Feature Article

The offices of Louisville's Fourth and Walnut Line, a mule-drawn street railway owned by the duPonts, was the venue for the first meeting between young Ermann duPont and the "chubby, round faced, curly headed" Tom L. Johnson. In 1869 Alfred Victor duPont had hired the Kentucky-born Johnson, a distant relative then fifteen years old, to empty fare boxes. As the enterprise expanded to become the Louisville Central Passenger Street Railway, Johnson earned promotion to company secretary. Ermann, meanwhile, went to work at age twelve, packing coins into paper rolls on Saturdays and during his summer vacations. As duPont grew into adulthood, he and Johnson developed a mutually beneficial relationship that would endure over the next four decades.⁵

The friends parted company for a time. The invention of an innovative fare box in 1873 earned Johnson a fortune, and he left Louisville to invest in street railways in Cleveland and other cities, as well as in steel manufacturing plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. He soon became one of America's wealthiest entrepreneurs, and in the 1890s served two terms in Congress, representing Ohio's Twentieth District.⁶ Ermann duPont went off to prep school in Boston, and later to Rensselaer Polytechnic institute in Troy, New York, where in 1885 he earned a degree in civil and electrical engineering. DuPont's first employment after graduation was as chief engineer with the Maine Jellico Mountain Coal Company in Nansee, Kentucky. He then served briefly as assistant superintendent for a cable-drawn streetcar line in Brooklyn, New York, before returning to Louisville to work for the family-owned Central Passenger Railway; it was in this capacity as a street railway engineer that A.B. duPont first earned a national reputation for efficiency and innovation.⁷

Despite his father's doubts about the practicality of electric street railways, in 1889 young A.B. duPont supervised the electrification of the new Louisville Railway Company, an enterprise which had been created through the merger of the Central line and the competing City Railway Company. Louisville thus became one of the first cities in the United States to convert entirely to electric-powered cars, while many larger cities still depended on horses. It was also in Louisville that duPont perfected what would be the most important of his sundry streetcar-related inventions, the "duPont Patent Motor Truck." A streetcar "truck" was the vehicle's chassis, upon which the car body rested. DuPont designed his new truck to carry the larger and heavier electric cars, yet it was as lightweight as earlier trucks, and "of the utmost simplicity of construction combined with great strength." With sidebars and cross bars forged from a single piece of steel, there were "consequently no bolts to work loose" and "no small pieces to break and rattle out." First used by the Louisville system, the device was soon the truck of choice for transit lines in Buffalo, St. Louis, and Owensboro, Kentucky. By 1893 manufacture of the item had shifted from Cleveland to Louisville, where it became known as the "Louisville Truck." Continually improved over the years, it became standard equipment for street railways throughout the country, including those owned or managed by Tom L. Johnson.⁸

One such line was the Citizens' Street Railway Company of Detroit, which in 1894 had been purchased by a group headed by Johnson's brother, Albert. The following year, after losing his reelection bid to Congress, Tom Johnson went to Detroit to manage the decrepit system, which was then in battle with Mayor Hazen Pingree over a number of issues, including outmoded equipment, poor service, and high fares. Pingree had determined that Detroit's streetcar system was the worst of any major American city, and through the creation of a quasi-publicly owned competing company he had attempted to force the Citizens' Line to lower fares, modernize its equipment, and expand its service. The subsequent battles between Pingree and Tom Johnson are thoroughly chronicled elsewhere; it is sufficient to note that Johnson eventually converted to Pingree's crusade for lowered fares, and the two men became allies. Refurbishment of the Detroit system was never a contentious issue, however; from the day he assumed control of the Citizens' Company Johnson's goal was to make it the most modern and efficiently managed transit system in the country. To oversee this endeavor he chose his friend, Ermann duPont.⁹

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