Hacker News Books

I just finished reading the book "Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869" (http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-18...). It talks about the building of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad greatly changed the shape of the country due to the fact that within a span of a few years, travel times across the country dropped from months to a week.

What is particularly interesting about this was how similar the methodology that they used was to the Lean Startup methodology. With the way that the Railroad Act was structured, there was significant award for moving fast. While they were in the wilderness, it was rather difficult/expensive getting supplies. They used lower quality cottonwood ties to build out fast knowing that once the railroads were built, higher quality replacements could be brought in for far cheaper.

Anyways, I'd highly recommend this book for those of you in the startup scene.

"At the tunnels, especially Summit Tunnel, the Chinese were using great amounts of black powder, up to five hundred kegs a day."

"The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn't exploded with his pick.
It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot. Strobridge declared, "Bury that stuff." Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it."

"Nothing Like It In The World", Ambrose, pg. 200-201

I'm not just quoting the book, I read the whole thing. It's really a great story.

I meant that Chernow would regularly list facts and anecdotes about Rockefeller, then sum up with some negative opinions about him that seemed to come out of nowhere (being unjustified by the facts presented). I suspected that he'd come into the project with the popular evil caricature of Rockefeller, and couldn't shake it.

Contrast that with Ambose's "Nothing Like It In The World" about the first intercontinental railroad. In it he says he started with the usual extremely negative view of the railroad and the people involved with it, but after doing the research was forced to do a 180 and regarded it as a marvelous accomplishment and the people involved were amazing.

WHAT? Are you kidding me?

Go read a book on the railroads - that is a prime example of exactly what I'm talking about. Nothing Like it In The World by Stephan Ambrose is a quick read and covers my point.

The railroads were granted the land tracts by the government - they didn't buy it. That was in the 19th century, what about the 20th century resurection of Conrail in the northeast? We wouldn't have railroads around NYC at all if it wasn't for a government bailout.

The internet was invented by the federal government. It was largely expanded by universities - funded by state governments.

The toll roads utterly failed in this country, thats why they were nationalized. The interstate highway system was entirely federally funded. Who built the bridges that I commute over everyday to work? Not private investors, in fact even if they were profitable in their own right and people wanted to build them - they never could because land had to be TAKEN from people against their will in order to build something for the common good. NYC would not be what it is today without the tunnels and bridges - but when neighbor hoods were getting cleared for the port authority building, do you think people like you thought it was a good idea?

One thing about myths - Stephen Ambrose wrote a book "Nothing Like It In The World" about the building of the first transcontinental world. He wrote in the Acknowledgements that:

"I had been taught to regard the railroad builders as the models for Daddy Warbucks. The investors and builders
had made obscene profits which they used to dominate state and national politics to a degree unprecedented before or since. John Robinson's book The Octopus: A History of Construction, Conspiracies, Extortion, about the
way the Big Four ruined California, expressed what I thought and felt. What made the record of the big shots so much worse was that it was the people's money they stole, in the form of government bonds and land. In my view, opposition to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific (later the Southern Pacific) had led to the Populist Party and then the Progressive Party, political organizations that I regarded as the saviors of America. I wanted nothing to do with those railroad thieves."

However, once he got into it, he realized that about everything he knew about the project was a myth, and finished it with a transformed belief that it was the greatest American achievement of the 19th century.

(It really is a marvelous book, too.)