Amisha Padnani

But when he returned, Granville T. Woods found that his drawings — a design for a novel invention that held the potential to revolutionize transportation around the world — were gone.

Woods had a pretty good idea where they were, and confronted his business partner. They came to blows, and his partner’s son joined the fray, leaping on Woods’ back and choking him.

That dramatic moment, later outlined in a court case, encapsulated how desperately Woods, the most prolific black inventor of his day, fought for recognition for his projects.

Woods is best known for working with electricity in the late 1800s. He is credited by some as having invented the third rail, or at least making significant improvements to it, allowing subways to operate. He also invented safety and communication mechanisms for rail systems.

It was the dawn of the electrical age, and Woods was elbowing greats like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and George Westinghouse, garnering headlines in newspapers across the country and even earning the nickname “Black Edison.”

Woods spoke eloquently and dressed elegantly, often in all black. He would tell people he was born in Australia, a fact many biographers now believe he fabricated to garner respect and dissociate himself from slavery in the United States.

“People would stand back in awe: ‘Who is this guy?'” said David L. Head, a former New York City bus driver who researched Woods’ life for years and wrote “Granville T. Woods: African American Communication and Transportation Pioneer” (2013).

“Back then most black people couldn’t read or write, let alone explain something as dangerous as electricity,” he said.

But the recognition came at a hefty price. Woods spent all his money on legal battles to gain credit for his inventions and barely had enough to survive. He became temperamental and conniving, and abusive toward his wife. When he died, he was destitute and all but forgotten.

“Woods’s life — at times closer to a nightmare than the American dream — clearly illustrates the harsh realities of being a black inventor at the end of the 19th century,” Rayvon Fouché wrote in “Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer and Shelby J. Davidson” (2003).

Woods’ big breakthrough, in the 1880s, was a communication system for railway workers that he referred to as the induction telegraph. Conductors had a very poor way of communicating with rail stations, so if two trains were heading to the same place at the same time, a collision was all but certain. Woods’ invention suspended a coil beneath the train so that as it moved along the rails, a magnetic field would be created around it, allowing messages to be sent uninterrupted.

But before he could file for a patent, he contracted smallpox and was bedridden for months. In that time, another inventor named Lucius Phelps beat him to the punch. Woods was shocked when he saw an article in Scientific American crediting Phelps for a version of the communications system he had been working on for years. He quickly finished his design and applied for a patent, setting off an investigation to determine who started developing the technology first.

Woods was able to show notes, sketches and a working model of the invention, and he secured the patent in 1887.

Woods became embroiled in patent interference cases for more than a dozen of the 45 patents he obtained in the United States, according to Fouché's book. He would often have to supplement his inventing career with side jobs for which he was usually paid a pittance. At one point he gave his landlady part ownership in his company in exchange for room and board.

“In the most basic sense, Woods’s day-to-day activities can best be described as surviving and even hustling,” Fouché wrote.

Woods married in 1890, but his wife filed for divorce a year later.

“He didn’t have money to provide,” said Head, the researcher. “He had a temper and would physically and verbally abuse his wife. She wanted his time, his attention. She wasn’t getting that.”

His most ardent fight was against James S. Zerbe, his business partner at American Engineering Co., which the two started in 1891. It was Zerbe whom Woods accused of stealing his plans.

Woods was hoping to improve the way electricity powered trains, and was especially drawn to the idea of the third rail, which powers trains from underneath rather than from wires overhead.

Some version of this had already been in place, but only for light rail above ground, Head said. Before Woods, no one had figured out a way for it to be powerful enough to propel trains underground, he said.

Woods and Zerbe would eventually go to court over ownership of the invention. Though Woods won, Zerbe had already patented the design in Europe. It was valued at $1 million.

Woods continued inventing and found moderate success selling his work to General Electric and Westinghouse. One of his later inventions for Westinghouse was an automatic air brake, an early version of a dead man’s switch, which slows or stops a train to prevent impact if a conductor is incapacitated. In 1896 Woods made enough money to buy a farm in Rockland County, New York.

In 2004, thanks to Head’s promotion of Woods’ work, New York City issued 4 million commemorative MetroCards about Woods and an exhibit about him was put on display at the Brooklyn Public Library.

“His modifications made the subways in New York City possible,” Head said.

Records are scant, but researchers believe that Granville Taylor Woods (sometimes spelled Tailer) was born on April 23, 1856, in Ohio. His mother was a washerwoman and his father was a sawyer.

As a boy, he was transfixed by the coal-powered locomotives chugging through the prairie. When he was about 10, he got a job at a railroad shop to help support his family and learned about metal making and mechanical engineering. Later, he worked for a railroad company pitching coal into the furnaces of train engines before he was promoted to engineer.

He died on Jan. 30, 1910, at 53, of a cerebral hemorrhage, a complication of smallpox. His burial at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, New York, was unceremonious.

“He was thrown in a coffin with two infants and an adult,” a historian was quoted as saying in The New York Times in 1975.

That year, a group of students took a trip to the cemetery, where a 10-year-old girl read a tribute to the inventor while workers hoisted a headstone in place.

“At long last,” the article said, “Grave 144, Range 3, Plot 5 had a gravestone.”

The name of the school attended by the students, in Brooklyn, is the Granville T. Woods School.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/obituaries/granville-t-woods-inventor-known-as-black-edison.html" id="c3cfe7be-0986-3b4f-a3e3-c75cd2b7d68a">The New York Times</a>.

Granville T. Woods, Inventor Known as 'Black Edison'

He carefully sealed the drawings in a mailing tube and quietly placed them out of sight from his business partner, then went to a meeting.

<h1>“The idea of a subway to Staten Island really goes way back,” said Stan Fischler, a subway historian. “Way, way back.”</h1>

The plan, first proposed in 1890, was approved. Maps were drawn up. Groundbreaking ceremonies were held. Construction began.

What followed were dozens of missed opportunities that could have prevented the fastest-growing borough in recent decades from becoming the most isolated.

Even today, skepticism is high that the MTA will ever consider adding a Staten Island subway to its list of capital projects, especially amid the recent tug-of-war over L train repairs, in which the plan to shut the line down for 15 months was suddenly, and very questionably, scrapped.

James Oddo, the borough president, said in an email that the Staten Island subway had “no chance of happening.”

“I choose to continue focusing my attentions and energies on more realistic projects,” he added.

Building a tunnel under 5 miles of waterway in a crowded city is an arduous and costly endeavor, but it would offer immense relief.

About a third of the borough’s 476,000 residents take mass transit to work, most of them relying on the Staten Island Ferry for part of the trip. Of those, about 40 percent spend at least an hour commuting each way to work, a larger proportion than in any other county in the country, according to 2017 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“You would think somebody would wake up in the morning and say, ‘We could do better,'” said Jonathan Peters, a research fellow at the University Transportation Research Center at City College of New York. “This is not an unsolvable problem.”

For Peters, the unfinished project is more than research — it’s also personal. His great-grandmother chose to raise her family on Staten Island, relocating from the Bronx in the 1920s because she heard there would be a subway. Every day she slogged to her job in Manhattan’s garment district, telling herself a better commute was on the horizon.

“My family has been disappointed now for 97 years waiting for the subway,” he said.

To be sure, Staten Island does have a train. The mostly elevated Staten Island Railway runs along the east side of the borough, from St. George in the north to Tottenville in the south. But it is the only borough in New York City without a rail link to Manhattan.

Over more than a century, no less than seven official ideas have been floated for connections to Staten Island. One imagined a line from New Jersey. Another proposal claimed its train would zip commuters to Manhattan in a mere seven minutes. A more recent study even considered a sky tram.

None of those proposals, needless to say, have panned out.

The one idea that was approved, in 1912, would have connected Staten Island’s North Shore with Brooklyn, merging with the Fourth Avenue line (now the R train) near Bay Ridge.

At the time, a major subway expansion was underway across New York City. The first underground system opened in 1904, propelling riders across Manhattan. The system stretched into the Bronx in 1905 and to Brooklyn in 1908. It would eventually expand to Queens in 1915.

The subway to Staten Island even had a name: Route 51.

“Staten Island Expects a Boom,” read a New York Times headline from 1912. “Proposed Subway Under Narrows Has Stimulating Effect on Realty.”

But the man who was one of the biggest champions of the project, Mayor John F. Hylan, was also its greatest hindrance, said Joseph Raskin, author of “The Routes Not Taken: A Trip Through New York City’s Unbuilt Subway System.”

“Very little got built or moved ahead under Hylan,” said Raskin, a retired MTA employee.

“Hylan’s attitude about transit issues was definitely his downfall as mayor,” he added.

And yet Staten Island named its longest thoroughfare Hylan Boulevard, in part because “they thought they would get a rail tunnel out of him,” Raskin said.

Long before he was mayor, Hylan was a train operator in Brooklyn. He would prop up his law school books in the corner of his cab and study when he could, Raskin said. He got into a crash and was fired.

Hylan was elected mayor in 1918. A boorish man who maintained a grudge against the subway companies, he actively tried to halt funding to transit projects. Gov. Alfred E. Smith even opened an investigation into allegations that Hylan was being an obstructionist. Stories of their battles frequently occupied the front page of The Times.

One transportation project for the borough Hylan did support was a tunnel big enough to accommodate freight trains. The tunnel would connect New York City, by way of Staten Island, to the rest of the United States, and would be more direct than the existing routes. It was a move he saw as revolutionary, one that could increase New York City’s potential as a commercial center and heighten his legacy for decades to come.

To sell the idea, he argued that the tunnel could serve both passenger and freight trains.

But there were critics, said Thomas Matteo, Staten Island’s borough historian. Some argued the funds should be used for subways in denser areas. Others questioned the long ride to Brooklyn and thought a train directly to Manhattan made more sense. Then there were the Staten Islanders who didn’t care for freight trains chugging through their backyards.

The borough’s population at the time was only about 120,000, and few even commuted; many lived and worked locally.

“It was entrepreneurs and businessmen who wanted it,” Matteo said of the proposed subway. “It was never the local yokels.”

The freight factor was important — railroad companies were willing to pay for a portion of the cost to dig the tunnel if they could move freight through it. Without their support, the tunnel would be too costly.

Hylan sensed his opportunities were dwindling. He quickly ordered workers to build a tunnel that would be big enough, in his memorable phrase, to “take an elephant.”

In 1923, he hoisted a silver pick ax high above his head at groundbreaking ceremonies, where he aired his frustrations with pushback from state officials. “It takes a man of iron to deal with these people,” he said.

A number of events finally killed the plan. In 1925, the governor’s transit investigation determined it would cost $60 million instead of $20 million to build a tunnel to accommodate freight, and it recommended a passenger-only tunnel.

Brooklyn Rapid Transit, the company that would have operated the subway, was in financial turmoil from a worker strike and from the aftermath of New York’s deadliest train disaster, which killed an estimated 100 people. On top of that, it was campaign season, and Brooklyn Rapid was denied a desperately-needed fare increase as politicians promised to make the price — a nickel — sacrosanct.

Then another more appealing idea emerged: building a bridge to connect Brooklyn and Staten Island.

In 1955, The Times said that not including train tracks on the bridge would be “one of the great planning blunders of our generation.” But that’s just what happened when the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964 under the auspices of car-centric city planner Robert Moses.

There has been limited interest in a Staten Island subway since then.

In 2013, Joseph J. Lhota, the former MTA chairman, asked city planners during his mayoral campaign whether the Verrazzano Bridge could support the weight of a train; it couldn’t, they said.

Even if a subway tunnel were feasible, there is the sense that it would never get enough support from Staten Islanders, said Allen P. Cappelli, a former MTA board member who was a proponent of a Staten Island subway.

“Probably a fair number of people would love it,” said Cappelli, now a member of the City Planning Commission “and probably there would be old-timers that would hate it.”

Mark Cannon, who spent years commuting for an hour to his job as an attorney in Manhattan, embodied those conflicted sentiments. He feared a subway would make Staten Island a more desirable place to live. “The commute would probably be a lot better,” he said. “But the best thing about Staten Island is it’s kind of separate from the rest of the city. It would get too crowded.”

Subway to Staten Island how a transit dream died

Deep under the New York Bay near Brooklyn, covered in mildew, seaweed and other gunk, is what thousands of commuters would consider a hidden treasure: the start of a subway tunnel linking Staten Island to the rest of New York City.

Subway to Staten Island: how a transit dream died

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Amisha Padnani

Articles written by the author

Granville T. Woods, Inventor Known as 'Black Edison'

Subway to Staten Island: how a transit dream died