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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. X. No. 250 



client had no control over the winds of heaven, speedily found him- 

 self out of court — his client should have used spark-arresters. But 

 until a very recent date, courts of justice habitually saved time and 

 routine labor by assuming accidents far less remote from their 

 proximate causes than the distance between a haystack and a smoke- 

 stack to be ' Acts of God ; ' though, indeed, a very recent English 

 court, while recognizing the principle, declared that a shipwreck, to 

 be a veritable act of God, must have happened in extremely bad 

 weather. 



But, though to-day in the United States the principle has all but 

 disappeared from our digests, its existence is rather suggested by 

 the somewhat startling fact, that, in all our recent chronicle of rail- 

 way casualty (and I confine myself to the United States in this 

 paper, because our safety appliances are invariably the latest, cost- 

 liest, and most elaborate in the world, our corps of watchmen and 

 care-takers the most numerous, and our estimates of the value of 

 human life incomparably the largest), as a rule the simplest acci- 

 dent is the deadliest, and the utmost perfection of life-saving appli- 

 ances (whose adoption saves in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases 

 in the thousand) may yet turn out to be helplessness itself in the 

 thousandth case when the calamity arrives : in other words, the 

 disaster, when it comes, will be found to consist in the operation of 

 some perfectly familiar law of nature (as of gravitation or inertia), 

 set in motion by the simple oversight of some trained and trust- 

 worthy subordinate ; which would have resulted from identical 

 causes thirty centuries ago to the most primitive of conveyances 

 equally as well as to our own limited expresses, with their air-brakes, 

 vestibules, and coupler-buffers. 



In examination of the history of railway-accidents in the United 

 States, the physical conformation of the country should not be 

 overlooked. As railways were first constructed among us, and had 

 their formative days of operation in the Eastern States rather than 

 among the flatlands and ordinarily easy grades of the Ohio valley, 

 it was only natural that the bulk of experiment, mismanagement, 

 error, and fatality, should have been expended on our Atlantic 

 slopes. The period of the railway in the United States is yet one 

 very insignificant in point of years. To-day, in 1887, the maps of 

 our territory of greatest railway-development have Lake Michigan 

 and the Mississippi, instead of the Atlantic Ocean, for their east. 

 But by the time that railway-construction had begun to extend 

 westwardly from those boundaries, those greatest insurances of 

 safety — the air-brake, the coupler-buffer, the steel rail, the im- 

 proved means of communication between the engineer, conductor, 

 and his crew, which had been slowly wrought out in the East — 

 had come into practical use. Hence it is that the Pacific railroads, 

 though spanning gorges, climbing summits, and surmounting 

 problems of construction to which the achievements of our Atlantic 

 slope railroads are moderate, have no such records of manslaughter 

 and destruction as we find in the records of Eastern rail-transpor- 

 tation. At present every American railway is equipped — is obliged 

 by law to be equipped — with the last improvement in safety- insur- 

 ing devices, not only for the convenience of the passenger, but for 

 the safety of the employee against his employer as well as against 

 fellow-employee. And it is an amenity to the credit of the railway 

 system (which ought not to be lost sight of in these days when 

 wage-workers are taught to look upon any thing incorporated as 

 their deadliest foe) that it has introduced into the common law of 

 the land the principle that an employer's duty to his employees is 

 only discharged by furnishing him the safest tools for his work 

 which the strides of science have devised. 



Until within a very few months, these strides of science seemed 

 to have happily abolished — in the United States — the great rail- 

 road-disasters of the past. Since the frightful catastrophe at Carr's 

 Rock on the Erie Railway of twenty years ago, science and ex- 

 perience have rendered the giddy curves and bold escarpments of 

 its Delaware division as safe as the tangents crossing an Iowa 

 prairie. The Angola and Ashtabula terrors on the Lake Shore 

 Railway wound up practically the list for that line ; while, had it 

 not been for a phenomenal piece of silly and unaccountable care- 

 lessness at Spuyten Duyvel (when Mr. Wagner, an inventor of 

 parlor-car conveniences, was crushed to death in one of his own 

 coaches), the New York Central would have closed up its own 

 perspective of great calamities at New Hamburgh, something in 



the neighborhood of fifteen years ago. But this fifteen years of 

 wonderful immunity from great railway-disaster — most wonderful 

 when we consider that it corresponds with an era of railway-build- 

 ing in the United States unparalleled in the history of human in- 

 dustry — has been brought to a termination by a rapid succession 

 of calamities, grouped into a period of ten months, which, in point 

 of loss of human lives (and no other point is worth considering), 

 are, if not the most terrible in railway annals, yet fall little in horror 

 below the Wigan slaughter, or the annihilation at Tay Bridge, of 

 the multiple horrors of which (analogous to those of shipwreck and 

 railwreck combined) no living tongue shall ever tell the story. 

 These five occurred during the first ten months of the present year, 

 (l) on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Republic, Jan. 4, 1887; (2) 

 on the Central Vermont Railroad at White River, Vt., Feb. 1 1 ; (3) on 

 the Boston and Providence Railroad at Forest Hills,, March 14; (4) 

 on the Toledo, Peoria, and Western Railroad at Chatsworth, Aug. 

 10 ; and (5) at Kout's Station on the Chicago and Atlantic Rail- 

 way, Sept. 1 2 of the present year. These five are, I think, remark- 

 able not only because breaking in upon the long immunity, but be- 

 cause upon examination it will, I think, be found that they were 

 each and all due, not to any defect of machinery, signals, or other 

 mechanical appliances which the corporation could have supplied, 

 or to any defective or careless management, but to those unaccount- 

 able omissions of trained minor servants to perform a perfunctory 

 detail of their routine work — a detail which it was their second 

 nature to perform — which it would have ordinarily required a 

 physical effort for them not to perform, or to have kept them from 

 performing ; that is to say (for it is difficult to exactly formulate it 

 in words), an instantaneous mental incapacity on the part of a 

 trained workman or care-taker, over which laws, rules, and incor- 

 porations have no control, and against the possibility of which 

 neither hope of reward nor fear of loss or punishments can afford 

 any defence or protection whatever. They all occurred on perfectly 

 equipped roads, and from the simplest natural causes. Each of 

 the accidents might have happened to the rudest contrivance of 

 primeval or prehistoric man, — to the cart which used the section 

 of a tree-trunk for a central wheel, or to the hollowed tree-trunk 

 which itself formed a means of water-transportation, as will ap- 

 pear from their recapitulation. 



The Republic accident was in this wise : a freight-train, which 

 had ample time to make a run of some dozen miles to get out of 

 the way of a through express coming in an opposite direction, 

 which had made that run easily every night for years, for once 

 failed to accomplish it. All the mechanical appliances and motive 

 power of the train were in perfect order ; its crew were old servants 

 of the company. But the weather was exceptionally cold, the 

 water in the tank of the engines was all but congealed, and the 

 crew of the freight-train found themselves encroaching on the time of 

 the express. Here was not only no novel situation, but, on the con- 

 trary, perhaps the simplest which can occur in any railway manage- 

 ment. There was no emergency to meet. Probably not an hour 

 passes in a day but that, somewhere in the vast railroad operations 

 of the country, the case is paralleled. But here at Republic, on the 

 night of the fourth day of January, 1887, the hand sent ahead with 

 the signal failed to carry it : two trains met. The old catch problem 

 of the irresistible force meeting the immovable body demonstrated 

 itself ; namely, the trains were destroyed, and twenty human 

 beings lost their lives. 



Just a month later, Feb. 5, came the disaster at White River. A 

 night express thundered upon a bridge, which was supposed to be 

 properly inspected. Every mechanical portion of the train was 

 working as it should ; every servant of the company was at his post ; 

 nevertheless, the locomotive left the rails instead of following 

 them ; the express-train was plunged to the frozen surface of the 

 river fifty feet below ; and, of its three hundred passengers, thirty- 

 two never breathed again, or were roasted in slow agony from 

 burning dibris upon a floor of ice. Every bridge on every railroad- 

 line in the nation is ordered to be watched. A corporation must 

 act by its agents. This bridge had probably been hourly inspected 

 for years, but somebody had failed to inspect it on the fifth day of 

 February, 1887. Another month went by, and on the morning of 

 the 14th of March a packed train on the Boston and Providence 

 Railroad of three hundred mechanics and working-women was 



