Free Bridge, Dollarway, Arkansas Roads, Part II

100 Years Ago:  The Free Bridge, the Dollarway, and Arkansas Roads, Part II

By David Trulock

 John Gould Fletcher’s book of Arkansas history and personal observation, published in 1947 and titled simply Arkansas, contains a story that can be said to herald the arrival of the automobile age in our formerly natural state.  The final chapter of the book is “The Sweet Home Pike Rolls On.” It opens with this paragraph:

On the twenty-fifth of March, 1910, the modern age—which was to rule Arkansas for the next thirty-five years and longer—proclaimed itself unmistakably when four automobiles, containing residents of Pine Bluff, made the run into Little Rock in four hours.  The distance, by the present-day motor highway, is exactly 43 miles; and it could not have been more than a mile or two longer at that time.  So these strange vehicles, which in those days frightened all horses, though the animals were still by far numerically the stronger on the streets, had averaged little more than a moderately good horse and buggy and had made the trip in scarcely over ten miles an hour.

The Sweet Home Pike, five miles long and completed in 1888, was the road on which the cars from Pine Bluff ended their journey into Little Rock.  Fletcher says that, as far as he could determine, the Sweet Home Pike was “the first hard-surfaced highway in rural Arkansas.”  It was constructed by the Telford method, using large, flat stones that were squeezed into place with a steamroller and covered with gravel and clay.  Then steamrollers were used again to compress the gravel-clay mixture, giving a relatively smooth and durable surface. 

During its earliest days, the Sweet Home Pike was a toll road.  “Had the automobiles passed that way only a year before,” Fletcher says, “they [likely] would have been forced to pay a toll in order to enter Little Rock at all.”  If so, they would also have had to pay on their way back, so maybe the Pine Bluffians planned their trip for just after the road had become toll-free.

Tolls were charged for horseback riders (2½ cents), horse-drawn buggies, carriages, and wagons (from 5 to 15 cents, depending on the number of horses pulling them), and livestock (a penny a head).  Pedestrians were not charged.  “Probably a provision for bicycles was added about the nineties, but whether there was ever any toll on automobiles I do not know,” says Fletcher.  “They were possibly charged according to the horsepower of their engines; or perhaps they were charged nothing, for the wonder was whether they could run at all along the then-existing mud-tracks.”

One thing is certain, and John Gould Fletcher’s story provides a good illustration of it.  In general, people in Pine Bluff have more interest in travelling to Little Rock than Little Rock residents have in driving to Pine Bluff.  For a brief period starting in mid-1914, however, automobile owners in Little Rock had a reason to want to travel here—and many did travel here, as did other automobilists from even farther away.  The reason was Jefferson County’s “Dollarway,” the first paved concrete road in Arkansas and the longest in the nation when it was completed in late October 1914.[i] 

The Dollarway was on the Pine Bluff end, and the Sweet Home Pike was on the Little Rock end, of the mostly unimproved road between the two cities.  The Dollarway was longer than the Sweet Home Pike, however, stretching almost 23 miles from West Pullen Street near Bellwood cemetery—presumably where Pine Bluff’s city limits were at the time—to the conjunction point of Grant, Pulaski, and Jefferson counties just north of Redfield.

 

The Dollarway’s five-inch-thick concrete base, covered with a bitumen sealcoat (a mixture of tar and sand), made for a virtually permanent roadway that gave an exceptionally smooth ride for automobile travelers.  Many people drove or had their cars shipped by rail to Pine Bluff in order to experience this lengthy, bump-free, futuristic surface.  In Arkansas, and in and most of the nation, other improved rural roads at the time were either gravel, water-based or tar-based macadam, or made of some local material, such as crushed sea shells in the case of the coastal states.  The vast majority of rural roads in Arkansas in 1914, however, were unimproved dirt roads not at all suitable for the coming of the automobile age.

The Dollarway was financed by Jefferson County’s Road Improvement District #4, created by a special act (Act 164) of the 1913 session of the Arkansas legislature.  A 1907 law passed by the legislature had authorized the creation of Road Improvement Districts, but not many had been formed. 

In her article “The Dollarway Road and Road Improvement Districts in Arkansas, 1913-1921,” Christie H. McLaren notes that under the 1907 law, “counties were authorized to establish road improvement districts at the request of a majority of landowners along a local route,” but the landowners themselves were expected to pay for the road.[ii]

(The Arkansas Constitution provided authority for general land or infrastructure improvements—levees and drainage systems, for example—to be accomplished in the same way. The Road Improvement District legislation was needed to provide uniformity of road construction practices throughout the state.[iii]  Jefferson County’s Bridge District, created in 1911 to finance the construction of the Free Bridge, will be discussed in the next issue of the Quarterly.) 

McLaren’s description of rural road financing in the years after the Dollarway was built provides some insight into the highway robbery that would soon be inflicted on Arkansas residents:

Taxes were assessed against property lying adjacent to the road to fund construction.  Various legal questions remained obstacles, however, meaning few road improvement districts were created under this [1907] law.  Notably Pulaski County, home of the state capital, and Jefferson County, of Dollarway Road fame, were the locations of several of the first few districts created.  When the Arkansas Highway Commission was founded in 1913, the shortcomings of road improvement district system were already apparent.

These shortcomings turned into scandals on both the state and county level that went on for ten years.  McLaren quotes a New York Times article titled “Arkansas Totters Under Road Taxes and Czar-like Rule,” published on March 26, 1921, that reports “land owners in numerous instances being taxed amounts that equal or even exceed the total gross incomes of their property.”  By 1923, things were bad enough that federal highway funds and technical personnel were withdrawn from Arkansas.  “In response,” writes McLaren,

Governor McRae called a special session of the general assembly in September 1923 and demanded that it pass the necessary legislation to bring about an end to the crisis.  The result was the Harrelson Road Law, which eased the burden of property owners somewhat by increasing user taxes and granted supervisory status to the reconstituted State Highway Commission. … Property owners, however, would have to wait until the Martineau Road Law of 1927 to be relieved of the responsibility for funding road construction.

Happily, the cost and the tax burden of the Dollarway when it was proposed were kept low enough that initial resistance from local landowners was overcome—well, the resistance of the largest landowner, the Iron Mountain railroad (forerunner of the Missouri Pacific) was not assuaged so much as it was just ignored.  “The railroad objected to being included,” Jim Leslie wrote in 1970, “as it would pay the highest tax, but the objection was to no avail.”[iv]

The initial objection of the individual landowners along the route was that the county’s contract with road builders Shelby & Bateman of Little Rock called for the use of concrete rather than macadam.  Concrete, the landowners assumed, would be more expensive.  Their objection was shown to be without merit, however, due to the fact that the terrain in and around Jefferson County was practically stone-free, and the rocks to be crushed and pulverized for a macadam road would have to be shipped in, making it more expensive than a concrete one.

The landowner’s tax burden was also eased by Jefferson County’s assumption of the expense for constructing bridges and culverts for the Dollarway Road, amounting to about $50,000 of the approximately $165,000 final cost of the road.  The originally anticipated one-dollar-per-linear foot ended up being closer to $1.36 per linear foot of roadway, or about $7180 per mile.

Although the “dollarway method” was indeed cheaper—and longer lasting—than macadam for road construction in Jefferson County, its expense was nevertheless considerably more than the $5,300-per-mile average for the 93 miles of “permanent roads” constructed in Arkansas under supervision of the Highway Commission in the 1913-1914 time period.[v]  Interestingly, this average amounts to $1.00 per linear foot of roadway (divide 5300 per mile by 5280 feet per mile).

Speaking of road construction material and its cost:  John Gould Fletcher’s chapter on the Sweet Home Pike tells how bauxite was discovered near Granite Mountain as a result of the road’s contractor running out of gravel while “completing the last mile of this highway close to the Confederate Home.”  Some of the “crumbly soft gray rock” in the area was put in the crusher, and was found to make “an excellent road surface.”  Later, when the state geologist determined the material to be bauxite, he told the contractor “the road you surfaced is now finished with the most valuable road-building material ever used on a highway.”

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[i] A concrete roadway in Maryland may have been a mile longer.  See “Public road mileage and revenues in Southern states, 1914,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Public Roads, 1917, Appendix, p. 56. (Accessible through USDA website.) Maryland is reported to have had 189.34 miles of concrete roadway at the end of 1914, of which 24 miles were in Baltimore County. The report doesn’t say whether it was a continuous 24-mile roadway with a bitumen coating, or when it was completed.

[ii] Looking Beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and Culture, Claudette Stager and Martha Carver, eds; University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 2006.

[iii] “The Automobile Age in Arkansas, Part II,” John Hume, in Arkansas Highways, V. 23, No. 3, Summer 1977.

[iv] “The Old Dollarway: It Was Narrow And Winding—But It Got You to Pine Bluff,” Arkansas Gazette, January 4, 1970, p. 6E.

[v] Historical Review Volume II: Arkansas State Highway Commission and Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department, 1913- 2003, published by the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department, Little Rock, 2003, p. 21.

Published in the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014.

Free Bridge, Dollarway, Arkansas Roads, Part I

100 Years Ago:  The Free Bridge, the Dollarway, and Arkansas Roads, Part I

By David Trulock

One hundred years ago, a “free bridge” across the Arkansas River was nearing completion six miles upriver from Pine Bluff. It was designed to be both a railroad bridge and a bridge for wagons, pedestrians, and—though they were not yet plentiful—autos and trucks. Thus it had two sets one set of train tracks down the middle, and separate, one-way “driveways” along each side.  But in the fall of 1914, neither railroad tracks nor roads were being constructed anywhere near the site of the almost-completed bridge.

The absence of adjoining railroad tracks is easy to understand.  Putting tracks on the new bridge was considered to be a first step in the future construction of a north-south railroad route, first proposed by a group of Pine Bluff businessmen in 1906. The Pine Bluff North and South Railway, as it was called, would compete with the existing east-west routes through the city and, it was hoped, lower local freight costs that were deemed to be unreasonably high at the time.

The absence of a roadway leading to the bridge as it neared completion is a little harder to understand.  These days, when we think of rural bridges we think of them as part of an interconnecting road system.  Wouldn’t a road out to the new bridge from Pine Bluff have been constructed at the same time as the bridge was being built?  

There was, in fact, a very nice road being built in Jefferson County at the same time the bridge was being constructed, but it was not related to the bridge project.  But it was an exception to the generally poor road conditions that prevailed in Arkansas at time.  The problem was not so much a lack of roads as it was a lack of maintenance and improvement of roads.  Local taxes were required to do that, and not enough local landowners, or perhaps not enough local politicians, wanted to pay for better local road conditions.  But national attention was being paid.

A United States Department of Agriculture publication from 1917 gives details on the mileages and types of public roads that existed in Arkansas at the time: [i]

At the close of 1914, Arkansas reported 50,743 miles of public road, of which 1,097 miles, or 2.16 percent, were surfaced.  Of the surfaced roads, 362.5 miles were plain macadam, 535 miles gravel, 175 sand clay, 21 concrete, and 4 miles were bituminous macadam. …  Quite a number of counties reported a smaller mileage of surfaced roads than was reported for 1909.  Several counties also reported large increases in total road mileage, with the result that the total mileage of all roads reported increased from 36,445 miles in 1909 to 50,743 miles in 1914, and that the percentage of surfaced roads shows a decrease on this account from 2.97 in 1909 to 2.16 in 1914.  In other words, if the figures are correct, Arkansas only had 11.75 more miles of improved roads in 1914 than in 1909.

The mileages given for improved roads are for roads “outside of incorporated cities.”

The 21 miles of concrete roadway reported refers to the exceptional roadway mentioned above, which many readers might now have guessed is Jefferson County’s historic Dollarway, completed in October 1914.  The Dollarway, also called the Dollarway Road, was actually between 22 and 23 miles in length, and was “concrete pavement,” meaning the concrete base had an asphalt or bitumen coating.  As is often noted, it was the longest stretch of paved concrete road in the United States at the time.  Also significant is the fact that the four small bridges along its route were the first in Arkansas to be built using what later became the standard material—reinforced concrete, which contains iron reinforcing rods or bars.

So in early November 1914, Arkansas had one short stretch of roadway in Jefferson County that its residents could be proud of, while overall its roads were in a rather shameful condition. At the same time, Jefferson County residents and particularly those who lived in Pine Bluff could brag about their almost-completed free bridge.  This was especially true after Thursday, November 5, when approximately 500 Pine Bluff residents were transported by barges up the river to tour the bridge, courtesy of the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Works, the contractor.  “The visitors were placed ashore on the south side of the river, mounted the bridge platform and walked to within one span of the north side of the river,” the Pine Bluff Commericial reported.[ii]  (The bridge had seven spans, one of which was a lift span.)

In newspapers during 1913 and 1914, the Free Bridge and the Dollarway were for the most part not dignified by capital letters, because those descriptive words had not yet become names.  The bridge was a free bridge as opposed to a toll bridge.  The road was constructed by “the dollarway method,” which, according to an Arkansas Gazette article by Jim Leslie, had first been used to pave West 10^th Street in Little Rock.[iii]  Leslie doesn’t say whether the 10^th Street project achieved the estimated one-dollar-per-linear-foot from which the name derives.  The final cost of the Dollarway, however, was closer to $1.36 per linear foot.[iv]  (Feel free to multiply that by 5280 to get the cost per mile.  One dollar per linear foot in 1913-14 was not cheap!)

How the Dollarway was paid for provides a lesson, perhaps, in why a new road from Pine Bluff to the Free Bridge wasn’t planned or constructed in a timely manner. Road Improvement Districts of that time period and the controversial “Bridge District” created to finance the Free Bridge—which didn’t open for traffic until April 1915—will be discussed in the next issue of the Quarterly.

But what about those railroad tracks on the bridge?

The tracks were torn out in 1926, and the center section was opened to automobile and truck traffic. The planned Pine Bluff North and South Railway never materialized.  In his 1974 book Saracen’s Country, Jim Leslie gives two reasons:  “The most important of these was the advent of World War I, which stopped all rail construction in the nation.  After the war the need for the connection became unnecessary, since better regulation of freight rates had developed and the two lines into the city were giving better service.”

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[i] “Public road mileage and revenues in Southern states, 1914,” Publication 387, USDA Bureau of Public Roads, 1917, p. 14.  Accessible online through Google Books.

[ii] “Big Crowd Saw the Free Bridge,” Pine Bluff Commercial, November 5, 1914, p. 1.

[iii] “The Old Dollarway: It Was Narrow And Windiing—But It Got You to Pine Bluff,” Arkansas Gazette, January 4, 1970, p. 6E.

[iv] “Dollarway Road” by Claudette Stager, in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.

Professor Plumgarden's Extraordinary Oversight

(This story of mine was published on the editorial page of the Hendrix College Profile on March 1, 1979, under the heading, “The Hendrix of the future . . . fiber optics?”).

The following story is mainly fiction—because it is set in the future—but it is based on fact. The fact is, however, that facts are not important to the story, so forget facts and use imagination instead. Imagine a college, such as Hendrix College, as it might be in 20 years or so. Imagine video input devices (TV cameras) in all the classrooms and classes being recorded and stored in digital form by computer, the result being a videoclass that could be copied and viewed on any television connected to a video playback device. Now try to imagine some of the difficulties that might arise…

Young professor Plumgarden was quite ill at ease as he paced slowly in a wide circle around the dean’s outer office. He hardly seemed to be pacing at all and indeed he was making every effort to appear as though he were casually walking around the perimeter of the office, inspecting the original art work hanging on the walls. The dean’s secretary was aware of the professor’s agitation, however, because every few moments Plumgarden would purse his lips while simultaneously furrowing his eyebrows and wrinkling his nose, giving the impression he’d just caught wind of a most unpleasant odor. The secretary was relieved when Dean Wigner finally ushered the professor into his office.

Wigner shook Plumgarden’s hand and offered him a chair. “I haven’t seen much of you since you joined our faculty,” Wigner said as he seated himself behind his massive desk. “In fact, I didn’t even see you at our get-acquainted banquet before school started.”

Wrinkling his nose, raising his chin and closing his eyes briefly, Plumgarden replied, “I’m afraid I had to leave the banquet early. The cigar smoke was making me queasy.” He paused but before Wigner could come up with a polite response blurted out, “Dean Wigner, I must have today’s videoclass erased! It is most urgent!”

Wigner, who’d been reaching for his box of cigars after sitting down, had casually retracted his hand and, seeing what he was up against, composed his thoughts. “Please call me Eugene,” he said with a friendly nod. “And your first name is…?”

“Purifoy.”

“Oh, yes, I remember now. Well, I think you realize, Purifoy, that we’ve had to tighten up our erasure policy recently. Several of our instructors were erasing some of their classes simply because they didn’t like the lectures they’d given. You know—maybe they’d made improper use of English or maybe they’d just all of a sudden stopped lecturing and started cursing—they’re liable to do that when lecturing to an empty classroom. Of course, the computer’s assembly censor is programmed to distinguish between those kind of aberrant tones and syllables and the normal combinations of syllables and vocal dynamics, as you know, I’m sure. Some of the older professors still won’t rely on the computer however, and they’d erase entire lectures if they could get past the monitor program without going through the proper channels.”

Plumgarden had been opening and closing his mouth, ready to start talking if Wigner happened to pause long enough. He finally got the chance. “No, no! It’s much more serious than that! I thought today’s lecture was one of the best I’ve ever given. The students seemed inordinately attentive. They asked more questions and I seemed to be getting more feedback than ever from them. I was quite elated until after class when one student approached me and whispered, ‘Dr. Plumgarden, your fly is open.’ You cannot imagine my embarrassment—no, it was humiliation, abject humiliation! And on top of that, I found I had a smudge of chalk dust covering my forehead! I still have a bad habit of resting my hand in the chalk tray, and I’ve always put my palm on my forehead when in deep thought.” He paused and pursed his lips. “Eugene, you see my predicament…”

“I most certainly do, Purifoy,” Wigner said, nodding with grave sincerity, “and I can assure you I will take the necessary steps to have lecture erased. You’ll want to keep the audio—am I correct?”

“Yes, I would be quite happy for the students to copy the audio, if you’re certain they won’t be able to get video also. What appears on the screen if only the audio portion of a class is available?”

“Well, in your case, only a transcript of the lecture could be viewed,” Wigner explained, leaning back in his chair, “since your class meets in a room that hasn’t had the chalkboards replaced by fiber optics, which would directly record and store your notations for immediate display at any time during the videoclass. Most students get a hardcopy of the lectures, though, so they probably wouldn’t watch it on the screen. As likely as not, your students will just listen to the lecture, like we used to do on our cassette recorders.”

“That would be fine with me,” Plumgarden said in a rather strained manner as he stood up and then cleared his throat. “I simply can’t bear the thought of copies being made of my extraordinary oversight in today’s class. I overheard some students mention they were going to send a copy to Saturday Night Live!” Plumgarden closed his eyes tightly and put his hand on Wigner’s desk to steady himself.

Wigner walked around his desk and put one hand on Plumgarden’s shoulder. “I assure you the video data will be erased immediately, and permanently. I’ll have Jeannette call the memory supervisor right now.”

As they walked to the door of the dean’s office, Plumgarden brightened up. He looked at Wigner with one eyebrow raised, and as they stepped back into the outer office asked, “Wasn’t your wife a Schrödinger?” He quickly pursed his lips, because the question sounded a little daffy, especially to the secretary (who looked up quickly when she heard it), since she’d never heard of a Schrödinger.

Apparently oblivious to the professor’s slight discomfort, Wigner replied, “Yes, she was. Do you know the family?”

“Oh, no. I only know of the name from studying the philosophy of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger stands out in my memory because of his cat.”

Wigner was standing at the door to his office with one hand on the doorknob as Plumgarden slowly stepped backwards toward the outer door. “Yes, I think most people remember Schrödinger’s cat,” Wigner replied with a smile, “and rightly so, since it was a development that laid the foundations of modern quantum psychology.”

Plumgarden smiled back at Wigner and said, not without obvious pride, “My PhD work was in quantum psychology, and I worked with cats, too, as a matter of fact—”

“Well, Erwin never worked with cats, actually,” Wigner said quickly. “He only proposed it as a kind of thought experiment. What was the nature of your work with cats?”

“My work was entirely experimental.”

“What was the title of your thesis?”

Plumgarden smiled modestly. “I called it ‘On the Behavior of Cats in Aqueous Solutions.’ I showed that, in many cases, animal behavior is indeed discontinuous.”

“Well,” Wigner said rather loudly, as he started moving toward Plumgarden, thereby inducing Plumgarden to move toward the door a little faster, “I think you’re going to make your mark in this world, Purifoy, and I hope you’ll feel right at home with our other faculty members here.”

“I’ve already begun to feel at home, Eugene,” Plumgarden replied with a quiet happiness dancing in his eyes. “I do appreciate your help on this matter.”

“You’re quite welcome.” Wigner nodded and was about to turn away, but then seemed to remember something. As Plumgarden stepped into the hallway, Wigner waved to him through the glass door and called, “I’ll see if we can’t get you into a room with the fiber optics.”

—David Trulock

The Super Collider: Round & Round It Goes. Where Does It Lead?

"Sir Ernest Rutherford is battering the atom by an electric attack under staggering voltage; and the negative electrons thus violently expelled from the domain of the positive nucleus are realizing the speculative guess made, centuries ago, by Hipparchus, that atoms could lose portions of themselves and thereby change their essence." — from a 1928 lecture given by the Scottish mathematician Andrew Russell Forsyth.

                                                                     By David Trulock

(published  in the Austin Chronicle on 13 January 1989)

Just after 6 p.m. on November 10^th I was waiting for my personal particle accelerator to warm up, so I could find out if Texas had been selected as the site for the much-ballyhooed Super Conducting Supercollider.

I was having a synchronization problem. My radiation detectors refused to synchronize with the target scanning rate of my accelerator. In other words, I was trying to watch the news on TV, but the stupid vertical hold wouldn’t hold.

Or maybe it’s the horizontal hold—I keep getting vertical and horizontal adjustments mixed up. I guess that’s one reason I majored in physics instead of becoming a TV repairman, although I did start studying physics while I was enrolled in a Vo-Tech electronics course. Anyway, when I saw the craggy features of Governor Bill Clements’ face flipping vertically across the screen (aha—vertical hold!), and heard him say how everyone pulled together to win the Super Collider, I knew: Waxahachie, Texas is the place.

Ooo coo coo. Golden cities. Golden towns

And great big signs and they all say:

Hallelujah. Yodel-lay hee hoo.
Every man for himself.

—Laurie Anderson, Big Science

A pretty accurate description of the real estate speculation going on in Waxahachie, wouldn’t you say? New shopping malls, a sports center, a freeway, and numerous drive-in banks—they’re all in the picture for the golden town. But beyond enriching landowners, real estate agents and construction contractors, is the Super Collider really worth building? What will it do that’s worth doing?

What it will do is convert energy into matter. The energy will come from accelerating protons to high speeds in opposite directions, then allowing them to smash into each other. For a very brief time after the collision, some of the energy of motion of the protons will be converted into unstable forms of matter. It is these unstable states of matter that coalesced into stable matter soon after the universe began—if the universe began as physicists and astronomers think it did. That “if” is by far the most compelling reason to collide particles at an energy 20 times greater than is now available.              

It also points to something that is being left out of the Super Collider discussion. From the way Texas politicians are talking, the Super Collider is the be-all and end-all of elementary particle physics. But particle physics, high-energy physics, will not end with the Super Collider, which will very likely generate more questions than answers. And then what? A higher energy machine will be needed.

So the Super Collider is a step up the high-energy physics ladder, not a complete stairway to heaven. The question therefore is simply this: Is it the right step?

In July 1983, the High Energy Advisory Panel at the Department of Energy decided the Super Collider was the right step. According to a 1985 article in Physics Today, the debate that led to that decision was “long and agonizing,” partly because the decision meant that proposals to expand existing accelerator facilities would not be approved. The Advisory Panel envisioned the Super Collider as a monolithic move forward for high-energy physics in the United States, a move that would “reassert American scientific supremacy.” President Reagan gave his enthusiastic stamp of approval to the project, and presumably President Bush will continue to support it when push comes to shove over funding in the upcoming session of Congress.

Some physicists, however, would prefer federal research money to be spread around a bit rather than concentrated in one project. A report last May in Physics Today noted that the Super Collider project “deeply divides the physics community, largely because of its cost and emphasis.” But the division seems to be more of a philosophical one rather than a technical one. “The polarization,” says the report, is mainly over priorities: big science or little science, crisis response or attention to long-term needs, national pre-eminence or international cooperation.” Every physicist for himself, in other words. What, then, is Congress going to think when it is faced with finding the funds to pay for the Super Collider? If the physicists aren’t sure about the project—well, hell, how are congressmen supposed to know what to do without solid support from a large block of lobbyists?

But let’s leave the quark-barrel politics behind, and get back to the central issue—whether the Super Collider is the best thing for elementary particle physics. Particle physics is necessarily big science, but particle physicists need not put all their ergs in one 53-mile in circumference basket. (An erg is a unit of energy, and energy in physics is the payment for doing work, so energy is a lot like money. And just as there are different units of money—dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies—there are different units of energy—joules, ergs, kilowatt-hours, calories and electron volts, for instance. Protons in the Super Collider will each have 32 ergs of energy when they collide. That’s equivalent to 20 trillion electron volts, or 20 TeV, each—meager when compared with the 251,000 TeV contained in a can of light beer. And they call it high-energy physics!)

While most particle physicists agree with the advisory panel’s decision, there are some supporters of particle physics who do not. One of them is Freeman Dyson, who has earned respect as both a physicist and a writer, or, more generally, as a thinker. Dyson, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, expressed his viewpoint in a recent opinion column in Physics Today.

“Every new machine is a gamble,” says Dyson. “If we build the SSC, it might turn out to be a glorious success or it might turn out to a flop. In either case, we will want to build other machines to carry on from where the SSC stops. Unfortunately, the SSC is an end rather than a beginning.”

How would the Super Collider be a flop? It would be a flop if it didn’t generate new questions—if, for instance, its energy wasn’t high enough to adequately produce new phenomena not seen at presently available energies. It would be a flop if it merely added details to what we already know, although such details could be fodder for hundreds of scientific papers (each co-authored by fifty or so physicists). And it would be a flop if laser acceleration of particles became feasible in the near future, because laser acceleration could probably do the work of the Super Collider at a fraction of its cost.

In fact, one of the alternatives to the Super Collider suggested by Dyson is an investment in laser acceleration research. Right now, nobody knows how to accelerate particles to high energy with laser radiation. But if it could be done, laser accelerators would be a great deal smaller than today’s electromagnet-based accelerators. Being much smaller would presumably make them much cheaper to build.

If the Super Collider does turn out to be a less useful machine than its backers anticipate, there is no practical or inexpensive way to increase its energy. that is why Dyson calls it an end rather than a beginning. For circular accelerators like the Super Collider, an energy increase can be achieved either by having a larger circular path or by increasing the efficiency of the electromagnets used for acceleration. Either case means rebuilding the machine.

Linear colliders, which accelerate particles in opposite directions along a straight line, can be “pursued incrementally,” says Dyson. That is, the available energy can be increased without rebuilding the machine. Since laser acceleration is uniquely suited for use in a linear collider, Dyson suggests that the alternative to the Super Collider is a concurrent investment in laser acceleration research linear collider technology.

In May, three months after Dyson’s opinion column appeared, the letters section of Physics Today was heavily weighted with responses to Dyson’s challenge. The responses brim with practical, hard-headed reasoning. Several letters noted that a subpanel of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel had considered linear colliders and found them to be less scientifically attractive than the Super Collider. Others noted that important particle physics research would be put on hold if laser acceleration research were to be chosen as an alternative to the Super Collider. And one letter said that the Super Collider “cannot be a flop,” citing calculations any interested physicist can follow through.”

Practical, hard-headed reasoning may be a necessary component of physics, but it is not sufficient for making great discoveries. Indeed, the greatest discoveries in physics have generally come from ideas that seemed crazy when subjected to the practical, hardheaded wisdom of a particular era. But such ideas have come from individuals, not from panels or subpanels. Collectively, people are more prone to do whatever is necessary to maintain some kind of status quo, which can lead to such things as bad investments by savings and loan institutions or continued use of an unsafe booster rocket for the space shuttle.

Not that Dyson’s ideas sound crazy. In his letter of rebuttal to his critics, he says that higher-energy particle accelerators are needed, and should be built “when we can do so cost effectively.” But he also says that higher energy is only one of several relevant criteria for continued research in particle physics. Then, after making his technical points, Dyson points to the philosophical ground on which he stands:

“In conclusion, I urge my critics to remember that the universe is, as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane said, not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. There is no illusion more dangerous than the belief that the progress of science is predictable. If you look for nature’s secrets in only one direction, you are likely to miss the most important secrets—those that you did not have enough imagination to predict.”

It seems, however, that most particle physicists are not as concerned with imagination as they are with insurance: the Super Collider insures that experimental particle physics research will not be interrupted. But maybe it should be interrupted. Although I was hopping around my house in excitement on November 10^th when I heard the word on the Waxahachie site, I also know something about the risks of investing huge amounts of money in scientific research—that there is no insurance when it comes to making discoveries. The lack of desirable and expensive laboratory instruments has been the key to some very important discoveries, and the awarding of large research grants has often simply increased the number of unread and uninteresting scientific papers. Lord knows there are too many of those these days.

So, while physicists are still “battering the atom by an electric attack under staggering voltage,” the costs of doing so can be more staggering than the voltages involved, and the number of research papers and journals is battering the budgets of university libraries. I hesitate to complain—an official inquiry into the matter might result in a new scientific journal called The Journal of Particle Physics Economics.

Instead, I’ll celebrate the coming of the Super Collider to Texas with a six pack of Quark, the breakfast of Nobel Prize winners. Or, as Laurie Anderson put it: Hey Professor! Could you turn out the lights? Let’s roll the film.

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21st Century Update: the Super Collider project was cancelled by Congress in late 1993, five years after the Texas site was selected. About $2 billion had been spent; physicists who were on the payroll were left without jobs (including some foreign physicists who’d moved to the U.S. to work on the project); and, probably the worst side effect, numerous people had lost houses and family farms in the Waxahachie area that were not recoverable. The only good thing to come out of the project that I’m aware of is the lighthearted 2003 novel “A Hole In Texas,” by Herman Wouk. But, like the whole Super Collider foofaraw, it’s not particularly memorable.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, also collides protons, but has less energy than the Super Collider would have had, only 7 TeV. It nevertheless found the Holy Grail of Standard Model particle physics, the Higgs boson, in 2012.  Nothing else of consequence has been discovered since then, but the collider will come back on-line soon, with more power.