If a train rumbles past under your feet while you're standing here, that's the point. There's a railway directly beneath this pavement, and it's part of the oldest underground railway system in the world. London built the first subway on Earth — and had to invent the whole idea of going down there to do it.
The first line opened in eighteen sixty-three, and you have to picture what a genuinely mad idea this was. There were no electric trains yet. So the world's first underground railway was run by STEAM locomotives. Actual coal-burning, smoke-belching steam engines, in a tunnel, underground, full of people. It was, by every account, disgusting. The tunnels filled with sulphur and soot and steam, and passengers came up coughing.
And the railway advertised the fumes as HEALTHY. A tonic for the lungs, good for your asthma. Meanwhile a pharmacist by one of the stations made a small fortune selling something he called the Metropolitan Mixture — a medicine to revive passengers who'd been h
alf-gassed on the way to work. The railway sold the air as a cure. The chemist next door sold the antidote. Same tunnel, two thriving businesses.
But the piece of all this that actually changed your life is the map. That famous Tube map — the colored lines, the neat angles, the little ticks for stations — was designed in nineteen thirty-one by a man named Harry Beck, in his spare time, for free.
