A FIRE IN THE BELLY
“Hitherto there has been but two ways of conquering the inequalities of the earth’s surface– by going around or through them. Mr. Marsh proposes to obviate this by going over them.”
Sylvester Marsh, 1871
A nagging case of indigestion and a life- threatening storm led to one of the great achievements of the Industrial Age
One day in August of 1857, Chicago businessman Sylvester Marsh decided he needed some exercise. Just two years earlier, he had mostly left a successful career in the meat packing and grain drying industries behind, after having accumulated a personal fortune sufficient to guarantee a very comfortable retirement.
But boredom and chronic dyspepsia soon became intolerable, leading Marsh to return to his native New Hampshire to climb to the summit of Mount Washington (and to nearly perish in the attempt during a horrendous storm). The novel idea born of that ordeal would forever change his life, reaching down through the years to touch the lives of countless others in the form of the Mount Washington Cog Railway.
Now you can read contemporary accounts of Marsh’s creation of what would become the world’s first mountain-climbing cog railway.