ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO MASS TRANSIT: MOVING SIDEWALKS IN NEW YORK CITY 1900-1925: PART THREE Henry Putnam & the Continuous Transportation Co.

摘要

In 1918, after 10 years of relative quietness regarding the use of moving platforms in New York City, American engineers once again turned their attention to this transportation system. This renewed interest, which resulted in projects that paralleled the earlier efforts of Max Schmidt, began slowly and reached a crescendo in late 1923 with the construction of a full-scale working model. Philip Sachs began this second campaign with a patent application filed on August 14, 1918 (System of Transportation, April 18, 1922, Patent No. 1,412,969). Sachs had devised a new means by which passengers boarded moving platforms. Typical systems employed multiple platforms that moved at varying speeds. According to Sachs, the "serious drawbacks" of these schemes included "the great expense involved in providing a plurality of traveling platforms extending throughout the length of the system, and the inconvenience attendant upon successively stepping laterally from one platform to another traveling at a higher or lower rate of speed."