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WHEN I BEGAN TO THINK 17 How I came to invent Roadtown 18

A NEW CONCEPTION OF TRANSPORTATION 21 Transportation in nature 23 Our disjointed civilization 27

LINE DISTRIBUTION--THE LOGICAL OUTCOME 31 Transportation determines the form of cities 33 Building in one dimension 35 A line of city through the country 38

THE ROADTOWN PLAN OF CONSTRUCTION 40 To be built of cement 41 The railroad will be noiseless 43 Speed possibilities 46 The street upon the roof 53

CIVILIZATION THROUGH PIPES AND WIRES 59 Water 63 Sewerage 64 Heating 65 Refrigeration 65 Drinking water 66 Bath and toilet 67 Gas 68 Vacuum 68 Disinfecting gas 69 Electric light 69 Electric power 69 Telephones 70 Dictograph 71 Telegraphone 72

ROADTOWN HOUSEKEEPING 74 Woman's work not specialized 74 No laundry work at home 76 Dusting and sweeping 78 Making beds by machinery 79 Co?perative cooking practical 81 The end of household drudgery 84

THE SERVANT PROBLEM IN ROADTOWN 89

ROADTOWN AGRICULTURE 90 Sufficient land to support population 93 Elimination of the middle man 99 Co?perative ownership of farm tools 100

INDUSTRY RETURNS TO THE HOME 102 Wage slavery doomed 103 A work room in every home 105 A new type of factory 110 A special message to women 112 The end of monotonous labor 114

ROADTOWN MAKES CO-OPERATION PRACTICAL 116 Also a Mecca for the individualist 117 The Roadtown department store 119

ROADTOWN EDUCATION AND SOCIAL LIFE 123 Roadtown athletics 125 Education for old as well as young 126 Eyes to be used less and ears more 128 Mothers for public school teachers 131 Lowest death rate in history 133 A home in the truest sense 137

WHO WILL BUILD THE ROADTOWNS 139 Home rule for Roadtowners 142 Detached villas practical but undesirable 145 Builders of Roadtown take minimum risk 148 The cost of the first mile of Roadtown 150 Economy increases with length 157 A real remedy for congestion 161

IN ROADTOWN THERE WILL BE NO TRUSTS 163 Shall we miss them 165 The Roadtown religion 168

ROADTOWN

WHEN I BEGAN TO THINK

Time passed. I finally located in New York City and became a patent investigator. I continued to think of transportation and its relation to land value.

In my business as a dealer in patents I became acquainted with all manner of inventions and inventors. I found that most inventions were worthless, that a very few were practical and were promoted and utilized in the usual fashion. Another group I found to be practical and workable in themselves, but not available for use because their adoption would throw into the junk heap millions of dollars worth of old machines, and hence they were bought up and "shelved" by the vested interests. And still another group could not be utilized because they would require new franchises which men with little capital could not purchase of the political franchise jobbers. To these were added a last lot of inventions that could not be utilized to anything like their full capacity because they could not be fitted into the crude mechanism of the present style of city construction.

So I began to dream of new conditions in which some of these shelved inventions might be utilized to ease the burden of life for mankind. One plan after another was abandoned until the idea occurred to me to lay the modern skyscraper on its side and run the elevators and the pipes and the wires horizontally instead of vertically. Such a house would not be limited by the stresses and strains of steel; it could be built not only a hundred stories, but a thousand stories or a thousand miles--in short, I had found a workable way of coupling housing and transportation into one mechanism, and a human way for land-moving man to live--I would not cure the evils of congestion by perfecting congestion as is the case with the skyscraper--I would build my city out into the country. I would take the apartment house and all its conveniences and comforts out among the farms by the aid of wires, pipes and of rapid and noiseless transportation. I would extend the blotch of human habitations called cities out in radiating lines. I would surround the city worker with the trees and grass and woods and meadows and the farmer with all the advantages of city life--I had invented Roadtown.

A NEW CONCEPTION OF TRANSPORTATION

When I use the word transportation in relation to Roadtown I do not mean what the term usually implies. You often hear the expression, "our transportation systems," but your conception of its meaning is limited to railroads, boats and street cars. The other crude links in our transportation system are invariably called by other names such as trucks, carts, delivery wagons, dumb-waiters, elevators, etc. It is true that these last named links are sometimes referred to as transportation devices, but not as a part of a comprehensive system of transportation.

The functions of housing and transportation are fully co?rdinated by Nature in the individual animal--legs are her vehicle of passenger transportation, talons and arms are her freight system, the animal body is the house. Housing and transportation exist together, being mutually interdependent. They are inseparable, the building is worthless without transportation and conversely there would be no need for transportation without the house.

There is no better illustration of the need for a proper combination of transportation and housing than that of the human body. The baby's first task is to learn to use its transportation devices, otherwise its house or body is useless. Life is full of lessons of the necessity of the harmonious combination of the functions of transportation and consumption. The monkey was provided with means for transporting himself up the banana tree and an efficient means of getting the banana from the stalk to his mouth. Gold carried from mines in Peru to a jewelry shop in Madrid; men carried from their homes in Brooklyn to their offices in Wall Street; food carried from a farm in Canada to a dining-room in a Boston hotel; gas carried from retorts to the burner in a parlor chandelier; electricity carried from the generator in Niagara to the motors in Rochester; a pound of steak carried by the delivery boy to the basement of your house and pulled up in a dumb-waiter; a letter carried by a postman; the song of a Prima Donna sent scintillating through the air by a wireless phone--all these things and a million others are but a civilized man's arms and legs--his means of transportation.

The game of life in wild nature is but the getting of food and water to the consuming plant or animal, or getting the more adaptable animal to the food or water or some warm spot, or the society of his fellows. So the life of man, whether it be the family with the single house or the city with its many houses, shows a similar relation--things needed by the inhabitants, things taken from the place where they are and to a place where we want them--that is transportation.

Start out in the morning, number your every minute's occupation, watch what your neighbors are doing. The man on the stairs, the wagon on the street, the rumbling subway train in a three million dollar a mile right of way, the elevator in the skyscraper, the office boy at beck and call--it is all transportation. Run over in your mind the work of the office and brain workers in a city business section, how many of them are engaging in planning, directing and accounting the various forms of transportation.

In fact, every hour of existence we are performing some act of transportation except when asleep. If we allow eight hours for rest we find that two-thirds of our lives are spent in transporting ourselves to our wants or our wants to ourselves.

The basic principle of Roadtown is a plan to give the social body proper arms and legs, to make them not as they are, separate and unco?rdinated functions, but as part, in fact the most important part, of the scheme of civilization.

The members of society are all engaged in transporting themselves and their belongings a goodly portion of their time, and besides a large group is exclusively engaged in the work of transportation. Moreover, the so-called productive labors are at every step interwoven with operations of transportation. Analyze for a moment the work of the factory, of the farm--how much of it is production, how much is transportation? Could we, like Aladdin, rub a mystic lamp and cause things to be created from nothing, we would indeed be well served. But could we command the g?nie of transportation, the will to wish what is from where it is to the place where we want it, our power would be equally miraculous and quite as useful.

Our methods of production, though still extremely wasteful, are constantly growing in efficiency. In this age a minority of mankind produce for the entire population. A constant stream of people from the farm pours into the city. These people produce nothing and expect to live by distributing goods to each other; but congestion of population in large cities introduces insolvable mechanical difficulties in distribution, until railroads, ware houses, trucks, wholesale and retail stores, delivery wagons, grocery boys and dumb-waiters, become congested; the machine clogs and thus the growing efficiency of modern production is lost through a more rapidly growing waste in distribution.

The increasing number of those who get their living by taking a slice of profit and the growing expense due to the ever increasing mechanical difficulties in distribution are evils that aggravate each other.

As the makers of law live principally by the profits of distribution, they will not change the scheme, nor can the wealthy, with their country villas legislate the modern city tenant back to the loneliness, long hours and lack of conveniences of farm life. A proposition that would combine cheaper rents, greater conveniences and give all an opportunity to engage in productive work would be a real solution for the high cost of living. Roadtown eliminates all possible waste and relieves the army of distributors of nine-tenths of their present work, thus throwing these people into productive labors.

Labor which results in the creation of a concrete product--something that can be eaten or worn is generally appreciated. Transportation, the far greater necessity, is not so readily appreciated as a source of wealth, nor is the waste in transportation so quickly seen or remedied.

Our factories and our farms--the places of production--our houses and cities--places of consumption, and our railroad trucks, delivery wagons and dumb-waiters, means of transportation, have been developed by separate minds--they work together--clumsily--wastefully. Civilization is a black cabinet of plates and doughnuts, arms and legs, and consuming mouths dancing around in an unco?rdinated fashion, occasionally getting together and serving each other, but more often missing the mark--two hands going to one mouth, another hand missing the mouth altogether; there is no plan, no unity, no harmony, no mind behind it all. The farm and factory, the railroad and the city grow separately, each to serve the other it is true, but the machine as a whole is woefully disjointed and inefficient. We may liken our present system of living to old style harvesting. A binder, wonderful enough in itself, left the bundles of grain strewn about the field. They were shocked by hand. Later they are gathered into wagons and hauled to the farm yard and built into stacks. Then the thresher comes and with another complex machine delivers the grain, loose, through a running spout, where men weigh it and sack it and load it into wagons, which are as crude as the threshing machine itself.

Compare this system, wonderful though it be, with the combined header-thresher, which at one operation cuts, threshes and delivers the grain weighed and sacked into the wagon. In the combination of the previous operations many of the steps, the binding and hauling and stacking and weighing drop out. The machine simplified the whole process, it eliminates waste, it represents a unity of plan, a harmony of operation.

Our modern complex systems of production, transportation and consumption, like the old-fashioned method of harvesting, require many separate machines. Take the one product of butter for illustration: the farmer produces milk, the milk hauler carts it to town, the creamery man manufactures the butter, then packs it into tubs and sells it to a dealer; the dealer ships it to the city by rail and then another truckman delivers it to a jobber which means more trucking; the jobber molds the butter into prints and boxes them. A wagon takes it to a grocer where it is again stored, sold, and goes the round of another wagon, a dumb-waiter, a pantry, a waiter, a table, and at last consumption. This is a sample story of civilization, a heterogeneous mass of independently acting individuals and separate mechanisms, full of mechanical waste, full of human waste, full of financial waste. The butter fat as is now wastefully produced is worth twenty cents in the farmer's milk pail, it cost two cents to skim it and churn it, the rest is transportation. It is worth forty cents at the grocery store and fifty cents to one dollar on your table, according to how much of your household distribution is done by your wife who gives services gratis and how much by servants whose arms and legs move only in response to the rattle of the shekels. And how much would this service of transportation cost if production, transportation and consumption, like the modern header-thresher, were built upon a plan of co?rdination, that is, if the farmer's dairy was on a transportation line with the creamery, and the creamery on a line with the kitchen where machinery and specialized labor are available, and the kitchen was on a line with the consumer's dining-room, and the only expense of transportation was the cost of power to move the material object and the cost of labor to perform the actual processes of manufacture that intervene between production and consumption.

The Roadtown is a single unified plan for the arrangement of these three functions of civilization--production, transportation, and consumption.

LINE DISTRIBUTION--THE LOGICAL OUTCOME

Civilization growing up in a separate and disjoined fashion has resulted in a certain arrangement of the population upon the face of the earth. At first savage men roamed the plains and forests seeking food. The advent of civilization, industrial and social co?peration, taught men the advantage of gathering themselves into cities. At first these cities were provisioned from the country by means of humans or animal beasts of burden, then water transportation caused the development of greater cities on rivers and harbors. With the advent of the railroad, together with the transportation agencies already mentioned, the provisioning of cities became limited only by the ability of the country district to support its own population and that of the city.

The occupation of the city people was chiefly that of manufacturing, trading and grafting on the farmer and on each other. The invention of steam power made it economical to assemble workmen into large factories which added another cause to the growth of cities. The use of this steam power forced the city worker out of his home and into the more economical factory, thus developing the factory system.

The continual growth of cities soon filled the land with large groups of houses, crowding each other for room. As the houses were built closer and closer together, the amount of light and air was shut out, in order that the distance the workers lived from their work might not increase. At first workers went from their work to their houses on foot, later by means of the horse car, still later by steam car and now the electric car is supreme. As these transportation facilities first used to get provisions into the city and the manufactured product out of it were utilized to get the workers to and from their work, the houses began to follow the transportation lines.

As time and the expense of transportation rather than distance were the elements that governed the distance from the heart of the city that could be used for workers' homes, the utilization of fixed lines of traffic resulted in the city building out along main streets, trolleys and railroads. Along main lines of traffic, as between two important cities, the population began to group itself into lines.

This is the state of the distribution of population to be found in the world to-day. But the present distribution is imperfect. The trolleys carry people to the street corner but make no provision for getting them into their homes or for getting the meals on the sideboard, the book from the library to the center table, or the camphor from the drug store to the sick room.

The means of conveying the necessities of civilization is almost wholly that of rails, pipes and wires. The former is the means of transporting people and parcels, the second of liquids and gases, the third of electricity in its various forms.

These mechanical servants have been placed in the streets which were first built as roadways for carriages. In the streets, the pipes and wires must be buried beneath the pavement at great expense. Through these streets, frequently full of curves and angles which offer little trouble to the free moving horse-drawn vehicle, the rails must be bent and the cars slow down for curves. From beneath the pavement the pipes and wires must be separately led into the basements of each building and up through successive stories to the apartments above. Within the building, separate vertical car lines called elevators, must be built and city transportation becomes a matter of three dimensions with train service running in from principal outlying points, cross-town trolley lines and vertical elevators, all separate schemes of transportation requiring changes and delays, endless duplication, colossal expense and criminal waste.

Now rails, pipes and wires can be most economically laid in continuous straight lines. In the case of railroads, the greater the speed without stops the more the necessity for straight lines. A car running at a speed of forty miles per hour has sixteen times the force for derailment as a car at ten miles, and there is a like increase in the cost in power and time to stop the car. Moreover, to be efficient the railway should be where nothing will obstruct the passage of trains. Pipes must be kept from freezing, live wires from giving shocks and yet all must be available for new installation and repairs. None of these needs are filled by present city conditions; all can be fulfilled if the city is planned to fit the rail, pipe and wire civilization of to-day instead of the pedestrian and equestrian civilization of the past.

The Roadtown is a scheme to organize production, transportation and consumption into one systematic plan. In an age of pipes and wires, and high speed railways such a plan necessitates the building in one dimension instead of three--the line distribution of population instead of the pyramid style of construction. The rail-pipe-and-wire civilization and the increase in the speed of transportation is certain to result in the line distribution of population because of the almost unbelievable economy in construction, in operation and in time. The people will return to Mother Earth because it is in every way desirable for them to do so and not because some merchant prince, railroad king or social worker says they ought to go.

In modern life an office building, store or apartment house is considered especially fortunate if it has a rapid transit station near or better still within the building. All the inhabitants of the Roadtown will live upon the main line and be near the station. They will live there because the utilities of civilization can be provided there more economically than elsewhere. But the line distribution has yet another significance of as great importance as the more safe and economical distribution of people, parcels, fluids and electricity.

The development of cities was originally brought about by the desire of men to get close together for industrial needs and social fellowship. This same want for ready communication and distribution of men and things I have shown can now be most completely fulfilled by the city which will be strung out in a line. In other words, the very laws which built the congested cities will, with the construction of the first section of the first Roadtown, surely mark the beginning of their gradual dissemination. Such a tendency can already be seen at work, but its development has not progressed far because of the isolation of the functions of house construction and horizontal transportation devices.

As soon as horizontal transportation is put in the house, the skyscraper on its side, and is pointed towards the endless country instead of up against the force of gravity, and the wonderful transportation devices now available are installed, you will see the cities spread out in lines amidst the fields and farms, as if by magic. Indeed it will be the magic of economy, the natural force to which all of humanity always promptly responds.

The height of the skyscraper is limited by the stresses and strains on the steel, by the instability of the foundation, by congestion of the elevators. The length of the skyscraper on its side has no limit for it is built on solid ground, it has no lighting and ventilating problems. Its transportation system by the aid of local and express service, by the fact that it can run trains, not single cars, and can run many trains following each other on one track and not require a whole shaft for a single car as in the case of the elevator, removes the mechanical limitation of length of the horizontal skyscraper. We can build not only a thousand feet, but a thousand miles and have every story connected with every other story by rails, pipes and wires.

The Roadtown will start at the end of the present subways or other rapid transportation systems of present cities or tap these lines far enough out to get comparatively cheap land and build out in the direction of other cities, passing near enough to the smaller cities, towns and villages to summarily attract much of their renting population. This movement will surely mark the "beginning of the end" of such wasteful loafing centers for the few, and the stagnant pools of wasted energy for the many. It will be a line of city through the country. It will take the apartment house to the farmer and incidentally free the farmer from the necessity of feeding the well-meaning townsfolk who give him in return scant clothing, the use of a hitching post for his team--sometimes; a place to get his weekly paper and a little social fellowship on the sidewalk Saturday afternoons. It will give the suburbanite all that he seeks in the country and all that he regrets to leave in town. It will enable him to play at farming, do real farming or retain his city job. The people will go to the land and take the best things of the city with them, take in fact all that is good in the city to-day and in addition much that is now pigeon-holed as unused patents, because the conglomeration of isolated homes and the crude horse paths called streets, owned by "hold-up men" called politicians, do not permit of the general adoption of these great inventions.

THE ROADTOWN PLAN OF CONSTRUCTION

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