CHAPTER 19Railroad Expert
By the end of the 1870s, Albert was the publicly recognized Pullman authority. George rarely spoke with journalists, while the older brother ceaselessly positioned himself as company spokesperson. Albert's work behind the scenes designing cars and supervising their construction, along with his success leading excursions, gave him the self-confidence and contacts to speak on technical subjects not necessarily within his area of expertise. He continued to be employed by the Pullman construction department, earning an annual salary of $4,000 (over $1 million in 2024) in that role.1 Journalists regularly sought his opinion on railroad matters, giving him a national platform.
The line between technical expert and product promoter was thin, indistinct, and easily crossed. Albert transgressed regularly, talking on a variety of topics unrelated to building and operating railroad cars, including commercial laundries and wheat futures. After a few years of investing in them, for example, Albert presented himself as knowledgeable on industrial laundries. When challenged by a former employee of Jennings Laundry, he engaged in a competition to eliminate iron from the water used in cleaning Pullman linens and bedclothes. Albert lost.2 In a slightly less public process, he submitted numerous patent applications, supported by the Pullman's Palace Car Company (PPCC) legal infrastructure and testifying to his self-confidence and determination.
While George knew a lot about financing, Albert had learned from the many contacts he made because of his friendly approach to people. Accumulating an eclectic store of knowledge across an array of topics, he was not shy about sharing it. When invited to observe a new technique for ventilating railroad cars, for example, he felt confident enough of his abilities to adjust the valves and deflectors to test the invention. In this instance, the technology won by continuing to remove tobacco smoke from the carriage while keeping dust, grit, and cinders at bay.3 Traveling later with PPCC Detroit works superintendent Thomas A. Bissell on a train demonstrating a new suspension system, Albert took the long view and declared “that the smoothness of action was assured, but that further demonstration was needed to prove the saving in wear and tear.”4 An article on a new Pullman Car journal bearing in Railroad Gazette invited readers to write directly to Albert for more information.5
When he had made up his mind to advocate for a product, Albert was an unwavering booster. An example was paper wheels. Manufactured by his friend Richard Allen, paper wheels consisted of compacted papier-mâché or similar material inserted into a steel tire and protected from the elements by a metal hub. Paper reduced vibrations transmitted from rail and wheel to passengers, smoothing the ride. The Pullman Company was an important purchaser and promoter of paper wheels, a choice Albert facilitated and defended.6 He and Allen traveled together to England on at least one occasion and applied jointly for patents in the United Kingdom and the United States.7 Intense competition pervaded the wheel-manufacturing business, and entrants encouraged railroad companies to specify their products in orders, so Albert's garrulous outreach offered Allen an advantage.8
Albert championed paper wheels whenever the opportunity arose. He showed them off to inquiring passengers and journalists at the drop of a hat, testifying to their utility and durability.9 He wrote to newspapers and journals explaining that paper wheels used by Pullmans were expected to last for an average of 125,000 miles each, citing the experience of cars on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway.10 He urged railroad companies to adopt them and explained how, in his experience, they provided a smoother ride, did less damage to rails, and helped trucks last longer than those with all-steel wheels. He argued that their useful lives would be extended by replacing or turning the metal tires encasing paper interiors. Albert told a New England Railroad Club meeting that PPCC used a grinding machine to rehabilitate warped tires, putting them back into service “with very good results.” He included the data for specific cars to show how grinding added at least 8,000 miles of life to “old condemned wheels” and later wrote how paper wheels averaged more than 110,000 miles before needing any type of servicing.11 Frequently quoted as an expert on the topic, he vowed to the influential trade newspaper Railway Age that Allen Paper wheels running between Chicago and New York averaged nearly 400,000 miles per wheel.12
Albert boasted about the safety record of paper wheels. He vouchsafed to Scientific American in 1882 that PPCC “have never had an accident caused through broken wheels or axels with any cars having paper wheels under them. While the present style of wheel has been in service we have never had a paper wheel fail en route.”13 This was not true. The Pullman car Woodbine had derailed six years earlier when a paper wheel broke on an express in Pennsylvania. Several passengers were killed and others injured; the parents of one of the victims sued the Pullman Company on the grounds of “gross negligence” for using paper instead of steel wheels. The lawsuit was thrown out when the plaintiffs could not prove that the company was at fault despite expert testimony supporting their argument.14 Exonerated, Pullman continued to use paper wheels.15
Others recognized Albert's expertise. In 1883, he joined the Master Car Builders’ Association (MCBA) when, seeking to extend its influence beyond the shop floor, the organization created a new category of “representative members.”16 Until the 1883 expansion, only master car builders employed in railroad car shops or car-manufacturing companies could join the MCBA. Thomas Bissell, head of Pullman's Detroit shops, served in that capacity for PPCC. Albert had previously shared the company's experience with paper wheels with MCBA.17 He joined the association as a representative member and was immediately elected to the committee responsible for coordinating its contribution to the 1883 National Railway Exposition in Chicago.18 Joining the MCBA allowed Albert to learn from other railroaders, enjoy the company of men whose backgrounds and interests were similar to his own, disseminate his ideas, and promote his interests.
E. H. Talbot, editor of Railway Age, organized the National Railway Exposition. It opened on May 24, 1883, with exhibits from around the world, including Chicagoan Charles Holland's demonstration of a hydrogen-powered locomotive. Rolling stock displays had by then become an expected element of railroad gatherings. The largest single display at the 1883 event was a full train of Pullman cars diverted for the occasion from the Erie Railroad. Also tempting viewers was a particularly sumptuous Palace car, the Railway Age, valued at an astonishing $75,000. PPCC gave it to Talbott as a gesture of thanks for organizing the exposition but, unable to afford the cost of operating and maintaining it, he sold it back, and the company rented it out for private excursions.19
Albert's expertise extended to all things railroading. Following a deadly crash and fire after a bridge collapsed over the Ashtabula River on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, a Chicago reporter asked Albert for his opinion on replacing in-car stoves with steam heat generated by locomotives. In the widely reprinted story, Albert argued that, because Pullman cars were double-glazed, a single, uncontrolled source of heat would “roast” passengers. He also feared that steam from a broken pipe would scald them and obscure visibility in the event of an accident. Albert recommended keeping his favored system of mounting a coal-burning stove in each car, braced but detachable in the event of a crash.20
Assertions like these drew sharp criticism from other railroad experts, who suggested that Albert was out of touch with newer developments and sarcastically called him “the great car builder.” Like someone with musical taste frozen in time, Albert could blindly promote obsolete technologies if he either mistrusted or did not understand advances. Noting that inventors had filed some three hundred different patents for steam heating, critics claimed Albert's real objection was the cost of retrofitting cars with a new technology. Another critic recommended pursuing legislative action to require the use of heat from locomotives to keep passengers warm and safe in cold weather. As soon as state legislators began to prohibit Albert's preferred method, “it will be found very speedily that stoves can be dispensed with” on the grounds of safety and efficiency.21
While he doubted developments made by others, Albert trumpeted Pullman technological advances. A case in point was the vestibule, the steel-framed fabric corridor allowing passengers to walk between carriages without being exposed to the elements. The Pullman Company introduced a successful vestibule system—its feasibility resting primarily on the ability to negotiate curves in the track without splitting apart—invented by employee Henry Sessions.22 Sessions assigned the patent to George, and the company immediately set out to apply and advertise it.
Albert was a passenger onboard the excursion from Chicago to Kankakee demonstrating a new five-car vestibule train built for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Destined for service on that line's prestigious New York Limited between Chicago and Gotham, it consisted of kitchen, dining, and three parlor-sleeper cars, all of them readily accessible without the risky practice of moving from one car to another in the open air. Following a public display at the lakefront, Albert traveled on that first run, his name prominent in reports of the excursion even though he had nothing to do with adoption of the vestibule, an innovation that proved enormously popular with passengers.23
Albert patented his own railroad inventions. Patenting was an American pastime and the American legal system protected inventors, encouraging them to license or sell their patents. Like many other people, Albert Pullman patented his ideas in the hopes of striking it rich. The case of Samuel L. Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), who earned more than $50,000 from a patent for a self-gluing scrapbooking album, was exceptional and few of the approximately 650,000 patents granted during the course of the nineteenth century earned their owners income.24 Albert's first personal experience with the patent system came in 1870, when he and David Myers patented the type of brake they tried unsuccessfully to commercialize through the short-lived Myers American Pneumatic Car Company.25 This was the firm that helped send Albert to the Supreme Court in the Great Western Insurance Company (GWIC) case. In Britain, Albert applied for several patents he thought British railways would purchase, including a type of coupler that permitted carriages to remain in contact throughout a journey, though no takers emerged despite his energetic pitches during excursions.26 He also patented a new type of car window based on conversations with his friend and summertime neighbor George Marsh, the sash-company owner.27 In one particularly creative year, he patented five railroad-related devices in 1883. That included a urinal, a sliding freight-car door, and a lock.28 None of his many devices appear to have troubled the surface of the railroad industry and sank, like the vast majority of patents, without a trace. The only exception was his final patent, the “A. B. Pullman Car Door,” advertised in railroad publications into the twentieth century.29
Unfortunately for Albert, the railroad industry rarely purchased products from patent owners because firms had the capacity to invent, design, and manufacture components in their own shops, as the Pullman vestibule demonstrated. George Westinghouse's air brake was a significant exception to that general rule, though universal adoption occurred only after passage of the Safety Appliance Act of 1893.30 Though they infrequently purchased outside patents, railroad company managers did correspond with patentees. Robert Harris of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) Railroad, whom Albert knew, was nationally recognized for his work with patent holders. He assisted one of Albert's business partners, J. Q. A. Bean of the American Homestead Company, by inviting him to use CB&Q facilities to test his inventions.31 On the other hand, railroad mechanics prided themselves on devising their own solutions to practical problems encountered on the line, ignoring the possibility of finding ready-made technologies in the patent books. The industry itself employed trained engineers, marginalizing tinkerers like Albert who invented beyond the company workshop.32
Newspapers recorded Albert's investment failures but did not sensationalize them, perhaps because of his congenial relationships with journalists and editors built during the period of excursion runs. Entering the marketplace of names gave Albert a kind of access George did not seek but which the gregarious elder brother craved, especially after his role in the Pullman Company shifted away from direct supervision of labor. Endorsements and expertise kept Albert in the public eye, but financial troubles of the 1870s gave way to personal tragedy and negative publicity in the 1880s. In that decade, Albert's relationship with George suffered a series of damaging jolts.