William Jackson Palmer - Childhood, Education in Railroad Engineering

Childhood, Education in Railroad Engineering

William Jackson Palmer was born to a Quaker family in Leipsic, a small coastal town in Kent County, Delaware in 1836. When he was five years old, his family moved to the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, his fascination with steam locomotives spurred him on to learn all he could about railroads.

In 1853, at age 17, Palmer went to work for a railroad building company working near Washington, Pennsylvania, on a line to Pittsburgh. He was sent to England and France to study railroad engineering and mining.

Upon his return, in 1856, Palmer went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), where he rose to the position of Private Secretary to PRR President John Edgar Thomson. With the PRR, Palmer was exposed to the inner workings of the railroad empire and learned the state of the art of railroading in general.

Young Palmer explained to Thomson that, from his observations in England, coal could replace wood as the railroad's fuel source. The PRR was then in an "ecological" crisis, burning 60,000 cords (220,000 m³) of wood per year and rapidly stripping the right-of-way of all trees. The Pennsylvania Railroad became the first American railroad to convert to coal. Over the next four years, Palmer was most concerned with the problems of efficiency and power in combustion. Among his collaborators in experimental industrialism were the PRR vice president Thomas A. Scott, and Scott's assistant, Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant from Scotland one year older than Palmer.