Sparks Fly
[Home] [PBS VideoDatabase] [Social Studies] [TSU] [UVA]

The Gilded Age

• Railroads

  • Central Pacific Railroad
    http://cprr.org/Museum/index.html
    "A light car, drawn by a single horse, gallops up to the front with its load of rails.  Two men seize the end of a rail and start forward, the rest of the gang taking hold by twos, until it is clear of the car.  They come forward at a run.  At the word of command the rail is dropped in its place, right side up with care, while the same process goes on at the other side of the car.  Less than thirty seconds to a rail for each gang, and so four rails go down to the minute ... close behind the first gang come the gaugers, spikers, and bolters, and a lively time they make of it.  It is a grand 'anvil chorus' ... It is played in triple time, 3 strokes to the spike.  There are 10 spikes to a rail, 400 rails to a mile, 1,800 miles to San Francisco — 21,000,000 times those sledges to be swung: 21,000,000 times are they to come down with their sharp punctuation before the great work of modern America is complete."

  • Time
    http://www.sptimes.com/Travel97/10198/To_Every_Times__There.html
    What with the extremely small numbers of that era's circumnavigators, the lack of a time zone system was hardly a matter for public concern. Only with the onset of the Industrial Revolution -- and the dramatic growth of railroads, which had to forecast arrivals and departures -- did the need for time zones become apparent. (As late as 1839, however, one English railway company refused to make public its new, single-time-zone timetables, complaining that such action "would tend to make punctuality a sort of obligation.") 

  • Early Railroads
    http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/transport/railroad.html
    Railways were in use in the United States early in its history. Cars and carriages to transport goods and people were pulled by horses along tracks or sent down hills--and then pulled up again--from the 1810's. 

  • History of Railroads and Maps
    http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/rrhtml/rrintro.html
    Surveying and mapping activities flourished in the United States as people began moving inland over the inadequately mapped continent. The settlement of the frontier, the development of agriculture, and the exploitation of natural resources generated a demand for new ways to move people and goods from one place to another. Privately owned toll or turnpike roads were followed first by steamships on the navigable rivers and by the construction of canals and then in the 1830s by the introduction of railroads for steam-powered trains.

  • The West
    http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/wpages/wpgs400/w4stanfd.htm
    In a conversation with us several years ago, the Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday remarked that the American West "is a place that has to be seen to be believed, and it may have to be believed in order to be seen." For five years we have travelled that landscape, photographed its vistas, talked to its people, sought out its history, all as part of our production of THE WEST, an eight-part documentary series for public television.

  • Pullman Car:  The History
    http://www.wimall.com/pullportermu/history.html
    A white-jacketed waiter balances a loaded silver platter as a speeding railroad diner pitches to and fro over seemingly endless miles of steel rail. In the kitchen, a black chef stoops over a blistering hot iron stove as he places a fresh turkey into the oven for dinner. And back in first class, the ubiquitous Pullman porter flashes a broad smile as he settles a passenger into her room.

  • Transcontinental Cover Up
    http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/HISTspike.html
    You've heard the story. You've even seen photos that "prove" it. It's pounded into the head of every American schoolkid over the age of five. The U.S. transcontinental railroad was completed when a golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit, UT, linking East and West on May 10, 1869. It's a lie.

  • Andrew Carnegie
    http://www.cmu.edu/home/about/about_history.html
    http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/exhibit.html
    http://www.carnegie.org/
    http://www.carnegiehall.org/
    http://www.cmu.edu/home/about/about_history.html
    http://www.carnegiemuseum.co.uk/index.html
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/

  • J.P. Morgan
    http://library.thinkquest.org/18626/SDream.html
    http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/titanic.html
    http://www.americanheritage.com/98/jul/012.htm
    http://www.jpmorgan.com/CorpInfo/History/overview.html
    http://www.morganlibrary.org/index.html