New York City’s economy and culture could not exist without its systems for moving millions in and out of Manhattan daily. Yet we have forgotten the man who made mass transit practical.

Charles Thompson Harvey had the buoyant charm of a natural salesman. In 1853, the 24-year-old Harvey was peddling industrial scales in the Midwest when he envisioned a one-mile canal at Sault Sainte Marie, Mich., that, by linking Lakes Superior and Huron, would create a 1,000-mile waterway from Minnesota to Manhattan. Construction would require blasting one mile of flint in savage backwoods country to which everything, including labor, would have to be imported 400 miles from the nearest railhead, where winters were five months long with midday highs of zero and summers meant mosquitoes and cholera. And Harvey knew little of engineering: He would have to learn on the job. Somehow, he seduced his employers into financing the project. After two years’ of pure hell, the first boatload of Michigan copper ore passed through Harvey’s canal on April 19, 1855.Today, the Soo Canal, with annual transits of 100 million tons, is the busiest in the world – with more traffic than the Panama or the Suez.

Ten years later, Harvey was working on a Long Island real estate deal when he noticed the New York Tribune’s campaign for better public transportation. The streets were intolerably jammed with horse-drawn private carriages, cabs, and omnibuses – overgrown stagecoaches. In 13 hours on one August day in 1852, gadfly Jacob Sharp had counted 3,035 uptown and 3,162 downtown omnibuses pass a single Broadway intersection. Horse-drawn streetcars, essentially omnibuses with flanged wheels running on rails in the streets, added to the congestion. Manhattan’s streets weren’t big enough for everyone who wanted to move on them.

“Such service,” the Tribune complained, “…would not be decent to carry live hogs and hardly dead ones.” A city commission was advertising for proposals to build a practical mass transit system. Amidst the plans submitted by the world’s greatest engineers was the self-trained Harvey’s scheme for an “Elevated Railroad” in which large, comfortable passenger cars designed for 40 riders would move at speeds of up to 15 miles an hour without locomotive smoke or horse manure by gripping a series of endless moving cables.

Like most practical ideas whose hour has come, an elevated railroad was unoriginal: People had been talking about them since 1825. But Harvey was the first to do something about it. He began building a trial half-mile section along the east curb of Greenwich Street on July 1, 1867. The “one-legged railroad” ran 30 feet above the pavement on a single row of spidery cast iron piers from Battery Place to Cortlandt Street, somewhere near today’s ground zero. Harvey demonstrated his system as early as December 7, 1867, by driving a test car – essentially an open platform on four wheels – over the rails. A photographer captured him paused near Morris Street, with observers watching from the sidewalk before Edwin F. Richards’s building at 37-39 Greenwich Street. About eight months later, on July 1, 1868, Harvey opened the line for service from Battery Place to Cortlandt Street as construction continued along Ninth Avenue toward 29th Street.

Some problems immediately appeared. Passing from one cable to the next violently jerked the car, throwing passengers from their seats. Harvey immediately redesigned the grip by adding a patented spring device to absorb the impact. Also, a broken cable would halt all service, requiring passengers to descend on ladders from the tracks. Nonetheless, The New York Times for September 7, 1869, reported “smooth and easy” rides, with the line to 29th Street due to open on November 1, 1869.

Less than three weeks later, on Black Friday, September 24, 1869, the failure of Jay Gould and James Fisk’s attempt to corner the nation’s gold supply caused a stock market crash. The El’s underwriters failed. The line ran out of construction funds. On February 14, 1870, the El was sold at a sheriff’s sale for $960 and Harvey was out of a job. The new owners resumed service, replacing the cables with steam locomotives. The El swiftly gained rider-ship because, as Harvey had envisioned, the trains moved faster than the jammed traffic on the street. By 1880, the city’s elevated railroads annually carried 300 million passengers on 88 miles of track. Gradually replaced by subways and buses, the last operating El lines – now integrated into the subway system – are Brooklyn’s J line along Fulton Street in East New York and the Franklin Avenue shuttle.

Harvey faded into obscurity long before his 1912 death. New York has no monument to his memory; although Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., named its marina for him, its Web site does not explain who Harvey was or what he did.