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A
crowd of curious onlookers and a few hardy volunteers gathered on
a Galveston
beach in the 1840s to witness the unveiling of a new amphibious
machine designed to travel on land and water. Inventor Gail
Borden was there to demonstrate what he called a Terraqueous
Machine.
The machine was rigged with a mast, a square sail, a rudder and
a steering device for the front wheels. Borden
enlisted some friends to ride with him on the machine’s initial
voyage, but whether those people remained friends after the demonstration
is not clear.
On that maiden voyage, the machine’s sail caught the wind and zipped
along at a clip fast enough to terrify his fellow passengers. They
panicked when Borden
steered into the waves. The Terraqueous Machine tumped over, spilling
its inventor and his passengers into the surf.
Anxious moments passed until some of the drenched and unlucky passengers
emerged from the waves onto the shore. When asked where Borden
was, one of the disillusioned riders said, “I sincerely hope he
has drowned.”
Borden didn’t
drown. He went on to invent condensed milk, among other things,
and is enshrined in the Inventors Hall of Fame. The Terraqueous
Machine was his first invention and though it never caught on, the
idea lingered.
Ten
years after Borden’s
fiasco on Galveston beach, Thomas Jefferson Chambers, for whom Chambers
County is named, received a state charter for the Chambers Terraqueous
Transportation Railroad Company. The charter allowed Chambers to
construct 4,000 miles of road for another Terraqueous Machine, which
he claimed to have invented. No one ever saw his invention, but
the legislature apparently believed him and gave him the charter
in 1854.
The charter
was amended two years later to include this paragraph: “General
Chambers represented he had invented a vehicle capable of traveling
equally by land and water, and passing from one to the other with
passengers and freight, with speed and safety, equal, if not superior,
to first class steamers by water and railroad by land.”
The series of roads that Chambers was to build for the machine was
“to be proportioned out, as near as possible, between the different
portions of the State, and a right of way 300 feet wide to proceed
over the land, rivers, and bays of the State.” The charter’s duration
was for 100 years but the terraqueous railroad was more of a scheme
than a vision and was never built.
Chambers was a successful but perhaps shady character who made more
than a few enemies in his day. Much of the animosity had to do with
the way he handled land titles. He managed to get legal title to
a lot of East Texas
land that some families had been living on for decades and he was
a regular in court. His lawyers and his family probably loved him
but not everyone did.
Fearing that someone would try to kill him, Chambers built his house
near Anahuac
with an outside stairway to the second floor where he could keep
a lookout for his enemies. One of them infiltrated his defenses
anyway and stuck a shotgun through an upstairs window, pulled the
trigger and killed him while he sat in a parlor with his family.
The killer was generally known to be Albert V. Wilcox but he was
never arrested for the murder, nor was anyone else.
At one time, Chambers owned some 140,000 acres of Texas
but his ownership was often disputed. The legal wrangling continued
after his death. His heirs claimed that the family owned the land
where the state
Capitol was built. The claim was contested in court for many
years until the state eventually settled the claim for $20,000 in
1925.
© Clay Coppedge
April 6, 2013 Column
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