When Victorian Transportation Lost the Plot
Ambition, Steam and Absolutely No Brakes
DISCLAIMER: This article is in reference to the time period of the Victorian era and not specific to any one country/region
When most people think of Victorian modes of transportation, they picture the Penny Farthing—an absurdly tall bike with a cartoonishly oversized front wheel. And honestly, fair enough, the Penny Farthing became a staple in modern media for its caricatured nature, danger and impracticality in modern standards. And yet, I would argue the Victorian era (1837-1901) had much more to show for its absurd ideas about transportation. This was an age drunk on possibility, when engineers believed sheer audacity could solve any problem—including reinventing the wheel of transportation. Forget the Penny Farthing, we’re going deeper. Here are 3 means of transportation that did not make the cut.
The Pneumatic Subway
Built by Alfred Ely Beach, the pneumatic subway was first invented in 1868 and made its first public debut in 1870 as a one-car shuttle subway. Except, as you can imagine, this was no normal means of transportation. Instead of using electric motors like modern subway cars do, the pneumatic subway was devised to use compressed air to propel cars throughout the system, similar to that of drive-up banking tubes. The tunnels were intentionally smaller (9-foot-wide) to tightly fit around the passing cars to create a sealed tunnel. Then, using a massive fan, the cars would be propelled either by pushing air into the system or drawing it in.
Beach would make a public display of the technology at the American Institute Exhibition in New York in 1867, which featured a wooden tube approximately 6 feet in diameter and 100 feet in length, with a massive fan to propel a 10-person car back and forth. After proving the concept was feasible, Beach would create the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company and begin construction of this design beneath Broadway under the guise of building postal tubes, as one of the top politicians of New York City at the time refused to approve the project. Once complete, the system would open to the public in 1870, less as a means of transportation and more as an attraction since the subway ran to a dead end and back to show the progress of construction. Even though the subway gained substantial public approval during its early beginnings—accumulating in over 400,000 rides in one year of its operation—diminishing support and the stock market crash of 1873 would result in the cessation of construction and the closure of the project.
As you can imagine, this subway system was not efficient. Pushing and pulling heavy train cars through a sealed tunnel is a mechanically strenuous activity that could only really propel objects short distances before becoming impossible. Additionally, while there were attempts to scale up pneumatic trains, they were quickly made obsolete by electric-based systems, which would later become the modern version of subway transportation widely used today.
The Monowheel
A Monowheel, also known as a Uniwheel, is a vehicle designed with one hollow wheel that loops around the driver. Although the original inventor is a bit of a throw up, as it has evolved through many iterations, we can attribute the first proper design to that of Richard C. Hemming in 1869 for his hand-cranked model of the Monowheel dubbed the “Flying Yankee Velocipede.” Hemming’s design would appear in Connecticut shortly after the work of Rousseau of Marseilles, a French engineer who created a similar design.
Now, you most likely have seen one of these before at a parade or some kind of motor vehicle show, but unlike modern times, the inventors of the 19th and 20th century truly believed this was the next big piece of transportation. They envisioned it as a compact, streamlined and highly efficient alternative to traditional motor vehicles, thus receiving great levels of attention in the 20th century trying to optimize its design. This included the addition of motor-power in 1904 and the patented Dynasphere in 1930 which aimed to solve the inventions' stability problems.
However, the Monowheel just had too many problems. Any device in which the rider is enclosed in this manner is renowned for poor visibility, stability and braking. In fact, the braking on this device was so notorious that it was referred to as “gerbiling,” (not to be confused with the Urban Dictionary meaning) which occurred when the driver broke too quickly and resulted in the flipping of the passenger upside-down in the spinning ring—similar to that of a pet gerbil in its running wheel. Luckily, unlike the other two devices in this article, the Monowheel narrowly survived history and is instead used as a pseudo-carnival attraction to this day.
The Steam Man
In 1868, Zadoc Pratt Dedrick and fellow mechanist Isaac Grass created a steam-powered humanoid robot designed to pull a cart. The robot took 6 years to build and received the name Daniel—named after one of the workers Dedrick hired to help build him—and was patented on March 24th, 1868. The original prototype was 7′ 9″ tall and weighed approximately 500 pounds, costing $3,000 dollars to build. In order to prevent the invention from scaring horses drawing other carriages or wagons, the design for it to be humanistic and clothed became an apparent feature, as well as a potentially racialized allusion to enslaved labor.
When considering anecdotes noting Daniel’s function, it is hard to determine whether or not the robot actually worked. From many historical accounts, it seems that at every public display Dedrick and Grass presented it at, there was always some limiting factor that prevented them from completing the display. This makes you wonder if these so-called limiting factors were petty excuses or actually truthful issues. But, in one personal anecdote from a man named Mr. Hunt in an article in 1931, he supposedly recalls seeing the steam man when he was a youth and remembers the collective excitement for its success. However, it is believed he may have been confusing Daniel’s functionality for the arrival of a steam carriage.
Unfortunately, Daniel the Steam Man was not a success, and when you consider the systematic issues its design potentially complemented, it is probably best that it was left behind. However, it is interesting to note that this invention is largely credited with being the first conceptualization of robots in America and acted as a key inspiration for the futuristic steampunk genre.
The Penny Farthing at least got to be a cultural icon. These three never got that far. They were dreamed up in an era when the rules had yet to be written, where a group of men could spend 6 years building a steam powered robot and genuinely believe they were revolutionizing travel. Most of them were wrong of course, but that is the natural trajectory of science—one device gives way to another, thus generating competition and resulting in technological progression. Every absurd invention is, at its core, a purposeful question someone asks, hopeful for the ability to contribute to societal progression. The Victorian Age asked a lot of them, most of which would go unanswered. But that does not mean we would be better off without them.
Did you Know?
Daniel inspired one of the first science fiction novels featuring a robot — Edward Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), published the same year Daniel was patented. The book predates Asimov's robot stories by over 70 years making a bumbling, possibly-never-worked steam contraption, one of the founding fathers of robot fiction.
The Dynasphere, as mentioned previously, was presented at the Brooklands motor racing circuit in 1932 and had the whole thing filmed for a newsreel. The vehicle, first being hyped up to be the future of transportation, then proceeded to wobble around the track, impossible to steer, serving as a failure to materialize the future.
Beach's secret tunnel sat completely forgotten and sealed beneath Broadway for over 28 years. It was only rediscovered in 1912 when workers digging a new subway line broke through a wall and found it.
Indeed, these kinds of extravagant and often impractical engineering feats reflect the broader mindset of the Gilded Age. In that era, ambition often outweighed practicality, and audacious displays of technological prowess were seen as symbols of progress and status. Just as Victorian inventors experimented with whimsical transportation designs, the Gilded Age celebrated grandiose projects, from opulent mansions to monumental public works, all underscoring a belief that bolder, bigger, and more ostentatious was inherently better. This appetite for spectacle over utility perfectly ties these whimsical machines to the cultural and industrial exuberance of the period.
The penny-farthing did succeed in becoming an icon. When people think of early bikes they inevitably assume this was the norm. I've seen lots of street photos from that era. There were modern-looking bikes doing messenger or delivery work, but no penny-farthings.