CHAPTER 28Investing in Tomorrow
Out on his own, Albert Pullman incorporated as the A. B. Pullman Company to manufacture and sell railroad equipment based on his patents.1 Incorporating was his final act of separation from George. Released from his obligations to the Pullman Company, he invested as widely as he had during the disastrous 1870s. The outcomes this time were often equally unproductive: while George had captured a market with the palace cars, Albert lacked his younger brother's ferocious determination and focus. Albert also had a knack for investing in companies or technologies that, for reasons that often had nothing to do with his involvement, fell by the wayside. In the last few years of his life, however, he became interested in innovations destined to change the shape of society. In electricity, the telephone, and the automobile Albert saw tremendous potential, but once again his penchant for backing the wrong horse reared its head.
Working in the railroad industry gave Albert opportunities to learn about technological advances, of which the generation and transmission of electricity was one example. The story of electricity in Albert's career began with the telegraph. Chicago enjoyed a prime location in the nation's telegraph network, unsurprising for the country's railroad hub because wires tended to parallel tracks, with the significant exception of the first transcontinental telegraph.2 Railroads, canals, rivers, and Lake Michigan helped make Chicago into the second-largest communications center in the country behind New York City. Chicago's wires handled over 1.5 million telegraph messages annually, Western Union's main office housed more than 2,000 telegraph instruments, and the company had 175 branch offices across the metropolitan area. Chicago was also home to the Western Electric Corporation, the country's main manufacturer of telegraph equipment and a supplier of railroad signals and components.
An unexpected consequence of this concentration of telegraphic expertise was the city's readiness to embrace telephones and electricity. In 1878, the first telephone exchanges opened in Chicago and, beginning in 1880, the Central Business District adopted electricity as a power source. Albert's friend John Drake was an early adopter when he installed electric lights in his office in the Grand Pacific Hotel. This gave him a reputation for innovation, and he quickly strung the lights throughout the building. His competitor Potter Palmer, unwilling to be known as a Luddite, almost immediately followed suit, aware that the city would be hosting the Republican National Convention in June 1880 and hoping to attract delegates.3 Illuminated by the city's electricity, James Garfield won both the nomination and the presidency. Albert himself had a telephone installed in his home in 1884, six years after local service began, probably to connect to the Chicago Hansom Cab Company (CHCC) office.4
Albert's interest in the telephone derived from its profit potential and his fascination with inventions. Like other early users, he employed it primarily for business purposes. Unlike telephones, which Alexander Graham Bell dominated, the infant electricity generation industry boasted a colorful assortment of individuals and corporations competing for customers in Chicago's Central Business District. In the absence of any centralized authority or main plant, some businesses installed their own generators and sold the surplus to their neighbors. By 1885, nine different patented systems were in use downtown.
The future belonged to electricity, and the city of tomorrow embraced it. Electricity met the need for a relatively pollution-free energy source in a community perpetually shrouded in smoke from coal-fired boilers and steam-powered locomotives and ships. In winter, cold air compressed the smoke and gave the business district an “extra dinginess,” cutting visibility to a few blocks. The growing number of high-rise buildings exacerbated the problem of pollution, leading to low visibility in high summer. In the Central Business District, “heavy smoke clouds hang like a pall low down even into the streets.”5 Electricity promised to end the artificial murkiness.
The advent of electric transmission lines altered Chicago's skyline as industrialists metaphorically grabbed the wires with both hands and flung them like poorly spun spiderwebs across alleys, streets, and buildings. Wires, poles, substations, and the hum of power assaulted the senses everywhere downtown, but not every section of the city benefited equally. While Pullman electrified the company town and its eponymous building on Michigan Avenue, the wires did not reach beyond the center with anything approaching the ubiquity of the business district.
Electricity ended downtown's perpetual night, but it replaced darkness with an eerie daytime glow. Some found the resonant luminosity exciting, while others shied away from it. Electric lights and vivid advertisements illuminated the nightscape and identified landmarks and destinations.6 An eyesore and a danger when sparks and arcs flew, the wires and the light refused to be ignored. Not everyone approved. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, newly arrived from Wisconsin, hated electric advertisements hung along city streets. He became “half-resentful because compelled to read the signs pressing on the eyes everywhere. They claimed your eyes for this, that, and everything besides. They lined the [street]car above the windows. They lined the way, pushing, crowding, playing all manner of tricks on the victim's eyes.”7 Advertisements had never been so inescapably present: with electricity, even a full moon on a clear night found itself outshone by the glow of electric signs. Add to this the sound of steel wheels on buried tracks, the urgent cries of peddlers and the high-pitched shouting of newsboys, the eternal clop of horse hooves on roadways, and the hum of machinery, and Chicago would have assaulted the senses of any new arrival.
The light could be bad enough, but just as annoying was the sudden tangle of wires reaching across roads and roofs to carry electricity into buildings. Calling electricity “the most subtle, powerful, and arbitrary of all the known forces of nature,” Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. threw his weight behind a movement to hide the cables.8 Pressured by unhappy business owners and lobbied by the Chicago Sectional Electric Company, the city council passed an ordinance requiring building owners to move their wires underground. The Chicago Sectional Electric Company gained the exclusive right to bury cables beneath city streets in wrought-iron boxes.9 Though delayed by opposition from Western Union and the electricity suppliers who would have to rent space in those subterranean compartments, burying cables gained the support of Elisha Gray, a cofounder of Western Electric, leading exponent of the telephone, and talented entrepreneur with whom Albert temporarily connected.10
Henry B. Cobb, the “springs king” of Wilmington, Delaware, also jumped on the cable-burying bandwagon and brought his old friend Albert in as a partner. Another example of Albert's bad timing and poor judgment, this investment ignored the monopoly given to the Chicago Sectional Electric Company. Perhaps Cobb hired Albert in hopes that he convince Mayor Harrison to rewrite the city ordinance, which did not happen. Incorporating the Union Electric Underground Company of Illinois, Cobb partnered with his brother Sam B. Cobb, executor for the Matteson family whose hotel Albert had lifted back in 1859, and Albert's son-in-law, flour merchant Graeme Stewart.11 Cobb believed the time was ripe to expand into the underground wire business. Using machines of his own invention, he claimed to be producing “ten miles of finished wire per day” and promised absurdly to invalidate “all the old theories of the electricians of the world.” He set out to run a mile of wire “underground in the Base-Ball Park” as a demonstration. Recruiting Albert as president in 1884, he brought in another of Albert's business partners, patent lawyer W. H. Dyrenforth, as secretary and treasurer.12 The company incorporated in the state of Illinois in 1885 but could not break the monopoly of the Chicago Sectional Electric Company. It limped on, purchasing a disused cannery in Wilmington for use as a wire factory that never opened and vanishing after 1888.13
Telephones presented another avenue to investment. Albert was one of “a large number of prominent gentlemen” present at a demonstration telephone call from New York City to Chicago using the “Postal Telegraph Company” wire. Accounts offer conflicting testimony about what actually happened. According to one eyewitness, several conversations through the wires occurred. In one of these, Albert's presence in the room was ascertained by a participant in New York who asked “if he has any stock to sell.” At the very least, this question cements Albert's reputation as a renowned wheeler-dealer and hints at the reason he lost his position at the Pullman Company. Others suggested the experiment was a bust, while one report claimed the whole thing was a fraud.14
The experiment Albert attended used one of Elisha Gray's “molecular telephones.”15 Gray was an acknowledged leader in the field of telephone experimentation, battling against Alexander Graham Bell for supremacy.16 Gray and Bell locked horns in the race to improve telegraph transmission and then to build and patent the first viable telephone. Their competition led to a controversy over who had invented the first working instrument. The storm centered on the time at which a crucial component had been patented. Both inventors filed applications for similar key advances on the same day, with Bell claiming to be the earliest of the two by several hours. Scholars have suggested there may have been foul play when a patent clerk forged the time stamp on Bell's documents. Gray was one of many—albeit the most famous—inventors and businessmen Bell sued for patent infringement.17 The suits began in New York City when the People's Telephone Company lost a patent infringement suit against Bell Telephone, a precedent leading ultimately to a ruling giving Bell a national monopoly on the telephone.18 Gray quit the field, taking Albert with him.
Albert tried to monetize his own patents. In July 1885, he became president of the Hewitt Manufacturing Company, which planned to construct a Chicago premises for its railroad component business. The Hewitt building did not materialize, but the company continued to manufacture brass products for railroads. It may have been allied with the Hewitt Car Door Company, another railroad supplier in which Albert invested.19 Working on his own inventions, Albert patented a new type of freight-car door in 1892, his single lasting contribution to the railroad industry.20 He invested in a lumber company and a metalworking firm that made the components of his car door, marketing it out of his Lake Street office.21
At about the time he was being linked with Hewitt, Albert reentered the mining business. Selling a piece of property he owned near the tracks of the Chicago & North Western Railway, he bought stock in and joined the board of the Yellowstone Milling Company, which he renamed the Pullman Reduction Company.22 Albert incorporated the firm in Chicago as a manufacturer and marketer of mining and milling machines while simultaneously engaged in “a general mining business” near Butte in the Montana Territory.23 The Pullman Reduction Company claimed to have developed a new machine to smash rocks in order to release deposits of gold and silver from otherwise insignificant boulders.
Albert and his principal partner, former Congdon Manufacturing official George M. Sargent, advertised for a manager. Contacted by Frank Price, they told him they had invested $31,000 in the Pomeroy Pulverizer, which was working profitably at Bear Gulch Mine. They offered Price an annual salary of $3,000 but asked him to invest $5,442 in the firm and assume debt worth $7,500, making him a one-third owner in addition to being manager. This deal would, they asserted, attract other investors. Excited about the prospect, Price traveled to Montana but found a machine that “worked spasmodically,” leading him to complain that the value of his investment had been grossly overstated. He sued for recovery of his stake plus costs, though the case was settled before it reached trial. As Price had surmised, the machine was a dud. Pullman had it dismantled and moved to another location, where it vanished from the historical record.24 Albert's Montana adventure ended following a claim for unpaid wages by a worker in Deer Lodge County in 1886.25 Though hardly alone in the precious metals game, at least this swindle had the charm of being original: very few, if any, previous mining frauds revolved around claims of the efficacy of a broken machine.26
To make matters worse for Albert's portfolio and reputation, the Allen Paper Wheel Company had stopped paying dividends after a change of management and fears that it was on the verge of bankruptcy.27 This came just a year after he had told the press 60,000 paper wheels were in use on “all the trunk lines between New York and Chicago.” This number almost certainly included Pullman cars, by far the most important customer for a product manufactured in a facility at Pullman, undermining the argument about the ubiquity of paper wheels. Demand dwindled in the 1880s. When the Chicago & North Western Railway built a new fleet of dining cars, it equipped them with Allen paper wheels, as did the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati & Indianapolis Railroad in 1884 when it produced new coaches.28 But steel wheels were beginning to replace the paper variety as heavier carriages came into use and concerns about the safety of paper wheels mounted.29
Two continuities followed Albert into the last decade of his life: the tumult of his investment decisions and a readiness to ignore family. A typical sentiment, from the pen of brother Royal Henry, noted laconically “Albert never writes, of course.”30 Shortly before the death of their mother, Albert, accompanied by daughter Emma and sister Helen, stayed with her at Castle Rest, where they sat with her “out on the piazza, for a long time.”31 This was a rare instance of maternal contact for the wayward son, his negligence occasioning a wry comment from the eldest brother, whose choice of words indicates the family was aware of his activities. Writing to their mother, Royal Henry prayed “may Albert feel his fingers tingle with desire to epistolize with tender words to the Mother who gave him life.”32 Despite his interest in electricity, Albert's digits did not respond to the current of family feeling.
Albert's attitude toward kin stood in marked contrast with that of George. In addition to building a summer home for their mother on Pullman Island and paying for her suite at the Belgravia Hotel in New York City, George visited her as often as he could. George stayed many nights at the Belgravia Hotel and in some years spent more time with his mother than with his wife Hattie, who was a hypochondriac.33 When their mother died in May 1892, George was at her bedside, but Albert was absent, so absent in fact that her obituary omitted his name from the list of her children. He did not even bother to attend the funeral of the mother whose quiet disapproval of his silences echoed that of Royal Henry and George.34 Though not unexpected, the death of the matriarch broke another connection with the family's heritage.
The future always attracted Albert more than the past. His next venture took him into the new world of electric traction. He first learned about it in the 1870s when one of those eccentric Americans who populated the nineteenth century approached him for help. A self-promoting inventor and convicted swindler by the name of Benson Bidwell claimed to have shown Albert a model of an electric streetcar in 1871. According to Bidwell's account in a self-aggrandizing and mostly fictional autobiography, Albert agreed that it had great potential as a moneymaker but supposedly told Bidwell that “he had no time to devote to the matter, his energies were so engrossed by his sleeping-car business.”35 If such an exchange was unlikely, publishing it in 1907 suggests Albert's name retained at least some of its power and remained associated with electric traction—which it was, because of his work with the Patton Electric Motor Car.
The Patton Motor used electricity as part of its hybrid power source. A petro-electric vehicle designed to run on rails, it combined gasoline and electricity for energy. The Patton may have been the first successful form of transportation using this particular combination, though the technology would not catch on for another century.36 Albert witnessed a demonstration of a small Patton streetcar in Pullman in 1889 and became interested in supporting William H. Patton, inspired in part by George Francis Train's enthusiasm for electric traction and his success with English tramlines.37 Patton thought of the idea while tinkering in his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, joining innumerable other American inventors in the quest to build an efficient urban motorcar. His first efforts failed to transmit power to the wheels, a problem he overcame by installing an electric drive and a battery to store surplus power that could be used for accelerating and braking. Patton filed a patent for this system in 1889, a year after he approached the Pullman Company about building the body for his prototype. Patton supplied Pullman with the specifications for his car, a very basic design omitting seats, curtains, mirrors, lights, sandboxes, and anything superfluous. Patton planned to build and install the running gear in the axles himself.38 He followed up six months later with another contract, this one containing a clause noting that he would furnish “certain special materials” and stipulating that two water tanks were to be built on the roof of the car.39
Patton's timing was excellent. The Pullman Company was seeking to meet the growing demand for streetcars, and the hybrid engine appeared to offer an advance on existing technology and therefore a market niche.40 Convinced of the invention's potential, Albert approached George about bringing Patton to the town of Pullman to develop his concept. George agreed, and Patton gained access to the financial resources he needed to continue working on his invention. By 1890, a Patton car was in use on rails around the works. Running on standard-gauge tracks, it had a gasoline-powered engine that charged an electric motor used to drive the wheels. The motor generated twelve horsepower, and the vehicle could carry eight passengers while also towing a light freight wagon. Employed for intraworks movements, Albert made sure that the car attracted attention beyond Pullman. In one demonstration, it pulled a railroad carriage at ten miles per hour to the delight of spectators, including Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific Railroad, retailer Marshall Field, and H. G. Bird, Albert's business partner. The Pullman Company provided “an elaborate lunch” following the run.41
As an entrant in the increasingly competitive street-railway market, the Patton motor car's self-contained hybrid motor meant it needed neither the underground cables nor the overhead electric wires that other streetcars required. Disadvantages included a cumbersome prime mover; a floor-to-roof compartment for the engine in the center, with passengers and driver seated on either side; and heavy batteries located under the seats. Heedless of these disadvantages, Albert pushed ahead with financing, seeking to increase the Patton Electric Motor Car Company's capitalization to $1,000,000 early in 1893.42 Built at Pullman, street railways in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Denver, Colorado, purchased Patton cars, but the design did not catch on.43
Such an outcome was not predetermined. Battery-powered vehicles had long been of interest to inventors. In 1835, more or less simultaneous experiments in Vermont and Massachusetts demonstrated the viability of an electric motor for powering wheels to move people and goods. Sporadic experiments and small advances followed until, in the 1880s, electric streetcars began operating with overhead wires in Cleveland, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia.44 Battery power took a little longer to emerge. The first experiments with stored-electric traction were performed in France in the 1850s, where the world's first manufacturer of electric automobiles could be found.45 In that decade, progress with electric traction shifted to the United States, but the internal combustion engine took a technological and social lead it did not relinquish.46
The ultimate hegemony of diesel and petroleum was not assured despite a slower rate of innovation with electrical power. According to the historian Rudi Volti, in 1900, the United States produced 4,192 automobiles, of which 1,681 were steam powered, 1,575 were driven by electricity, and only 936 had gasoline engines.47 When Albert became interested in battery power, it was “the only viable alternative” to the internal combustion engine. The first car to run on the streets of Chicago was battery powered, driven from Des Moines, Iowa, by its inventor, William Morrison.48 Electricity ultimately lost to petroleum because the manufacturing, political, and research infrastructures supporting the development and application of battery power could not sustain its growth.49 For Albert, the Patton motor car looked very much like the future, but the future did not embrace it during his lifetime.
FIGURE 11. The Patton Motor and the Sessions Streetcar at Pullman, evidence of Albert's forward-looking investment strategy toward the end of his life. Reproduced by permission of the Pullman Palace Car Company Photographs, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Another form of traction Albert promoted at this time was the streetcar. Taking the lead in this initiative was the youngest Pullman brother, Charley.50 After demobilization from the Union Army and trying to forge a life for himself as a farmer, he returned to Chicago permanently in 1886 to mend fences with his brothers and to seek his fortune. Embraced by George and liked by Albert, he shared a table with Albert and Emily at one of Drake's annual game dinners and lived with his family in an apartment in the downtown Pullman Building.51 Albert, along with about seven hundred other people, attended the wedding of Charley's son William Charles Pullman, a railway equipment supplier who worked in the same building as Albert, to Margaret Allan Pinkerton, granddaughter of the founder of the detective agency known for spying on workers and violently breaking strikes. The ceremony took place at the Third Presbyterian Church, after which guests attended a reception at the Pinkerton residence, where “everything was costly and tasteful in the extreme.”52
George hired Charley as a contracting agent for Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC).53 In this position, he reviewed specifications for new carriages and wagons and forwarded recommendations to upper management, doing the vital bureaucratic labor Albert could never quite bring himself to perform. Under Charley's watch, the company turned to streetcar construction, beginning with forty cars for the Minneapolis Street Railroad Company.54 This became a regular source of business, and Charley applied his expertise to designing and patenting his own double-decker streetcar.
Before a Pullman double-decker streetcar could see the light of day, a patent dispute between Albert and California banker Edward C. Sessions had to be resolved. Sessions, president of the Oakland Savings Bank and a real estate financier and transit investor in the Bay area, owned a patent for a type of footrest for streetcar upper decks.55 Sessions paid the Pullman Company to build cars according to his specifications, but a patent specialist in the Pullman offices noted the similarity between his patent and another streetcar component designed and patented by Albert.56 Negotiations resulted in the incorporation of the Sessions Passenger Car Company, in which H. G. Bird, a partner in the A. B. Pullman Company, was a director, to market Charley's double-decker car. A licensing agreement with Sessions gave him royalties, and it is likely this was also the case for Albert. The design incorporated patents issued to Sessions, Albert, and Charley Pullman.57
The Sessions car superficially resembled European trolleys but had a rich-looking mahogany exterior and an intricate double staircase in the center for access to the second level.58 It also had the appearance of a steamboat, with rounded pilot houses at each end for the driver and an open upper deck. Though significantly more expensive to build than existing streetcars, it carried the Pullman name, and Charley claimed that it could transport twice as many passengers as its competitors.59 Charley and Albert reminded interested observers that increasing the capacity of streetcars would alleviate congestion in city centers. At the time, elevators in Chicago's Masonic Building carried people up its twenty-one floors at nine miles an hour, double the average speed of travel in the clogged business district.60
The double-decker streetcar operated around the town of Pullman. It was powered by overhead electricity and was therefore too tall for the tunnels under Chicago's rivers. Albert accompanied Charley to Pittsburgh for the 1891 meeting of the American Street Railway Association where, as one report put it, “Messers. Charles L. Pullman and A. B. Pullman of the Pullman Palace Car Company … were energetic in presenting to the street railway men the features of the new Double-deck centre vestibule street car.”61 Despite their efforts to sway municipal officials from across the country, they had only one taker. The Sessions Passenger Car Company secured a contract in the nation's capital, where one of its cars ran daily between Georgetown and suburban Bethesda, Maryland.62
FIGURE 12. Interior of the Sessions Streetcar, the vehicle Charley and Albert hoped would bring them fame and wealth. Reproduced by permission of the Pullman Palace Car Company Photographs, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Albert appeared at several streetcar demonstrations in Pullman, including one attended by Boston officials, and may have contemplated investing in the Sessions concern, although it is not clear that he actually did so.63 George seems to have pulled out all the stops to help Charley, including making his personal railroad car available to bring would-be customers to Pullman for demonstrations. On one run, for example, the brothers accompanied the mayor of Chicago, several aldermen, representatives of a taxpayers’ association, journalists, engineers, and PPCC officials to the town.64 There, they traveled on the new streetcar and heard Charley tell them how “every car company could double its carrying capacity with the same number of cars.” As happened on so many occasions, the target customer, Chicago's South Side Company, did not bite.65
Unfortunately for Charley's ambitions, the Pullman Company did not prove as dedicated to his streetcar as it had to railroad passenger and freight vehicles. This may have reflected the experience of the Pullman Street Railway, built fitfully between 1888 and 1892 to connect the town of Pullman with industrializing Calumet. The line lost an average of $200 a month when it operated and could not even do that during harsh winters, when it simply stopped running. The three cars with which it commenced operations lasted less than five years before they were scrapped. Calumet Electric officials expressed some interest in restoring the line, but that interest evaporated when it became clear it would cost over $100,000 to do so.66
Albert was on firmer ground with a brickmaking concern, the Illinois Terra Cotta Company, which made its product in the town of Pullman.67 In 1891, Albert became president and moved its headquarters to his office in the Lakeside Building, an architecturally eclectic structure hinting primarily at a mixture of Loire Valley and Gothic styles.68 Conveniently located a few blocks west of the Pullman Building and adjacent to Drake's Grand Pacific Hotel, the Lakeside Building put Albert inside the business district and within easy reach of Chicago's railroad depots. The firm had the advantage of a steady customer in the town of Pullman and paid regular dividends. While unable to benefit financially from cars, electricity, or telephones, Albert did generate income from the business of bricks.
By 1890, Albert had become something of a well-known character in Chicago and on the Thousand Islands. He had a memorable beard and shock of silver hair, could easily be mistaken for George, and presented himself as a personality in his straw hat and boating coat while on vacation.69 Despite falling ill with the intermittent stomach problems dogging him his entire life, he continued to explore new investment opportunities. His abiding interest in civic events and his desire to play a role in Chicago's business world led him to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. There he experienced the last highwater mark of his life, simultaneously a triumph and a stark reminder of how far he had fallen.