The Baltimore Ohio Railroad: Incubator of Engineering Entrepreneurs in the Nineteenth Century

摘要

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was born out of the desire of Baltimore businessmen to compete for western trade with New York after the Erie Canal opened trade to the new Midwestern states. Early in 1827, group of businessmen meeting at the home of George Brown, a director of Alex Brown and Sons, the great Baltimore investment banking firm, decided to push for the formulation of the railroad. At the end of February of that year, the Maryland General Assembly approved the incorporation of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad Company. Since its inception as one of the first railroads in the world, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was a great incubator of engineering entrepreneurs, particularly in its first seventy-five years. Being the first large scale railroad to begin building in the western hemisphere, the B&O needed innovation and invention in order to succeed in its goal of bringing goods and passengers from the great waterways of the Midwest to the port of Baltimore. The brand new enterprise attracted many inventors, tinkerers and others who dreamt that the spark of a new idea could be developed into an innovation that brings fame and riches. This was the cutting new technology of the mid nineteenth century. The railroad spawned not only a quick, inexpensive way to bring large amounts of goods and people from town to town to city to city, but also brought a new kind of society - a more modem society with new ways of life, a new concept of distance, and new ways to earn a living — new professions; civil and mechanical engineering became modem engineering disciplines. The entrepreneurial spirit of inventors and innovators in civil engineering as in other professions is timeless. In the 1820's, and 1830's, Philip Thomas, Ross Winans, Peter Cooper, Wendel Bollman and Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Jr. were the Bill Gates and Larry Ellison of the 1990's, the Henry Ford and William Durant of the 1910's. Who were these nineteenth century entrepreneurs? Following are brief vignettes on a few of the more important of these engineering entrepreneurs.