Was this week watching a History Channel HD documentary (TheJourney to Palomar) about solar astronomer and Chicagoan George Ellery Hale (1868-1938).
Hale was responsible for telescope glass evolving from about 30 inches wide to 200 inches wide. Can highly recommend, some interesting movie shots of nonstop special trains hauling the huge 17 foot mirrors with the line ahead being cleared for them.
Anyhow, one of the historians said in 1890s Chicago there was so much grade level train and streetcar traffic the death toll on average was THREE people killed on tracks EVERY DAY. He added there were very few crossings with guards or warning equipment.
No outrage, I guess an acceptable level of casualties for the time.
Astounding!
Can highly recommend this two-hour show, very well done, see how giant telescopes evolved. Look for it on PBS stations, too.
Actually, those figures were not acceptable. I have a book called Metropolitan Corridor by John R. Stilgoe, 1983, Yale University Press. There should be a copy in any sizeable library in the country since it won several awards, and I would recommend every railfan read it.
In Chapter 6, titled Crossing, Stilgoe states, “In 1902, the Interstate Commerce Commission recorded that nearly 4,000 people ‘struck by trains, locomotives or cars’ died instantly or within twenty-four hours of the collisions; another 3,563 suffered injuries. Federal statistics under-reported fatalities and injuries, however, because the commission never adequately defined such terms as persons, persons not trespassing, and trespassers.” Later, Stilgoe says, “…journalists investigating the emerging scandal of grade-crossing catastrophe learned to distrust both government and private industry statistics.”
This is pertinent today because the chapter goes on to state the problems with crossings and people and the ineffectiveness of trying to keep people from being struck by trains. We still have the problem, only more so with vehicles than with pedestrians.
The program about the telescope sounds interesting, Pop. I’ll look for it on PBS since I don’t have cable.
I watched National Treasure agiain last night with my two younger sons. It has Nicolas Cage following historic clues about a treasure from place to place to place. Today, I come on the forum, and read this thread, which leads to another thread, which leads to another thread! It’s like deja vu all over again![:P]
Back to the original post- life a century ago had to be quite different than now. Corespondingly, the accident and death rates for many things had to be different then, verses now- take the incidense of injury or death by being kicked by a horse, for example.
Thanks for the heads up on the Palomar show. I will try to watch it, as I am interested in astronomy.
Are there any other amatuer astronomers out there? I have a small telescope, a 90mm ETX (Meade) which is excellent for backyard astronomy. I have considerable light pollution (limiting magnitude of about 4) in my neighborhood, but the scope works well, particularly on the moon, planets, double stars, and certain deep sky objects (primarily open clusters). The great thing is I can be set up within 5 minutes.
I tend to focus on one major hobby at a time, the past several years have been railroading, but did get back outside several times the past month.
BTW, it is snowing here in NW Indiana…winter has arrived.
Yes, astronomy is a dormant hobby of mine. I must have forgotten that the 200" Palomar mirror had been transported by rail, but how else would it have been taken close to the Mountain? The Soviets poured a larger mirror some 40-50 years ago, but the blank cracked at some point. So, as far as I know, the Hale telescope’s primary mirror is still the largest and heaviest extant pour of boro-silicate that has been cooled (took 2 years?), figured to reflect light to a prime focus, and then installed successfully in a telescope frame.
Incidentally, modern mirrors are “tweaked” with servo-actuators that press on the back of the mirror to deform it slightly, something in the order of 1/10,000th of an inch. These deformities permit far sharper images and detection by accounting for different refractive indices of the air above the telescope as air currents and layers of different densities of air wander into and out of the light path. Very high tech stuff.
I’ll say. If you read the old newspapers from 1880-1900, you will see that with the machine age came the age of getting entangled in machinery. With grade crossings being the problem they are now, you can just imagine the problem they must have been when nobody had much experience with them. Railroad operation itself was unbelievably dangerous in the pioneering era.
It is not true for the city government to tolerate the congestion and grade level street traffic toll.
Get a copy of “The Iron Horse and the Windy City” by David M Young. It tells about the development of the city as a rail hub begining with the Galena & Chicago Union.
The book has whole chapters devoted to the rail comgestion with some 30 lines built into & around the city. The Illinois General Assembly began some legislation in 1869 & 1874. An early solution was to install gates, installed by gatekeepers (if they could be manned 24/7), or would require a gate to cover up to 22 tracks near a yard area. In 1871, the city completed 2 tunnels under the Chicago river to reduce delays there.
So the city through it’s charter power wanted the railroads to grade/separate the lines and electrify them to reduce the smoke/smog. The efforts continued into the 1930’s when the Depression stopped the efforts. It’s too bad it has taken nearly a century for Chicago to get back to this program with the CREATE effort.
I highly recomend this book published by the NIU/Dekalb Press. 268 pages for $45
I suspect that streetcars were as common in Chicago back then as buses are now (maybe more so, judging from some of the pictures I’ve seen), and pedestrians were much more common than they are now. And PZ, although you used “pedestrian”, your source apparently didn’t–suggesting that some of the casualties might have resulted from the one- or two-horsepower vehicles being spooked by the streetcars and trains.
One can see why elevated railways were all the rage back then.
The Chicago city government at one time included a Bureau of Track Elevation to encourage and approve the various railroad plans to elevate their tracks and eliminate grade crossings. Long-time residents of Chicago are aware of the relative rarity of main line grade crossings in the older parts of the city. Most areas inside the city limits that have main line grade crossings were either not developed prior to the Great Depression or were isolated from the rest of the city.
I’ve seen a History Channel show on early railroading, and they claimed that there were over 250,000 railroad worker FATALITIES from 1890 to 1915.
People have also forgotten how much more dangerous the highways were in the past. I’ve done a lot of microfilm research on auto racing in South Dakota (pop 600,000 or so in the 1950s). In the 1950s there would be 8-12 highway fatalities every weekend, often with 3-5 in the same accident. In those days the traffic deaths were highly publicized to increase public awareness. It was a different world then. Narrow two lane highways with no shoulders, 2 ton cars with skinny tires that blew frequently, less efficient drum brakes trying to stop the cast iron cars, more drunk driving than now, NO seat belts unless you installed them yourself.
Changing the mindset on safety seems to take decades, even now.