is a “woodcut” often used in printing. Some artists can create quite convincing drawings, but in this case, those that know the cramped quarters of a locomotive know that you can’t fit two people on that seat like that… Those that have no idea what it is like in the cab just see two people on the bench seat similar to the passenger seats in coach and I think the artist only had a quick look in the cab to decide what kind of pipes to draw and it is all just his impression of what it might be like.
It doesn’t look like a photograph to me. I agree that a woodcut would likely be the method of portrayal. Both persons appear to have their hands on the throttle. The hogger’s bench looks mighty long, maybe even an added artefact if it is a photograph. By that I mean it is an added fixture for the purposes of staging the photo with the engineer seated as he is depicted.
Why is ‘she’ there at all? It could be there to portray the care and sensitivity of a man who knows he has families, women, and children aboard, or that he has the gentle touch of a woman on the throttle so that the train is handled with care. Maybe that he is likely to be a stable family man, not a young careless risk-taker, and that when it is at the throttle, so is his squeeze.
I don’t agree that the image is a woodcut. Woodcuts are created by hand, and have very limited resolution, due to the grain of the wood, and the size of the artist’s chisel. The image is almost certainly a photoengraving, produced from by a chemical engraving process on a metal plate, likely originating from a photograph. This technology was developed long before the poster was printed. While the image may look crude by today’s standards, its really pretty good for a photo “printed” via a printing press 100 years ago. More info on photengraving is here:
I do agree with Crandell’s comments at to why the woman is in the image in the first place. The text on the bottom of the poster reinforces the image’s message that the Chicago & Alton offers the concern for its customers that a woman would provide.
“The class of travel between Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City is too good to go over any other line.”
As a former printer at two newspapers, I can attest to the fact that this is not an actual photograph, but is more of an artist’s illustration converted into a wood carving.
Actual photograph engravings were known as halftones and consisted of thousands of small dots. This image is solid, indicating a wood carving or cast metal image.
The railroad was probably just trying to portray themselves as customer friendly.
Whether it is a wood cut ( which I don’t think it is), a photo, a screened photo, or artitistic rendition one way or anyother, the image is the question and most ingrigueing. What is it and why is it? Two different things come to mind. One, it is a piece to assure women that there is no reason fo fear a giant, steamy, dirt belching, roaring hissing machine whether it slithers through her back yard dumping soot and whatever on her laundry and the halls of her home or when it is incharge of whisking her off to new travel adventures… Second, at a time when the Lackawanna was turning to Phoebe Snow as an image to entice the most genteel and timid to ride their trains because it was “clean” and swift and pleasant, this may have been an attempt to find another way to use the womanly image in marketing and advertising. Either one of these ideas are as plausable as the other or of any other idea one can come up with. At a time when the World was a man’s World, it was also a time that the importance of the women in the world was becoming more apparent as they knew they were heading to the woman’s right to vote and knew that despite the man being the breadwinner, it was the lady of the house who determined how the bread was to be spent. I do hope that there others have other ideas about this.
Not much point in agonizing over this one. Just accept it as a fun artifact from a long-ago time. Maybe some marketing person in the Chicago and Alton realized that women can crave adventure and excitement just as much as men can and decided to play on it. Whoever that young woman was, I sure envy her!
I suspect the halftone dots got clobbered somewhere between the printing of the ad and the uploading of the digitized image (e.g. the print ad was photographed and the photograph was scanned). The grays are too nicely rendered for the picture to not have been a photograph.
Nice looking woman, though she would have been a few years older than my grandmothers.
“…But in the innocent, carefree era of 1903 when train travel was in ascendancy, I could see it. Back then, the engineer was the ultimate symbol of trustworthiness. As long as the engineer was looking over her shoulder, nobody would have objected, probably not even the company. This ad was a bold idea for a bold era when railroading was young and wild with a sense of humor to go along with the swagger…”
Was that era of the NEW 20th Century that carefree, or is that a ‘myth’ to capture an earlier simpler time?
There was much turmoil in society then:
America was winding down from the Spanish American War and at the turn of the Century was embroiled in investigations of the Government’s ( Army,etc) handling the logistics of the action.
Women’s Suffrage was a Social Issue all over the Country. The formation of the Women’s Trade Union League [1903] in New York. [which later became the Int’l Ladies Garment Worker’s Union].
In 1900 the US Industrial Commission declared Unions to be good for the Country.
1902 The Eastern Coal Strike was arbitrated by Pres.Theo.Roosevelt.
Well no, the turn of the 20th Century wasn’t a “Music Man” kind of world, certainly they DID have problems, but remember this was also the age of optimism, whatever the problems were people felt there were solutions. Maybe they wouldn’t find them this week, or this year, but the problems WOULD be solved. It certainly wasn’t the time any of us would want to live in, but it wasn’t all bad. People are resiliant and they usually manage to find a way to have a good time one way or another. This was the age of Teddy Roosevelt and wherever Teddy went there was usually plenty of action on whatever he turned his hand to. Teddys enthusiam was very infectious, just like any good leaders should be. It took the cataclysm of the First World War to rattle that optimism.
By the way, know what other labor organizers said the I.W.W stood for? “I Won’t Work”!
Look at the photo in “original” size and the halftone dots become very obvious. Further, there are subtle details (including the aforementioned shading and stripes on the engineers overalls) in the image that would be virually impossible to render in a woodcut.
It’s a photo, but there’s no way to tell whether it was real, or staged.
The photograph of the engineer is real enough, but I have to wonder whether the featureless face of the woman wasn’t somehow added to the picture. The arms don’t look right to me on an otherwise well-proportioned figure. Halftone dots would appear in a metal engraving picture.
She looks like my great great great grandmother… I would say this is staged. How times have changed. Now there are some good looking lady engineers who are really engineers…
I am not sure why everyone is concerned about whether or not the photo was staged. Just to be clear, I never intended to suggest that this was a real event. In fact, I am thoroughly convinced that it was staged. The real point, however, is what was being staged and why.
This is a railroad advertisement built around the romance of a serious rules violation. It does not make any difference whether or not the event actually happened or whether the violation actually occurred.
Today, this would be like the U.P. making a television commercial on their freight transportation by glorifying the hobo, and showing them riding a freight train or camped out in a freight yard.
The fact that the photo appears in an ad for the railroad says that it was fully sanctioned by the railroad. Without a copy of that railroad’s rules from 1903, we don’t know if it was a violation (under normal circumstances) or not. Since the odds are that it was staged, that’s a moot point.
Perhaps the message they were trying to convey was that the railroad was so good that even a woman could run a train over it. Certainly not the politically correct thing to say today, but the term hadn’t been invented in 1903…