Author: Justin Franz / Source: Atlas Obscura
In 1852, the entrepreneur and inventor Sylvester Marsh got lost in a storm and nearly died on the slopes of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington.
The Northeast’s tallest peak is home to some of the worst weather on earth—in 1934, observers at the summit measured a wind speed of 231 miles per hour, one of the fastest gusts ever recorded not associated with a tornado or cyclone—and over the years it has claimed dozens of lives.After wandering the slopes for what must have felt like an eternity, Marsh stumbled through the doors of a shelter near the summit. As he recovered from his ordeal and prepared to spend a night 6,288 feet above sea level, Marsh thought to himself that there had to be a better way to reach the summit. Marsh would end up spending the next 17 years solving that problem by building the world’s first mountain-climbing cog railway, which in 2019 is celebrating its sesquicentennial.
In the mid-19th century, when Marsh set out to design his new mountain-climbing contraption, railroads were still a new technology. The first railroad in the United States had only been built about 25 years earlier and generally only ran on flat ground. But if anyone could figure out how to run a train up a mountain, it was Marsh. The New Hampshire native had made his fortune in meatpacking in Chicago and held nearly a dozen patents. According to legend, Marsh even invented the first coffee percolator, although for some unknown reason he never filed a patent for that.
Marsh decided to build a railroad that used a cog-and-rack system, not unlike a bicycle chain on a sprocket, to help propel a train up hill. By 1858, he was confident enough in his design to approach the New Hampshire legislature for a charter to build a railroad up the west slope of Mount Washington. But politicians were less than impressed with his proposal and nearly laughed him out of the State House. One legislator suggested Marsh build a “railway to the moon” while he was at it. But despite their snide remarks, the state legislators granted Marsh a charter anyway.
The Civil War delayed Marsh’s plans, but by 1866, track was being constructed at the base of the mountain. To aid in the construction of…
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