Horatio Allen

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Horatio Allen, between circa 1860 and circa 1865, photograph by Mathew B. Brady

Horatio Allen (born May 10, 1802 in Schenectady , New York , † December 31, 1889 in South Orange , New Jersey ) was an American railroad engineer and inventor and from 1843 to 1844 President of the Erie Railroad .

Life path

Allen was born in Schenectady, New York; his father, Dr. Benjamin Allen, was Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Union College in Schenectady. Horatio Allen graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1823 and after a year at the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Company was appointed Assistant Engineer of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company (the predecessor of the Delaware and Hudson Company) Railway ) appointed. Here he met John B. Jervis. In 1827 he left the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company and went to England to study the emerging railway technology, especially locomotives. He met the British railroad engineer George Stephenson (1881-1848) know. In Great Britain, Allen commissioned the construction of four steam locomotives for the planned railway line of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, three for Foster, Rastrick and Company and one for Robert Stephenson and Company.

On August 8, 1829, Allen took a test drive in Honesdale , Pennsylvania, on one of these first steam locomotives used in the USA, namely the " Stourbridge Lion " from Foster, Rastrick and Company. The locomotive worked, but destroyed the tracks it traveled on. The tracks, which were designed for four-ton vehicles, were not up to the 7.5-ton locomotive, which is why it was no longer used after another test drive on September 9, 1829.

From 1829 to 1834 Horatio Allen was chief engineer of the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company in Charleston (South Carolina) , which - at about 218 km - was the longest railway line in the world at the time. The "Charleston and Hamburg line" connected the Atlantic coast of South Carolina with its hinterland and ended at the Savannah River , the border river to the US state of Georgia . Allen succeeded in having the trains on this line pulled by one of the first steam locomotives built in the USA instead of horses. This steam locomotive, the " Best Friend of Charleston ", pulled the first scheduled passenger train in America on December 25, 1830. It was developed and built under Allen's direction by the West Point Foundry in New York City and is considered to be the first locomotive made for sale in the USA. Allen stayed in Charleston until 1835; then he and his wife Mary M. Simons traveled abroad for three years. Upon their return, they moved to New York City.

Allen invented the bogie for railroad cars ("swiveling truck"). The determination of the railroad track width of five feet (about 1.524 meters) is said to go back to Allen, but ultimately this did not prevail. As a rule, the railroad companies in the north of the USA used the English gauge of four feet and 8.5 inches (about 1,435 meters), while in the south of the USA the five-foot gauge initially prevailed by Allen. If railway lines of different gauges met, either the freight had to be reloaded or the wagons had to be re-tracked in a time-consuming and costly process. Until about the mid-1860s, however, this was not a major problem, as the rail traffic flows between the northern and southern states of the USA were still quite low until after the end of the Civil War in 1865. After the civil war, however, with increasing industrialization and the end of the slave economy in the south, the different gauges increasingly proved to be an obstacle to the movement of people and goods. The gauges were initially standardized to four feet and nine inches (about 1.448 meters) from the beginning of 1886. Less than a decade later, many of the railroad companies in the southern United States consolidated under the name " Southern Railway " (SOU), and the Southern Railway eventually switched to the English gauge of four feet and 8.5 inches (1,435 meters) .

Allen was senior assistant engineer on the Croton Aqueduct , New York City's main water supply system , from 1838 to 1842 .

From 1842 until his retirement in 1970, Allen was chairman of the "New York Novelty Iron Works", a major mechanical engineering factory that constructed ship steam engines, among other things. Among other things, she supplied the steam engines for the Artic , which won the Blue Ribbon in February 1852 , the award for the fastest passenger ship on the transatlantic route between Europe and New York, and which sank on September 27, 1854 after a ship collision. Horatio Allen's brother George F. Allen survived the sinking of the Artic , but his wife, their young son and several other relatives were killed.

Horatio Allen was involved as the executive engineer in the construction of the New York Crystal Palace , which opened on July 14, 1853 .

Allen was also temporarily chief engineer and - from 1843 to 1844 - President of the Erie Railway Company, also a consulting engineer for the Panama Railway and for the Brooklyn Bridge and 1872/1873 President of the American Society of Civil Engineers . In the later years of his life, Allen also devoted himself to astronomy. For this he wrote a textbook and constructed several instruments. He died on December 31, 1889 at the age of 87 and was buried in Rosedale Cemetery in Orange, Essex County , New Jersey.

Literature by Horatio Allen

  • "Diary of Horatio Allen 1828 (England)", in: Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, Volume 89, November 1953, pp. 97-138
  • "Astronomy in its general facts and relations, taught by aid of mechanical presentation and illustration": Parts I, II, and III, Printed by Edward O. Jenkins, New York 1882
  • "Sun, Planet and Star Instrument Description and Directions for Use," 1883
  • “The Railroad Era; First Five Years of its Development "(" The era of the railroad; the first five years of its development "), 1884, https://archive.org/details/24TheBirthAndFirstMaturityOfIndustrialAmericaPart4_201905/page/n103/mode/2up  ; accessed on February 28, 2020
  • "Arithmetic", 1884

Honors

D&H high-pressure steam locomotive "Horatio Allen" from 1924

The “ Delaware and Hudson Railway ” (D&H) named their first experimental high-pressure steam locomotive No. 1400 , built in 1924, after Horatio Allen.

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Moritz Förster: Missing Link: From the management of a mammoth project that worked and was therefore forgotten. In: Heise Online News. February 23, 2020, accessed February 28, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Allen, Horatio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American railroad engineer
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1802
PLACE OF BIRTH Schenectady , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1889
Place of death South Orange , New Jersey