- Do you enjoy monster truck rallies or demolition derbies?
Do you think it's peak entertainment when things explode
or get crushed?
If you said yes to any of this,
well, the victorians would heavily agree with you.
I know we commonly imagine the Victorians
as these socially constipated prudes
who only like boring things, but the truth is,
entertainment interests and humor
hasn't actually changed all that much throughout history.
People have always loved watching big machine go boom.
The people of the late 1800s to early 1900s
were really, really into watching staged train collisions.
And sometimes, it got deadly.
Probably the first of these events was in 1895,
organized by A.L. Streeter.
He set up a track about a mile long,
pointed two locomotives at each other,
had the engineers set 'em rolling,
and just before the trains collided,
the engineers jumped out.
Spectators in the crowd paid $2 per ticket,
which is about $63 today.
Not a bad way to make money, if you've got
two random trains laying around.
The one guy to actually turn this whole deal
into his brand, though, was Joe Connolly,
who later became known as "Head-on Joe."
According to Atlas Obscura, "Connolly grew up
in Iowa along the tracks and as a boy often wondered
what would happen if two trains ran into each other.
"I believed that somewhere in the makeup
of every normal person there lurks the suppressed desire
to smash things up," Connolly wrote in an article in 1933.
"So I was convinced that thousands of others
would be just as curious as I was to see
what actually would take place
when two speeding locomotives came together."
Ugh, yes king!
I mean, he wasn't wrong though.
Joe really has a finger on the pulse there.
He teamed up with locomotive engineer J.H. Bancroft
to make his first crash safe,
and approached the Des Moines state fair board about it.
After some rough negotiation, they agreed.
Boy, this guy just wanted to crash trains so bad.
On September 9th 1896, around 5,000 people
paid 50 cents per ticket to sit in the stands,
and thousands more stood outside a fence to watch.
The wreck went smoothly, and Connolly went on
to stage more collisions across the US
for the next few decades.
He kept upping the ante, too,
sometimes attaching dynamite to the trains,
or putting hot coals in the train cars
so they would burst into flames upon collision.
Truly, Head-on Joe was an artiste.
Many train-collision organizers had little gimmicks,
like, for example, painting things on the trains,
so each train would represent opposing political figures
or causes, and spectators could scream and root
for their team.
One of the last wrecks in 1932 had "Roosevelt" and "Hoover"
painted on the trains.
Train collisions weren't just about people wanting to see
a 'duel of the iron monsters', though.
There were a few sociological factors
that went into this as well.
These shows came up in a time when the railroads
had become a dominant force of American life.
In 1893, an economic depression took a huge hit
to many railroad companies, and they were looking for ways
to improve their future outlook.
A lot of that had to do with trying to generate
more ticket sales, and convincing people
that the railroad companies are not their enemies.
As I discussed briefly in my video
on LA's novelty architecture,
many railroad companies generated ticket sales
by heavily advertising a 'healthier' life
living on the west coast, in places like Southern California
and San Francisco, or touting the various visual wonders
of nature western America had to offer.
It worked for a lot of people, but still others,
especially in the smaller, rural towns could not be bought
into that fantasy.
So the idea of creating train-related spectacles
that could get people moving for one or two days
where they otherwise wouldn't,
was kind of genius.
Many people in these smaller towns
didn't have a lot of access to great entertainment
the way people living in bigger cities did,
so the concept of a big train crash spectacle
in their state was definitely enticing.
A lot of people also wanted to see two trains
get completely busted because of what they represented:
the doom of modernity.
Victorian melodrama plays and novels had already ran
for a while with the popular image of trains
as a tool of villainy.
A train about to run over a helpless damsel,
a train used as a robbery site
or a getaway car for criminals,
railway executives cast as the antagonists,
not undeservingly.
It wasn't that long ago at this point
that the fastest vehicle anyone could possibly use
was a horse.
The rapid speed of the industrial revolution
was not only scary and confusing for a lot of people,
but also came with a lot of unique new exploitation
and pain that no one knew yet quite how to reckon with,
and trains ultimately became a singular symbol
for this world shift.
Out of this came the rise of the 'sensation drama',
an uptick in stories focusing on large,
overwhelmingly dramatic events,
often within the backdrop of an urban metropolis,
the isolation of modernity.
As Nicholas Daly explains in Blood on the Tracks:
Sensation Drama, the Railway,
and the Dark Face of Modernity,
the railways blurred the lines between rural and urban,
for the first time, standardizing time itself
between individual locales.
The lives of nearly every person in this era intersected
at a railway.
As such, though people had no choice but to rely on
and trust the railways,
they were also consumed by anxieties
about its safety and morality.
So for a lot of people, getting to see
two trains destroy each other, rather than people,
was a deep set sort of cathartic desire.
That and people legitly wanted just to see
big machine go boom.
As Mike Cox, author of Train Crash at Crush, Texas,
America's Deadliest Publicity Stunt says,
"a person's economic standing did not seem to have an impact
on their appetite for entertainment.
If anything, the dismal years of 1893-95
actually, from 1873 to 1896 the economy
was in recession 50% of the time,
had practically made escapism a national pastime."
As the economy sagged lower and lower,
the need for fairs, carnivals and other events
to figure out creative ways to convince visitors
the ticket price is worth it rocketed sky high,
and attractions became more and more daring
to justify the price.
Of course, all this came to a head during an event
that would go down in history for all the wrong reasons,
The Crash at Crush.
On September 15, 1896, over 40,000 people
traveled to Waco, Texas, where William George Crush
was holding a massive train-crash publicity stunt.
Crush was a passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas
and Texas Railroads, often called the Katy Company,
and proposed to company that he would hold an event
on the railway, selling tickets to and from the event site
where two steam locomotives would then crash head-on
into each other for spectators to witness.
The Katy executives were like, hell fuckin' yeah, dude,
sounds like the best idea anyone's ever had!
Go forth and utterly destroy two perfectly good trains!
That summer, Texas newspapers and bulletins
heavily advertised the "Monster Crash",
and tickets started selling like crazy.
The two trains set to be crashed were a green engine
called "Old No. 999" and a red one called "No. 1001".
These two trains traveled around the state
where they were displayed in various towns
to further entice people to come watch,
which is a little morbid when you think about it,
come on boys, one last trip before we kill you.
Before the event, Katy got a bunch of engineers together
to judge the safety of the situation.
All of them said it was safe except one guy,
who warned that the boilers could explode.
So obviously everyone ignored him.
The event was set up about 14 miles north at Waco,
in a small valley, and tracks for the collision
were laid down as a midway carnival
for the spectators was organized.
The temporary town was obviously called 'Crush'.
And there was a circus, a restaurant, games,
picnic areas, political speeches.
POLITICAL SPEECHES?
Why, I have no clue.
I guess people thought those were fun back then.
Crush assumed the event would have about 20,000 people,
but it pulled in twice that number in the end.
Finally, it was time for the big crash.
999 and 1001 started off at opposite ends
of the 4-mile track, and then started speeding
towards each other at about 50mph.
As the Texas Handbook Online very poetically says,
"Crush appeared riding a white horse and trotted
to the center of the track.
He raised his white hat and after a pause
whipped it sharply down.
A great cheer went up from the crowd as they pressed forward
for a better view.
The locomotives jumped forward, and with whistles shrieking
roared toward each other.
And then, in a thunderous, grinding crash,
the trains collided."
And when they hit each other,
you'll never guess what happened.
All that steel's gotta go somewhere, baby!
And unfortunately it went into some of the spectators.
Yeah, these things absolutely blasted off.
The boilers exploded, sending broken steel
soaring through the air like shrapnels.
Three spectators were killed,
and six more seriously injured,
which is actually not as bad as it could have been
with 40,000 people there, but three dead people
is still three too many dead people.
But as people do, despite the terror,
a ton of people swooped in on the wreckage
to pull souvenir pieces from the burning debris, cool!
One reporter recalled: "A crash, sound of timbers
rent and torn, and then a shower of splinters.
There was just a swift instant of silence,
and then, as if controlled by a single impulse,
both boilers exploded simultaneously
and the air was filled with flying missiles of iron
and steel varying in size from a postage stamp
to half a driving wheel,
falling indiscriminately on the just and unjust,
the rich and the poor,
the great and the small."
Local photographer Jervis C. Deane was thrown off
the press platform when a bolt went through his right eye
and lodged in his brain.
Somehow, he lived, and later took out ads in local papers
that said, "Having gotten all the loose screws
and other hardware out of my head,
I am now ready for all photographic business."
Good for him.
A Civil War veteran who attended even said
it was more terrifying than the Battle of Gettysburg.
Slowly people filed out and by nighttime,
Crush, Texas was gone, as fast as it came.
Crush got fired by Katy but was immediately re-hired
the next day.
The company paid off the damages claims quickly,
and despite the disaster,
the event was actually a huge success.
Local humorist Alex Sweet joked that the next event
would be, "a prearranged, scheduled meeting
between a waterspout and a tornado."
And Ragtime legend Scott Joplin composed the hit
"Great Crush Collision March"
which actually goes hard as hell, am not gonna lie.
These spectacles continued to be popular
for the next 20 years in one way or another,
but by the 30s, in the midst of the Great Depression,
it just seemed unsensible and wasteful
to be destroying working trains for fun,
even though some of them weren't even working,
they were gonna go to the scrap yard anyway.
Connolly did his own final collision in 1932
at the Iowa State Fair.
After the collision was over, Connolly said,
"Well, that's that." and walked away.
So long king.
Of course a couple staged collisions happened after that,
like the one for the movie "Denver and Rio Grande",
but not really anything like the public carnival events
that used to be so prevalent and popular.
So train collisions became mostly a thing of the past,
but humanity's inherent desire to see big machines
get utterly wrecked definitely didn't.
I hope you all enjoyed this video.
A bit shorter than I usually do,
but it's because I'm working on a couple longer things
that I hope you'll like.
Until then, you still need to wash thy hands,
wear thy mask, and read my very good web comic
it's called Cunning Fire,
you can read it on cunningfire.com
on Tapas or online Webtoom.
(upbeat music)