Crossing the Hudson: Historic Bridges and Tunnels of the River

2. Steam and a Bridge at Troy

T he genuine importance of the bridge between Waterford and Lansingburgh notwithstanding, it’s diªcult to argue that it was a watershed event in the history of the Hudson Valley. Burr’s early and e¤ective use of the combined arch and truss (which led the editors of Engineering-News to describe the bridge in their editon of 1 June 1889 as “the greatest existing wood span in the world”) gave it a unique place in the history of civil engineering, and its role as the first bridge to cross the navigable Hudson is clearly noteworthy. But in the context of the complex, developing history of the Hudson Valley, it was a structure that did not respond to or bring about any compelling or historically important change in the region. It could probably have been built a little earlier or later, or even in a di¤erent location, without significantly a¤ecting the history of the region. The railroad bridge at Troy is another story. Thirty-one years after the Waterford-Lansingburgh Bridge was finished, a bridge between the city of Troy and the village of Green Island, just a few miles downstream from Waterford, marked a change in the course of history in the Hudson Valley. The Age of Steam had arrived, bringing with it power for industry in the valley, speed and reliability for vessels on the river, and railroad connections to the rest of the country. The bridge at Troy was the first to carry a steam railroad across the Hudson, and as such it was an agent of historical change. Not that steam power was a new idea in 1834. Scientists and other inventive people had been thinking about it for hundreds of years by then and had made some progress toward controlling and harnessing it. As early as 1698, an Englishman named Thomas Savery, building on the still fairly 17 c hap ter 2  Steam and a Bridge at Troy primitive work of several even earlier tinkerers, had been able to remove water from the depths of flooded English mines with a device that relied on the vacuum created when steam condenses. A couple of decades later, another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, refined and further developed Savery’s work to produce a single-acting, steam-driven piston engine that could pump out mines. All that groundbreaking work and still other ideas were brought together and expanded during the late 1760s, when a singularly brilliant Scot named James Watt, working on repairs to a Newcomen engine at the University of Glasgow, developed and patented a significantly more eªcient and more e¤ective steam engine of his own. When he teamed up in 1775 with Matthew Boulton, an aºuent English industrialist who had earlier worked with Benjamin Franklin on a steam engine, the seed for one of the Industrial Revolution’s most important inventions was sown. By the end of the eighteenth century, when the patent for the Watt-Boulton engines expired, more than three hundred of them were already working in the mines and mills of Great Britain and Ireland.1 America, meanwhile, where the potential for applying steam power was as promising as anywhere in the world, hadn’t yet entered the industrial age. Its foundries and small factories were becoming more productive, but there weren’t many of them, and they were for the most part still focused on turning out the simple products that a largely agrarian population wanted. Steam power certainly was not central to their operations. But a few forward-looking signs were beginning to appear in the Hudson Valley. Limitations on the ability to transport goods and people into and out of the area’s counties were increasingly seen as major barriers to growth. Serious people were starting to look for a way to improve the situation, and the more they heard about steam-powered railroads, the more interested they became. The trouble was that the center of the relevant technology was in Great Britain, and the cost of bringing such a complex new technology and its equipment across the Atlantic seemed beyond anything the Americans could a¤ord. By the end of the eighteenth century, somewhat discouraged , these entrepreneurs had pretty well accepted the idea that if the new Republic was going to move e¤ectively into its first full century, they were probably going to have to figure out a way of developing such a technology for themselves. Steam power was certainly not...