All the while, Beach watched Manhattan's streets growing hopelessly dirty and dangerous as four or five horse-drawn omnibuses rattled by each minute. He turned his attention to urban rail service. The British had just built a small experimental subway line in London, but it'd be another thirty years before regular subway service was finally established in America.
In 1866, Beach petitioned the City for something called a postal dispatch charter. That was actually a smokescreen -- a way to get authorization to build a subway system without letting the city of New York know what he was doing. He meant to start with a small 300-foot demonstration line under Broadway. He had to keep it secret from the corrupt Boss Tweed (of Tammany Hall infamy) because he knew Tweed would extort extra money before he'd let him dig.
Alfred Beach's pneumatic New York subway, a giant pneumatic tube ran for one block west of City Hall and was based on his 1865 patent. It was America's first subway.