He Dug Deep

"A hurricane of frightful power”

            If you were a businessman in Manhattan in the 1860s and 1870s, you wanted William ‘Boss’ Tweed as a friend. He ran the Democratic Party’s political machine. It controlled the city. What’s more, Tweed was the Big Apple’s third-biggest landholder. Nothing happened without Tweed’s permission—at least until 1877 when he went to prison for stealing tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers.

            Even back in those days, traffic was terrible in New York City, especially Manhattan. Alfred Ely Beach had a dream—a subterranean dream—and he defied Tweed. Beach wanted to build a subway. Tweed didn't.

            Beach was no eccentric. He knew how to make an underground train system work. He had the scientific, legal, and business savvy, and the money to make it happen. What he didn’t have was Tweed in his back pocket.

            Born into a wealthy New York City family, Beach had in 1849 proposed the construction of an underground horse-powered tram system. That idea went nowhere. Around the same time, he designed and patented a typewriter for the blind. It embossed letters on paper. That notion fizzled, too.       

            He then became publisher of The New York Sun newspaper. It was the city’s first daily paper that cost only a penny. It was also the first paper to publish lurid crime stories. The result? A huge success.  

            Then a new publication called Scientific American came to his attention. Oddly, though, it published poetry and essays. Beach had big plans for it. As its co-owner, he turned into a publication about scientific progress.

            Experts on the history of American patents think Beach’s vision for the magazine caused such excitement in the scientific community that it was at least partly responsible for the vast jump in the number of patent applications during the mid-1800s—from 600 in 1846 to 20,000 in 1886.

Ambitions ran low

            But Beach’s ambitions ran low, much lower than patents and papers. His underground urgings led him to found the Beach Pneumatic Power Company. In 1867 his Scientific American proclaimed: “It is probable that a pneumatic railway of considerable length for regular traffic will soon be laid down near New-York, under the auspices of the Pneumatic Dispatch Company of New Jersey, of which Mr. Beach has lately been elected President.”

            Instead of being powered by ponies, his subway would run on air-power. A giant fan would propel underground carriages. It would push them with air, or when the fan's direction was reversed, it would suck them onward.

            Beach's problem was political, not technological. He went before New York City’s government and proposed the following: He would build not a "railway of considerable length" but a test line consisting of one stop with one car. It would run 312-feet underneath Broadway connecting Murray Street and Warren Street. (This is near the Wall Street area in the southern tip of Manhattan.)

            Unfortunately, local—and powerful—landowners felt threatened by digging near or under their properties. The millionaire John Jacob Astor came out against the project. He was one of the city's biggest landlords. Alexander T. Stewart wanted no mechanical moles burrowing anywhere near his buildings, threatening their stability. He owned the Marble Palace (otherwise known by its lower Manhattan address '280 Broadway). It was the city's first department store and had a well-heeled clientele. And, unfortunately for Beach, the swank store stood on Broadway one block north of Warren Street.

            What’s more, there were also discussions in New York City about building an ‘el’ system, a network of 'el'-evated trains. Property owners preferred that plan. And “Boss” Tweed liked it, too. He especially fancied the thought of the millions of dollars he would surreptitiously make in bribes from its construction.

            In the end, Beach could only get the city fathers to approve tunneling to build much smaller postal tubes. A system of shooting air-powered underground mail had already proven successful in London.

            He wasn’t going to give up on his dream. "I won't pay political blackmail," Beach told his brother, who was the co-publisher of The Sun. "I say, let's build this subway furtively."       

            After getting his permit, Beach quietly went back to the city. He had the permit amended so he could dig a tunnel with a greater diameter. No one noticed, and Beach had his day in the sun—or in the dark, as the case may be.

            His men dug secretly in the day using a hydraulic tunneling bore. To help keep the project hush-hush, the resulting great heaps of dirt were brought to the surface and hauled away by teams of horse-drawn wagons only at night. Beach went to such lengths that the wagons had muffled wheels.

            When the mayor wanted to visit this stygian construction site, Beach refused to let him descend. After all, Beach was footing the bill. It's estimated he sunk somewhere between $70,000 and $350,000 of his own funds into the project ($1.2 million to $6.1 million in today's money).

            In February 1870 Beach opened his subway to wonderful acclaim. First, passengers entered through air-tight doors in Devlin's, a men's clothing store. Then they descended into a 112-foot-long waiting room. The New York Times reported that instead of a “dismal, cavernous retreat,” travelers found a “light, airy tunnel” complete with an “elegant reception room.”

            Here passengers waited in style amid Greek-style statues. Gas lamps burning in chandeliers kept the hall brightly lit. Those waiting enjoyed gazing at frescoes and at goldfish swimming in a fountain. There was even a baby grand piano.

            Adjacent to the hall was the Great Aeolor. This steam-powered air pump got its name from Aeolus, the god the ancient Greeks believed controlled the winds. But most people called the grand gizmo The Western Tornado.

Its enormous throat

            Wrote one passenger: "As we went in, we felt a gentle breeze; but after we arrived at the mouth of the great blower, and while we were gazing in wonder at the motions of the gigantic blowing-wings, the engineer put on more steam and increased the speed, so that the blast instantly became a hurricane of frightful power.

            "Hats, bonnets, shawls, handkerchiefs, and every loose thing, were snatched away from our hands and swept into the tunnel; while all of us, unable to stand against the tornado, hastily retreated from the machine to a corner of the air-box, where we were slightly sheltered. At this juncture the speed of the Aeolor was reduced, the storm was over, and only a gentle summer’s breeze issued from its enormous throat.”

            The train did indeed have one car which held 22 passengers. It ran 312 feet in a tunnel that was nine feet in diameter. It went 10 miles per hour. The fare was 25 cents. All proceeds benefited a home for orphaned children of men who fought for the Union Army in the Civil war.

            The Times raved that Beach's conveyance was "the most novel, if not the most successful, enterprise that New York has seen in many a day.” The public agreed. Beach sold 400,000 tickets.

            He wanted to dramatically extend his subway. "We propose to operate a subway all the way to Central Park, about five miles in all," said Beach. "When it's finished we should be able to carry 20,000 passengers a day at speeds up to a mile a minute."

            That, however, was not to be. Tweed was furious and shut him down after a year. Nonetheless, Beach fought back. Bills supporting an expanded subway line passed in the state legislature in 1871 and 1872, but the governor, who was conveniently in Tweed's employ, vetoed them, saying the project lacked adequate state and city supervision.

            Finally, in 1873 when it looked like Beach would get political approval and financial backing, the U.S. fell into a severe depression, and his financial backers had to withdraw their proposed funding.

            For a time, Beach rented out his underground world as a rifle range and then as a wine cellar. Ultimately, those ventures failed, and when Devlin's burned to the ground, the entrances to the subway were sealed and not opened again until 1912 when the city built the BMT subway line. His subway car was donated to Cornell. Its whereabouts are now unknown.

MORAL: Get down if you want

get up in the world.

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Get on the Beat

"There is a measure of justice."

            In 1879, surprising as it may seem, doctors had yet to fully understand how the heart worked as a pump. In that year three French physiologists conducted what was then a most peculiar experiment. They threaded a catheter into a horse's jugular vein and then into the animal's heart. Once there, they inflated the balloon's tip. Why? To see if the animal's ventricle was actively contracting. It was. They published the result of this experiment in their book Lecons de Physiogie Operatoire.

            It so happened that 50 years later a German surgical resident Werner Forssmann, 25, found a dusty copy of the book in his cupboard. He became obsessed with the description of the experiment and its accompanying pictures. He tore the drawings out of the book and carried them everywhere.

            At this time there no such thing as open-heart surgery. Doctors regarded the heart as a type of sacred chamber, one so fragile that they rarely, if ever, performed experiments on it, much less procedures.

            Forssmann was not like his peers. He likely asked himself, "What could doctors do if they could see inside a beating heart? Could you insert a catheter into a heart, inject dye, and then X-ray the organ—all without harming a patient? In what unimaginable ways might patients' lives be saved?"

Only on rabbits

            He asked a senior physician, a Dr. Schneider, if he could explore this notion. Yes, he was told, but you may only experiment on rabbits. When he asked his supervisor if he could perform this experiment on humans, namely himself, his boss replied, "Drop this suicidal idea. What could I tell your mother if one day we should find you dead?" After all, such catheters might become tangled in patients' hearts and kill them.

            Undeterred, Forssmann practiced on cadavers and then enlisted (or perhaps seduced) an accomplice, an operating room nurse named Gerda Ditzen. "[I] prowl[ed] around her like a sweet-toothed cat around the cream jug," he later wrote. He told her that he would perform the procedure on her and that it would be absolutely harmless.

            Whether Ditzen was seduced by the notion of furthering science or otherwise seduced, she agreed, and the two of them went to a procedure room. Once there, she obtained the necessary equipment, especially a uretheral catheter. (Of course, at that time cardiac catheterization equipment had yet to be invented.)

             Forssmann then strapped her arms and legs to the exam table. This is not nearly as lurid as it sounds. Forssmann needed her help because only she had the keys to unlock the surgical supplies he needed. As a lowly resident, he wasn't trusted with such access.

            He pretended to ready her for the experiment. Once she was unable to stop him, he numbed his arm and inserted the tubing deep into his body—but not quite into his heart. Indeed, once she realized what was going on, she yelled for him to stop.

            Now Forssmann had another problem. In his enthusiasm to perform the experiment, he realized they were in a room that had no X-ray machine. Thus, there would be no proof he had catheterized himself. So, the two of them walked down to the hospital's basement with the tube stuck near his heart.

            Once there, one of Forssmann's colleagues tried to rip out the catheter. Instead, Forssmann overcame him. He pushed the catheter into his heart, and X-rays were taken.

            At first, Dr. Schneider was furious. But then he relented and took the young doctor out to celebrate at a "low-ceiling wine tavern" where waiters were impeccably attired.

            Forssmann published the results of this and follow-up experiments. The resulting publicity got him fired from a new job as a surgeon in a different hospital. The chief of surgery resented his showboating.

            And that ended Forssmann's career as a surgeon. "The time was not yet ripe for this discovery," he wrote, and in the early 1930s Forssmann became a urologist.

"A more critical distance"

            He also joined the Nazi Physicians League. While working in a Berlin prison in 1943, he tried but failed to convince the warden to allow him to sedate political prisoners before they were executed.

            Perhaps more chilling, in 1937 Forssmann met Karl Gebhardt, the personal doctor of SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Along with Hitler, Himmler masterminded the Holocaust. Gebhardt was convicted of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials and executed. Gebhardt knew of Forssmann's cardiac research. He offered to supply with him with subjects for human experimentation. Forssmann refused.

            According to Forssmann's personal correspondence during the war (and with Jewish colleagues in the 1960s), while he was infatuated with Nazism in the early 1930s, he "developed a more critical distance to Nazi ideology," according to a paper in Urologia Internationalis.

            Forssmann "will be remembered as the man who saved many innocent victims from the Nazis," according to a review of his autobiography in the British Medical Journal.

            After being captured and put in a POW camp, Forssman became a lumberjack and then a country doctor.

            On October 11, 1956, while having a drink a pub, his wife called to tell him to rush home. Someone with a foreign accent had called. He continued drinking and arrived home late at night. Someone else called. He refused to take the phone.

            The next day he performed two operations. He heard that two Americans had received the Nobel Prize for their work in the field of cardiac catheterization. Accounts vary, but Forssmann felt either crestfallen or numb. All his life his work had been ignored.

            Then the head of the hospital burst into the operating room. There was good news—He, too, had won a Nobel Prize.

            "I feel like a village parson who has just learned that he has been made bishop," Forssmann said. "It seems that sometimes there is a measure of justice in our world."

MORAL: Get to the heart of the matter.

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An August Decision

"I have never done wrong."

            The Nazis claimed that their infamous straight-arm salute had its origins in ancient Rome, but as with so much else about Nazi Germany, that was a lie. Historians believe that Italian fascists first used it in the early 1920s to honor their dictator Benito Mussolini. German fascists admired the salute's militant posture and adopted it.

            "It must be regarded as a survival of an ancient custom, which originally signified, "See, I have no weapon in my hand," said Hitler.

            On June 13, 1936, Hitler visited the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg to witness the christening of the warship Horst Wessel. By a strange twist of history, a photograph taken on that day went relatively unnoticed until it appeared in a Japanese blog in 2011 that was dedicated to boosting relief efforts for the recovery from that country's recent earthquake and tsunami.

            The black-and-white photo shows more than 100 men tightly packed together, their arms outstretched in the Nazi salute, undoubtedly chanting "Heil Hitler" (Hail, Hitler!) or "Sieg Heil" (Hail, victory!)

An Odd Expression

            While there are a few men in the photo whose arms are not raised, one man stands out. His arms are crossed with seeming defiance. He has an odd expression, almost a grimace. Tellingly, other men seem not to want to stand beside him.

            His name was August Landmesser, and he was a shipyard worker. He had joined the Nazi Party five years earlier hoping it would help him land good work which it apparently did.

            In 1935, however, when he became engaged to Irma Eckler, the party expelled him. Why? She was Jewish. They were to be married in September of that year, but before they could exchange vows, the Nazis passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws which forbid Jews and non-Jews to marry. (It also made legal other severe forms of discrimination against Jews.) Their first daughter Ingrid was born the next month.

            In 1937 they lovers tried to flee to Denmark but were arrested at the border. When Eckler became pregnant again, the Nazi arrested Landmesser, accusing him of violating the Nuremberg Laws. He was tried and found guilty.

            In a small gesture of leniency, the court accepted his assertion that he thought Irma was only part Jewish, and he was not jailed. When she was a child, she had been baptized as a Protestant when her mother remarried. As a parting gesture, the court warned him that if he continued on the same path, he would be imprisoned.

Racial Infamy

            Two months later he was seized again. He begged the court for leniency writing it, "My fiancee is expecting our second child any time now. Now I would like to marry her before this occurs and not leave her alone with the two children. I also ask that it be taken into consideration that I have never done wrong and that in this case the crime was committed thoughtlessly and, as it were, in a state of mental confusion, first due to the constant questions of acquaintances about how I' m going to manage and pay for everything once the second child arrives."

            He found guilty and sent to Borgermoor concentration camp where he served two-and-a-half years of a three-and-a-half year sentence for dishonoring the Aryan race—racial infamy ("Rassenschande").

            A newspaper account of the trial read: "In passing sentence, the Court maintained that if the purity of the Gennan race is to be successfully maintained, then such violations of the Race Protection Law (Rassenschutzgesetze) must be severely punished; that applies to Aryans as much as Jews. However, in this case the Court did not totally ignore the human aspect of the case. The Court was concerned not so much with the relationship of the accused with the woman involved, who is hardly a very worthy character, but rather his relationship with his children, for which the Court has every sympathy. However, the situation was aggravated by the defendant resuming the forbidden relationship and thus acknowledging neither restraint nor repentance. This was also the reason for the Court's decision to impose a sentence of penal servitude."

            Landmesser never saw his wife again.

            Meanwhile, the Gestapo arrested Eckler and sent her to prison where she gave birth to her second daughter Irene. From there, she was sent to a series of concentration camps, finally ending up at Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp, before being taken to the Bernburg Euthanasia Center where it is believed she was murdered in February 1942. (The Nazis used this facility to kill mentally ill, sick, elderly, and disabled people as a part of its racial cleansing program. A total of 9,384 innocents were killed there in a gas chamber that used carbon monoxide.)

            Freed from prison in early 1941, Landmusser worked as a laborer until being drafted in 1944 into a battalion composed only of former prisoners. Strapped for manpower and possessed with limitless cruelty, the Nazis used such battalions for dangerous missions, such as minefield clearing, where large numbers of casualties were expected. He survived until October of that year and died in combat in Croatia.

            Ingrid and Irene had been sent to an orphanage prior to their parents' deaths. The Nazis allowed Ingrid to live with her Aryan grandmother, and she did so until 1953.

            A family friend took Irene to relative safety across the border into occupied Austria. When she returned to Germany during the war, she was put in a hospital, which was told that her identity papers had been lost. Later both children were placed with foster parents. In 1958, Irene published her family's memoirs which mostly consisted of reprints of Nazi documents which lay out the course of events that befell her family.

MORAL: Never forget.

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