Capt. Josiah Vincent Meigs, (USA)

The Meigs Elevated Railway was an experimental but unsuccessful 19th century elevated steam-powered urban rapid transit system, often described as a monorail but technically pre-electric third rail. It was invented in the US by Josiah Vincent Meigs (also known as Joe Meigs or Joe Vincent Meigs), of Lowell, Massachusetts, and was demonstrated in a suburb of Boston called East Cambridge from 1886 to 1894.

Josiah Vincent Meigs, who answered to "Joe", was born into a well-connected professional family of Nashville, Tennessee (his attorney father was a friend of Abraham Lincoln). He served as captain of the Union Army during the American Civil War, and made a personal appeal to President Lincoln for permission to raise a detachment of black troops for a colored artillery battery. This was the first of such to serve in the war.

After the war he was a lawyer at Washington. There he became close friends with a fellow veteran, General Benjamin Butler, and the two moved together to Lowell, Massachusetts where they built adjacent houses. Butler became an influential state politician, and was to serve as governor from 1882. Joe Meigs was proving himself to be a capable inventor, and was responsible for the Meigs rifle as well as taking out several other firearms patents. In the 1880 US census and in the 1889 Lowell city director, inventor was given as his profession.

Joe Meigs thought out his rapid transit system in the early 1870s, and patented it in 1875. Compare the Aldershot narrow-gauge suspension railway, built in England in 1872.

As a result of exploiting his social connections in Massachusetts, he attracted substantial backing including that of his friend General Butler. So, the two set up the Meigs Elevated Railway Company with Butler as president in 1881. The company hung out its shingle at 225 Bridge Street (now Monsignor O'Brien Highway) in East Cambridge, on a site in an industrial area previously occupied by the works of the Bay State Glass Company. It then began to lobby for a state charter to allow it to build rapid transit lines in the streets of Boston and its suburbs.

The company was finally chartered under state law in 1884. The authorized share capital was $200 000 (about $5,000,000 in 2020 values). However the company was not yet free to construct publicly, because the charter required the approval of Boston City Council for any construction within city limits. Instead, it allowed the building of a short experimental line at the East Cambridge site. The text included the following proviso: No location for tracks shall be petitioned for in the city of Boston, until at least one mile of the road has been built and operated, nor until the safety and strength of the structure and the rolling stock and motive power shall have been examined and approved by the board of railroad commissioners or by a competent engineer to be appointed by them. Meigs amended his design, and acquired a new patent in 1885.

The Meigs rifle was designed by Josiah (Joe) V. Meigs. He was granted U.S. Patent 36,721 for a protected a sliding breechblock locked by a pivoting strut. It fired the .50 caliber Meigs cartridge, with a 25" round barrel, 50 round magazine rifle and was a sliding guard action repeating carbine. The rifle had a nickeled finish with the receiver made from brass. A twined piece of cord was used instead of a fore stock. The guard and trigger assembly is capable of sliding back and forth on a rail. This is producing the motions needed to rotate the magazine frame and move the breechblock which extends up out of the frame to eject the fired cases. The magazine consisted of a metallic tube which replaced the stock. The tube has 5 bores and each of them could be loaded with 10 cartridges. A soldier could fire his 50 rounds in just over one minute but what made his design remarkable was that the tubes were replaceable so that a soldier could carry pre-loaded tubes which gave the rifle a potential rate of fire of about 160 rounds per minute compared to the early Gatling Guns of 1861 that had a rate of fire of around 200 round per minute. According to records, there are only 3 of these guns in existence including one that resides in the Cody museum that was donated by the Army. They received the rifle from Meigs for trials which lasted almost four years with this particular rifle firing a about 38,000 rounds without failure.

• Updated from MyHeritage Family Trees via brother James Lamme Meigs by SmartCopy: Jan 27 2015, 22:27:41 UTC