When Science Fiction was Fact: The New Jersey Steam Man of 1868

 

        Is it a machine?  Or is this some kind of human being?

Whatever the thing is, it’s moving in slow, lumbering circles around Military Park in Newark, New Jersey, on the morning of January 23, 1868.

It has the form of a man, albeit a very large man, standing as it does at over seven feet tall.  And it is wearing the elegant clothes of a Victorian Era gentleman complete with a vest, top hat, trousers and polished leather shoes.  In fact, it even has a moustache!

Yet, as the crowd gathers in the park that morning in Newark to gawk at this futuristic looking spectacle that seems to be moving all on its own, something appears staged, maybe even a little gimmicky about the whole thing.

The being is pulling a cart, like a small rickshaw, which it holds in its two lanky long metal arms that hang down at its side, and sitting in that cart is its eccentric inventor, Zadoc P. Dederick.

Military Park Newark NJ circa 1900

        Dederick is urging the assembled masses to, “Come see the Newark Steam Man up close and in-person for only twenty-five cents!”

Zadoc P. Dederick, inventor of the Newark Steam Man, is a patternmaker for local metal foundries by trade and he has put his metalworking skills to use and created the steam powered facsimile of a man that he hopes will make him a fortune.

In the end, Dederick won’t make much of anything off of his futuristic invention, but he will help to create an entirely new and unique genre of literature and entertainment that remains popular to this very day.

However,  back in January of 1868 Dederick touted his Newark Steam Man as,”The solution to the problem of the horseless carriage”, and he believed that his invention was the answer to affordable mass produced self-propelled transportation nearly half a century before the arrival of Henry Ford and his Model T automobile.

He hopes that in the future he will be able to redesign and tweak his Steam Man enough so that it will be capable of traveling at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour while pulling two adults.  Despite the fact that it has cost Zadoc over $1000 to produce this first prototype he is seeking to get enough investors, and make enough profit from showings such as this one in Military Park, to be able to reduce those costs enough to allow him to reproduce his Steam Man at the more affordable retail price of $300 apiece or about $6,000 each in today’s money.

The Newark Steam Man is powered by a 6 horsepower steam engine that is tucked away in a bulbous cast iron compartment inside of its belly.  The legs are double jointed and witnesses report that it, “Stumbles along with a disjointed gait not unlike a drunken man.”

Still, for those who see that first demonstration on January 23, 1868, the idea that a machine could move on its own, particularly one that looks so much like a man, is too shocking a sight for many to absorb.

Original Patent Blueprint of the Newark Steam Man

        That week the Newark Daily Journal reported that many well-to-do ladies became faint and nearly passed out after paying their quarter for the opportunity to see the Steam Man up close and personal and observing how lifelike it truly was.

The same paper went on to earnestly question, “if steam men and women are made and reproduced will it be possible for normal men and women to compete?”

It is difficult to tell  what exactly the Daily Journal meant by its use of the word ‘compete’ but clearly, at the time, many questioned if it was a good idea for technology to become so advanced or if Zadoc P. Dederick somehow attempted to play God by having created the Newark Steam Man.

In addition to the 6 horsepower engine in his belly the Newark Steam Man also had a smokestack hidden in his face and top hat that released smoke through a hole in the top of the hat while his long riveted arms pulled a cart on metal wheels which in addition to being able to carry passengers also housed a large iron fuel tank that continuously powered the engine through a series of gears and rubber hoses.

What Zadoc P. Dederick really created was a primitive example of the internal combustion engine that was years ahead of its time.  Although he did not see the promise in his engine and instead  went ahead and only took out a patent for the external form of the Newark Steam Man on March 24, 1868, and not for the internal workings of the machine, which had he done so would have made him a very rich man indeed for years to come.

The Steam Man of Newark remained on display for several weeks in Military Park and outside at a nearby beer garden where revelers could pay to touch the machine and take a spin being pulled in the machine’s rickshaw cart.  Zadoc even took his invention to New York City where it was put on display for even larger crowds to view on Broadway.

Dederick would take his Steam Man of Newark on a whirlwind tour of the United States during the second half of 1868 and first half of 1869 making stops in not only New York City, but also Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington D.C. and Chicago all before the summer of 1869.

Advertisement for the Steam Powered Man

Marcus Lawrence Ward, Governor of New Jersey in 1868, made several trips to Newark to see the Steam Powered Man.  He was so taken with Dederick’s invention that he suggested that Steam Powered Men could be mass produced and used as a means to transport settlers out west and, “develop the plains and prairies.”

With the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad only a year later in 1869 that connected the east and west coasts of the United States, most people forgot about the Steam Man of Newark as a tool that could be used for westward expansion, but Governor Ward’s suggestions regarding the Steam Man may have influenced one young writer from Red Bank, New Jersey, and changed the course of American literature and entertainment forever in the process.

That young writer was Edward Ellis, and he was inspired after viewing the Newark Steam Man for himself, and hearing about Governor Ward’s remarks, to write a novel entitled The Steam Man of the Prairies.

The Steam Man of the Prairies is a novel with a far-fetched plot about a giant sized steam powered man who inhabits the vast American plains and goes on a series of whimsical adventures.  What makes Ellis’ novel noteworthy is that it is one of the very first examples of what most literary scholars consider modern day science fiction.  It is, without a doubt, the first example of the science fiction genre appearing in American popular fiction and was wildly popular in its day going through eight separate printings in the years between 1869 and 1904.

First Edition of The Steam Man of the Prairies

Oddly enough, no one knows for sure what happened to the Steam Man of Newark New Jersey after the year 1868.

Information regarding the life of Zadoc Dederick after the appearance of his Steam Man in 1868 is scarce, but many believe that after amassing a small amount of money he could have dismantled his own machine in the hopes of improving upon it as he had originally promised and just simply never have gotten around to it.  

Within twenty years inventors would start to make viable versions of steam powered four-wheeled automobiles that would have relegated Zadoc P. Dederick’s Steam Man obsolete.  Also, during the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century bicycles started to become all the rage as methods of transportation and recreation for both men and women, before they too would be largely replaced by the automobile prior to the outbreak of the First World War.  But by the 1870’s the bicycle would have appealed to many as a much more economical and easier to maintain method of transportation than anything else driven by a steam powered engine.

Perhaps, like many ideas that are years ahead of their time, the world was just not ready for the Steam Man of Newark New Jersey, or maybe, people just didn’t want to pay that kind of money to lumber around with a gait not unlike that of a drunken man.  Who knows?

We may never know what really happened to the Steam Man of Newark New Jersey, but for a few brief moments in early 1868, science fiction became science fact for all to see, and although the fact has since left us, the fiction has stayed behind forever.