Transcript
Introduction
When Henry Flagler, co-founder of Standard Oil and one of the world's most famous and powerful men, announced that he would extend his far-flung empire by building a railroad across the ocean few could have anticipated how things would ultimately turn out. Many immediately dismissed Flagler's intentions as impossible. They were hardheaded scientists, engineers, and businessmen who thought what Flagler proposed, to build a railroad 153 miles from Miami to Key West, much of it over open water, was a crackpot notion on the face of it. Flagler's folly, the press dubbed the project. Though the man who proposed it was undeterred, he would press on.
The story behind the very being of this railroad may be its most amazing aspect. It is a story that concerns one of the world's richest men, one of the most difficult engineering feats ever conceived, and the most powerful storm ever to strike American shores. In a sense, this railway is what remains of one of the last great gasps of the era of manifest destiny and an undertaking that marked the true closing of the American frontier. The building of the railroad across the ocean was a colossal piece of work, born of the same impulse that made individuals believe that pyramids could be raised, cathedrals erected, and continents tamed. The highway is a ghost really, all that remains of an error where men still lived, who believed that with enough will and energy and money that anything could be accomplished.
That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean, and it was written by Les Standiford. Okay, before I jump back into the book, I just want to tell you how this fits into everything else that you and I have been talking about. I've had this book for a very long time. I hadn't gone around to reading it, and I think now's the perfect opportunity to do so because I'm rereading. Then the very next podcast I'm working on is I'm rereading the fantastic biography of John D. Rockefeller called Titan. I read it all the way back on podcast number 16, but I didn't really know how to make a podcast back then and that book was way too important.