I am usually skeptical of technological inevitability, but this seems like a potentially good example. For decades, the New York City subway was a locally resisted technological temptation,[1] and a potential example of technological overhang.
The 1866 example was effectively a tech demo for tech that wasn’t good enough to use at all. Beach Pneumatic Transit is just a 300 foot long tube and you pump air on one side or the other with a steam engine.
It doesn’t have any routing and it’s difficult to see how to make this work at scale.
If you use the technology of the time, that’s going to be boilers and steam engines per train, and they would fill the tunnels with coal smoke, which is quite deadly. (much more than just the carbon monoxide, a low concentration of it killed thousands of people.)
What you need is a big, heavy duty electric motor. Not a demo unit but something that can move a train.
And:
this allowed Sprague to use electric motors to invent the first electric trolley system in 1887–88 in Richmond, Virginia, the electric elevator and control system in 1892, and the electric subway with independently powered centrally-controlled cars. The latter were first installed in 1892 in Chicago by the South Side Elevated Railroad, where it became popularly known as the “L”.
Conclusions: it looks like the time between “motor good enough for a subway” and “subway” was approximately 4 years, or about the earliest possible date.
New York’s actions didn’t create any kind of technological overhang because Chicago was doing it. Per the ‘race’ assumption, had New York failed to adopt the subway at all, instead of being 12 years late, NYC would have stopped growing, the Chicago Stock Exchange would be the largest, with Chicago the financial capital, and so on.
This doesn’t look like it fits your reference class.
I chose the start date of 1866 because that is the first time the New York Senate appointed a committee to study rapid transit in New York, which concluded that New York would be best served by an underground railroad. It’s also the start date that Katz uses.
The technology was available. London opened its first subway line in 1863. There is a 1.4 mi railroad tunnel from 1873 in Baltimore that is still in active use today. These early tunnels used steam engines. This did cause ventilation challenges, but they were resolvable. The other reasonable pre-electricity option would be to have stationary steam engines at a few places, open to the air, that pulled cables that pulled the trains. There were also some suggestions of dubious power mechanisms, like the one you described here. None of the options were as good as electric trains, but some of them could have been made to work.
This is not a global technological overhang, because there continued to be urban railroad innovation in other cities. It would only be overhang for New York City. This is a more restrictive definition of overhang than I used in my previous post, but it might still be interesting to see what happened with local overhang.
None of the options were as good as electric trains, but some of them could have been made to work.
Now that you’ve brought up other working systems, the question would be if the pre-electric subways ROIed. Yes there’s cable driven streetcars in SF, as I recall switching cable is something the driver does. So that’s a valid power mechanism.
Mitigations and inferior tech has costs. Higher ceilings, people passing out from CO exposure and heat, big ventilation fans that waste coal.
Were these costs enough to make the London subway unsustainable in an economic sense? The Baltimore one sounds too small to be viable.
Another thing you’d have to look at is what NYC residents are giving up. If a subway saves 20 minutes each way at that time from a 10 hour workday (Fair Labor Standards Act is 1944 limiting it to nominally 44 hours a week except for exempt), that’s a cost of 6 percent to daily productivity.
Less because early subway networks only have partial coverage, so only the portion of the city’s residents covered have a 6 percent delta in productivity.
This is such a small effect the historical data may not show anything. Many other factors would affect the economic performance of NYC and Chicago.
A hypothetical technology that made a 100% difference in productivity, or 1000%, would be far more costly to give up, and it might simply not be a viable choice at all. (unviable because it effectively makes the group “not giving in to temptation” cost 2x-10x as much to do any task, and they are selling goods and services to the global market. Would go broke fast. I did this analysis when looking at autonomous driving, and I realized that autonomous taxi and trucking firms could set their price to where their competition still using drivers loses money on every ride)
The London subway was private and returned enough profit to slowly expand while it was coal powered. Once it electrified, it became more profitable and expanded quickly.
The Baltimore tunnel was and is part of an intercity line that is mostly above ground. It was technologically similar to London, but operationally very different.
The 1866 example was effectively a tech demo for tech that wasn’t good enough to use at all. Beach Pneumatic Transit is just a 300 foot long tube and you pump air on one side or the other with a steam engine.
It doesn’t have any routing and it’s difficult to see how to make this work at scale.
If you use the technology of the time, that’s going to be boilers and steam engines per train, and they would fill the tunnels with coal smoke, which is quite deadly. (much more than just the carbon monoxide, a low concentration of it killed thousands of people.)
What you need is a big, heavy duty electric motor. Not a demo unit but something that can move a train.
And:
this allowed Sprague to use electric motors to invent the first electric trolley system in 1887–88 in Richmond, Virginia, the electric elevator and control system in 1892, and the electric subway with independently powered centrally-controlled cars. The latter were first installed in 1892 in Chicago by the South Side Elevated Railroad, where it became popularly known as the “L”.
Conclusions: it looks like the time between “motor good enough for a subway” and “subway” was approximately 4 years, or about the earliest possible date.
New York’s actions didn’t create any kind of technological overhang because Chicago was doing it. Per the ‘race’ assumption, had New York failed to adopt the subway at all, instead of being 12 years late, NYC would have stopped growing, the Chicago Stock Exchange would be the largest, with Chicago the financial capital, and so on.
This doesn’t look like it fits your reference class.
I chose the start date of 1866 because that is the first time the New York Senate appointed a committee to study rapid transit in New York, which concluded that New York would be best served by an underground railroad. It’s also the start date that Katz uses.
The technology was available. London opened its first subway line in 1863. There is a 1.4 mi railroad tunnel from 1873 in Baltimore that is still in active use today. These early tunnels used steam engines. This did cause ventilation challenges, but they were resolvable. The other reasonable pre-electricity option would be to have stationary steam engines at a few places, open to the air, that pulled cables that pulled the trains. There were also some suggestions of dubious power mechanisms, like the one you described here. None of the options were as good as electric trains, but some of them could have been made to work.
This is not a global technological overhang, because there continued to be urban railroad innovation in other cities. It would only be overhang for New York City. This is a more restrictive definition of overhang than I used in my previous post, but it might still be interesting to see what happened with local overhang.
Now that you’ve brought up other working systems, the question would be if the pre-electric subways ROIed. Yes there’s cable driven streetcars in SF, as I recall switching cable is something the driver does. So that’s a valid power mechanism.
Mitigations and inferior tech has costs. Higher ceilings, people passing out from CO exposure and heat, big ventilation fans that waste coal.
Were these costs enough to make the London subway unsustainable in an economic sense? The Baltimore one sounds too small to be viable.
Another thing you’d have to look at is what NYC residents are giving up. If a subway saves 20 minutes each way at that time from a 10 hour workday (Fair Labor Standards Act is 1944 limiting it to nominally 44 hours a week except for exempt), that’s a cost of 6 percent to daily productivity.
Less because early subway networks only have partial coverage, so only the portion of the city’s residents covered have a 6 percent delta in productivity.
This is such a small effect the historical data may not show anything. Many other factors would affect the economic performance of NYC and Chicago.
A hypothetical technology that made a 100% difference in productivity, or 1000%, would be far more costly to give up, and it might simply not be a viable choice at all. (unviable because it effectively makes the group “not giving in to temptation” cost 2x-10x as much to do any task, and they are selling goods and services to the global market. Would go broke fast. I did this analysis when looking at autonomous driving, and I realized that autonomous taxi and trucking firms could set their price to where their competition still using drivers loses money on every ride)
The London subway was private and returned enough profit to slowly expand while it was coal powered. Once it electrified, it became more profitable and expanded quickly.
The Baltimore tunnel was and is part of an intercity line that is mostly above ground. It was technologically similar to London, but operationally very different.