London - Edward Rutherfurd [545]
He had, however, as all his partners would admit, one of the finest engineering brains in London. And it was undoubtedly for this reason that he had recently been put on retainer by the rich American gentleman whose presence a week before Christmas in her house had caused Esther Silversleeves to go all of a flutter.
If Arnold Silversleeves had dreamed of projects for the betterment of mankind, or at least the Londoners, it gave him some satisfaction that many of them had come to pass. When, in the late fifties, Parliament finally decided on a complete remaking of the London sewers, it did not award the work to his own firm, but to the great engineer Bazalgette. Characteristically, he had at once offered his own drawings of the existing system to the great man, who used them as a check upon his own. “Your plans,” he generously told Silversleeves, “I found to be perfect in every particular.” The resulting Thames Embankment, which now swept along on reclaimed riverside over the new main drains from Westminster to Blackfriars gave the worthy engineer almost as much pleasure as if he had profited from it himself. More directly, he had actually been called in as a consultant on another colossal engineering feat now arising in the Thames. The two huge towers of Tower Bridge were clad in stone and modelled in high Victorian Gothic style to blend with the Tower of London and echo the Houses of Parliament downstream. “But the stone casing is just a disguise,” he told his wife gleefully. “Inside is a great framework and a huge machine all of steel.” It was the great bascules – the massive pair of steel drawbridges that opened to let the tall ships through – for which he had acted as consultant to the engineer Barry; and Brunel, Barry’s partner, had called him in again to check all the complex mathematics of the system that would support and pivot the two mighty hundred-foot spans. His greatest enthusiasm, however, was reserved for the new project for which the American had retained him.
“This will be the way of the future,” he told Esther excitedly. The dream he had always had of a London underground had partly been realized. A system of deep cuts and of tunnels with air vents had already been constructed for steam trains; but it was hot and sooty and without clearing or undermining much housing, it could not be expanded into the more elaborate system London now needed. “But if we went deep down, maybe forty feet, we could safely build a whole network,” he would explain. “The clay down there is easy to cut through. Then we build a tube. The train would run in a tube.” But it would be utterly impossible to run a steam train through a deep tube. “So,” he concluded happily, “the trains will be electric.”
Electricity. To forward-looking Arnold Silversleeves, it was the herald of the modern age. It had been 1860 when Swan invented his electric lamp, but not until ten years ago had the first system of electric lights been installed in London, on the splendid new Thames Embankment. But since then, progress had been rapid. In 1884, the first electrically powered trams began to replace a horse-drawn version in the streets. Five years ago Parsons perfected a steam-turbine to drive a dynamo, opening the way for public power stations. And this very year, work was already under way on a deep tube which would contain an electric train. Silversleeves, who had already built his own dynamo and installed – to Esther’s terror – several electric lights in their house, was all enthusiasm. “The electric train will be clean,” he assured her. “And I calculate that, correctly engineered, it could be amazingly cheap to run. The working man will be able to afford the fares.”
The only problem was finding men bold enough to build and operate them. Governments did not invest in such things, nor had they the money to do so. The tube, like almost everything in Victorian Britain, would be a commercial enterprise, and British investors, so far, were cautious about the new technology. But the Americans were not. And when