in the panic of 1893 i was in the city of los angeles. i had received word from the east that my small fortune had vanished as a result of an ingenious wall street railroad “reorganization.” i had drawn my last dollar from the bank and had spent it. i was out of a job. i didn’t know where or how to get one, for i had been troubled with eye strain all my life, and had little experience in the work of the world. the city was thronging with experienced and trained workmen, out of work like myself. i did not know where the price of my next week’s board was coming from—in short, i was stranded in a stagnant world. it was sunday afternoon.18 i was sitting on a rock on top of a hill in the heart of the city. the ground about me was vacant, yet i could have thrown a stone over the precipice into the principal street of the city. i began to think—i needed money—there was no opportunity to get a living by working with my hands. i grasped eagerly at any idea that had within it the possibility of creating value, wealth, money, bread, perhaps butter and a new suit of clothes. the ground where i was sitting was vacant and comparatively worthless. i asked why? the answer was, lack of transportation. there was no convenient way for people to get on top of the hill.

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.

how i came to invent roadtown.

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 practical19 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;20 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.