The Crash at Crush of 1896 | Episode 19

Back in the day before marketing appeared in washrooms, projected on buildings, geo targeted your phone, and dragged on banners across the sky. People could raise brand awareness simply by blowing things up. Get ready for the story of the worst marketing stunt in American history. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous podcast. Together we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. For example, on today's episode, you will hear about skull fractures and eye gouges, and steam burns, and people playing catch with flaming metal and showers of boiling water. This is not the podcast you play around your kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learned something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. The Greatest Showman is a musical in movie that celebrates the birth of show business and tells the story of P. T. Barnum, a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation. Sorry not sorry. P. T. Barnum was a relentless self promoter whose loathsomeness was legendary in the storied history of human garbage. He would exhibit anything from taxidermied half monkey, half fish mermaids to indigenous people or African Americans as oddities to be laughed at. He especially loved people with earth defects. He also did love a good song and dance about racial inferiority. One of his earliest touring hits was a woman named Joyce Heath. She was blind and partially paralyzed, and she'd been a slave who Barnum purchased and reinvented as the former nurse of George Washington, and that would have made her about one hundred and sixty one at the time. When she died, Barnum charged spectators to watch her autopsy, and he felt bad that he could really only do that that one time. But no, this is not the story of P. T. Barnum. From electrocuting elephants to burning down buildings, history is littered with publicity stunts that went off the rails. Even in the modern age, we've seen minor gaffes like Susan Boyle's album launch with that dual purpose hashtag Susan album Party that read more like Sue's anal bomb party, to major screw ups like the unannounced Air Force one low altitude photoshoot over New York City that nearly led to the paniced evacuation of Manhattan Island. Today, we're going to explore a marketing stunt way more dangerous than some anal bumb party. Today's story takes us to the lone star state of the eighteen nineties, Texas. Let's see what was happening back then. Nearby Utah had just become the forty fifth state. Hordes of people were wagon training it up to the Klondike to panhandle for gold. Coal miners in Pennsylvania were shot by the police for asking for time off. The Supreme Court checkmarked racial segregation under the Separate but Equal doctrine, and the Sioux people were massacred at Wounded Knee. It actually gets worse the further you go. Back in the mid eighteen hundreds, most of the land west of the Mississippi River was relatively uninhabited. Depending on your moral and ethical point of view, The federal government wanted to change things up by creating rail routes all the way to the Pacific. US Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who later became the Confederate States of America's first worst and only president who was loathed by a good chunk of Congress, his own military, future, historians, native groups, and the public at large. This was the dude that led the surveying efforts for the new rail lines leading through Native American territory. After all, manifest destiny meant moving white people like chess pieces all over the board, and railways cut ninety percent off their travel time. They were literally nine hundred times faster than wagon trains. New railways meant developers were able to create entirely new towns and settlements without being tied to rivers. From eighteen fifty three to nineteen oh five, more than two hundred and seventy railroad companies nailed track all over Texas. It boasted more miles of track than any other state, a record that still stands today. Back then, railroads were literally considered railed roadways, and the king of the rails was the steam locomotive. Anyone alive today will take trains for granted, so let me explain how revolutionary they were. If you traveled back to seventeen oh four and showed a commoner of video on your phone, they would immediately beat you to death for being a witch. Fast forward one hundred years to when the first steam train was built, and people reacted just as weirdly. They could travel at twenty five miles per hour or forty kilometers per hour. Mankind had never traveled at such dizzying velocities. They thought passengers would be shaken unconscious by the vibrations. People believed the air would be whizzing by you so fast that people would not be able to catch a breath. They thought a train trip would be enough to unhinge the mind and injure the brain, leading to insanity and violent outbursts, and the sight of the landscape flying by the windows would lead to mental psychosis. As late as eighteen ninety eight, doctors wrote that women who traveled at more than fifty miles or eighty kilometers an hour could expect their uteruses to prolapse and fall out, quote the resulting sterility defeating a woman's true purpose in life. In fact, some people suspected out loud that a human body might just melt and fall apart at high speeds. Remember, these people were not that far removed from an age where the fastest you could travel was by horse. Picture the old timiest train you can and you're probably pretty close to. Picturing a mid nineteenth century steam locomotive, giant cylindrical beasts rhythmically chugging out puffs from a tapered smoke stack up front. If you feel like you've been trapped into a History of Trains podcast at this point, fear not. There will be blood a first the history of transportation In a nutshell, Most of the energy we use for transportation comes from oil, but that wasn't always the case. The typical steam engine burned coal or wood or oil. It boiled water into steam in an enormous boiler, which was then piped into cylinders to power these rotating pistons attached to the wheels by long arms. Until the early twentieth century, coal was the world's favorite fuel, and it powered everything from trains and ships to the ill fated steam planes invented by the American scientist Samuel P. Langley, an early rival of the right Murners. Coal is an organic chemical, which means is based on the element carbon. It forms over millions of years when the remains of dead plants and animals get buried under rocks, squeezed by the pressure, and cooked by the Earth's internal heat. That's why we call them fossil fuels. Lumps of coal are really lumps of energy. The carbon inside them is locked to atoms of hydrogen and oxygen by joints we call chemical bonds. When we burn coal in a fire, those bonds break apart and the energy is released in the form of heat. Coal was cheap and abundant, and it was also filthy and contains half as much energy per kilogram as say, gasoline or diesel or kerosene. Not to mention the health effects. Coal dust is incredibly fine, less than two and a half microns across. Once you suck it into your lungs, there it stays, increasing your chances of respiratory diseases like asthma or lung cancer. So yeah, owner operators would jump at the chance to switch from coal to cleaner, more efficient alternatives. Could have been worse, though, when the steam engine was first modeled Dutch physicists Christian Kuigans. The pistons were powered by exploding gunpowder. Can you imagine how unbelievably loud living in a parallel reality where Hugen's exploding trains became the dominant mode of transportation. Back in eighteen ninety two, of the biggest employers in the country were the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cortage Company YEP, the two biggest employers in the country were a railroad and a rope company. America was a pretty different place back then, anyway. By eighteen ninety three, both went belly up, which led to a panic on Wall Street. Banks and investment firms began calling in loans, and hundreds of businesses that had borrowed heavily to expand their operations during the post war boom were sco rude All across the country. Over fifteen thousand businesses disappeared. One in four railroad companies filed for bankruptcy. Money was tight and jobs were hard to come by. Unemployment soared as high as twenty five percent. Homelessness skyrocketed. You probably never heard of the panic of eighteen ninety three, but it was only second to the Great Depression in terms of severity. It ended by eighteen ninety seven, but today's story takes place in eighteen ninety six. For our story, we're going to follow the adventures of the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad, which was popularly shortened to the KT even though most people used it more casually like Katie like, Hey, Katie, hun, what do you want on your hot dog? The KD as a business was well aware of the economic and competitive pressures. The only way for companies to survive the panic was to reduce costs and approve efficiency. So the thing about steam engines is they were big and hungry and inefficient. A conductor shovels coal to make the furnace as hot as possible. The hotter the furnace, the more water bubbles in the boiler unit turns into steam, which drives the pistons, and whoosh, you're off. Like we said, But they needed a tremendous amount of fuel and energy to build up that steam pressure, and every time it had to stop or slow down, they basically threw threw away all at steam and had to start all over again. Imagine replacing your shoes every time you stopped. As an example, in a week, typical locomotives consumed its own weight and coal and water. Engineers eventually figured out how to construct new engines that were smaller but had much stronger boilers that produced more steam even at higher pressures. Most railways used thirty ton engines, but these new sixty ton models could produce twice as much power with less effort. So yeah, the KADI was forced to pony up to maintain their competitiveness or risk becoming obsolete. Of course they were worried. For one, it was exactly this heavy outlay of cash that was the exact kind of thing that drove so many companies into the ground just three years earlier. That with each new train purchase, the KDI increased its stockpile of older thirty ton models. Some were sold off, but there were plenty gathering dust and recycling was not yet a thing. The other side of the equation was the fact that by the mid eighteen nineties there were more than eight thousand miles of rail line spider webbing across the state of Texas. This much competition meant that railroads, who were more used to engines of steam, had to learn the engines of marketing and promotion. Fortunately for the Katie they had an ace up their sleeve that they didn't even know about. William George Crush joined the KD five years earlier as a general passenger agent out of their head office in Denison, Texas. He worked with the railroads since he was twenty three. What made him so valuable was his brain. He was as enthusiastic about creative thinking and marketing as he was about mustache maintenance. And finally, caving in to his youthful exuberance, the Katies president, Frank rous And delber Jones, who was a very influential member of the board of directors, agreed to a meeting with him. They discussed his thoughts on new ways of increasing freight business and promoting the Katie Flyer, a fast, new train with first class service let people travel all the way to Saint Louis and Chicago without having to change trains. Then he described his most ambitious idea. Back then, men could join a farmer's group for socializing, and women had the Christian Temperance Union, but actual entertainment was rare and hard to come by. Texas college football wasn't even a thing. Yet, Crush ecstatically pitched his plan to destroy two of the cadi's train in a duel of iron monsters. He wanted to line them up on a single track, facing each other and sell popcorn. A train wreck in the eighteen hundreds was front page news. The idea of two trains crashing together through the filter of our modern age would be about as exciting as watching four seven forty sevens somehow smashing together. It wasn't the most original idea, but it was a good one. A couple months earlier, the Columbus and Hawking Valley Railroad had been facing the same issues surrounding over stock and pr and their quick solution was to stage a locomotive crash. It created a ton of public attention for them. Crush went on to explain that he felt confident he could draw a crowd of at least twenty thousand people, as he staked his reputation on it. He didn't tell them about a time earlier when a railway equipment salesman Al's Streeters had done the same thing in Ohio and a man had been injured by a flying bolt. It just skipped his memory. The newspapers called the collision the most realistic and expensive spectacle ever produced for the amusement of an American audience. Rouse and Jones were skeptical, but Crush had an ace up his own sleeve. Crush was on first name terms with at least two dozen newspaper editors, traveled in a good society circle, and was a good friend of John Ringling of the Ringling Brothers circus. So they agreed to take his idea to the board and pretended like they hated it, but secretly they loved it, and they could not wait to see two trains crash together. Crush immediately went to work. He labored around the clock. This was his big chance. He knew, you only get one shot. You do not miss your chance to blow up two trains. This opportunity only comes once in a lifetime. Every paper along the line from Chicago to Galveston ran the story and were thirsty for more details. Articles on every aspect of the subject appeared almost daily for a month before the big event. Crush described it as a scientific experiment to establish cause and effect. See the collision was to be viewed by technical engineers and the results would be thoroughly examined to ascertain the weak points of the present construction of locomotives. Yep, the papers believed that too. Thousands of posters built it as the site of a lifetime larger than the circus, greater than the state fair. With vivid red illustrations of the before and after. They were printed and posted all over Missouri, Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, which back then they still called Indian Territory. Before long, letters started pouring in from all over the country, slowly at first, and then by the hundreds. Some came all the way from the Pacific Coast, others were from the Eastern States, but the most came from Texas. One was from an engineer who wanted to drive one of the locomotives and was willing to risk getting smashed to pieces as part of the das. Others begged to ride in the rear cars just for the notoriety. One short scouting exercise later, and it was agreed that the spectacle would be held along the Dallas Houston route at a site fourteen miles or twenty three kilometers north of Waco and three miles or four point eight kilometers south of a town called West in McClellan County, and yes, it was obviously remote, but it sat in a shallow valley surrounded by endless acres of Texas farmland and hugged hills on three sides. It created a natural amphitheater, promising a good view would be had by all. They created a separate four mile segment of track alongside the Kadi Railroad so that there was no chance a runaway train could end up on the main line. Each end of the track was situated atop a low hill on opposite sides of a bowl shaped valley in which the trains would meet. Two American type four to four zero thirty five ton engines manufactured by Grant Locomotive Works were chosen. Each weighed seventy eight thousand pounds and they held twenty five hundred gallons of water, which added another twenty thousand pounds to the weight. The event was promoted for months by the railroad company, with posters and ads and newspapers along the railway towns for thousands of miles, foreshadowing it was heavily publicised as a safe event. The day would be captured in black and white, but the in person audience would be in for a treat. Mister Crush had the locomotives rebuilt, remodeled, and repainted in opposing schemes of practically every primary color, but mostly in red and one in green. Rather than charge an entrance fee from the public, it was decided that the event would be free for all. They even went so far as to promise that no food vendors would gouge the visitors, and even paid to have two wells dog on site with pipes to run several hundred faucets. In marketing terms, this is called lost leadership. It's a pricing strategy where a company draws you in with an offer so good that they're actually willing to lose money on it, but intending to make it back in other ways. Classic example, Gillette used to give away their razors for free, knowing the customers would have to pay for replacement blades, which is where the company makes its real money. The only profit that Kadi made was from the sale of tickets on special excursion trains that would run to and from the site, but those fares were offered at bargain rates. The price was a flat two dollars per round trip ticket. From anywhere in the state. Special excursion trains were so packed that some chose to ride on the roof for lack of room inside. If you thought you were paying two dollars to travel the middle of nowhere, stand in a field and watch two trains crash before starting to make your way home, you could not be more wrong. For starts. Instead of stumbling off a train into the middle of the desert, Crush erected a twenty one hundred foot station platform. They built an actual town for the occasion. The Wringling Brothers Circus ponied up a fifty x seventy five foot tempt to use as a restaurant, with F. E. Miller at the helm. He was the cadi's head chef. I bet you didn't know that railroad companies had head chefs, and not just that. A festival atmosphere rose up around the event. There were midway rides and carnival games in a pretty good recreation of the eighteen ninety three Chicago World's Fair. Those lemonade stands, medicine shows, cigar vendors, and sideshow acts. To entertain the crowds. A large bandshell was set up with speaker stands. Turns out politicians thought this was a pretty good place to come and talk. Reporters got their own sets of stands, and two telegraph officers were built so they could spread their word live across the land. The KT christened the space Crush, Texas in honor of Bill Crush. But the greatest gift was the event name. The crash at Crush and the backbone of old timy marketing was awesome alliteration, like Coca Cola or dunkin Donuts. You won't find it on a map, but for one single day in the late summer of eighteen ninety six, a town was born. It was home to as many as fifty thousand people, and it became ground zero for the most insane marketing stunt of all time. Of course, the first rule of event marketing is return on investment. Then comes budget and timing, but the fourth rule is safety and liability. Crush had safety on the brain. He consulted with engineers and mechanics to make absolutely sure the audience only felt the exhilaration and maybe a gust of dust and wind wafting over from the impact. The main concern had been whether each of the engines boilers would hold up under the stress of the crash. Steam engines use a large, heavy metal pressure tank called a boiler. It's big and heavy and full of water, which itself is also big and heavy. Fire borels of water into steam. We already talked about this, but since steam takes up seventeen hundred times as much volume as water, the expansion creates a tremendous pressure inside the boiler, which transfers through the pipes to the cylinders that drive the wheels. We talked about that too. What we didn't say was that if for any reason a boiler ruptured under pressure, the result would be almost exactly like a large bomb being set off. You remember the amount of damage a pressure cooker created at the Boston Marathon years back. Imagine one the size of a train engine. In eighteen sixty five, the steamship saw al Tana suffered a boiler explosion. She'd been heading up the Mississippi bringing Union soldiers home from the war, and long story short, its boiler exploded and killed around seventeen hundred. In nineteen twelve, a steam train at the Southern Pacific Roundhouse in San Antonio had its boiler rupture for unknown reasons, and the resulting explosion leveled most of the buildings in the railroad yard and much of the surrounding neighborhood with it. A house and its owner seven blocks away were crushed by the front end of the train as it fell from the sky. Forty people were killed and another fifty injured. There's been a lot written about the causes of boiler explosions, but they all boiled down to poor design, bad workmanship, or undetected flaws in the building materials. The engineers and mechanics, the very men that had originally built the engines, assured everyone that after a very high speed crash, it was almost impossible for them to cause any damage. The foreman at the Dennison, Texas Roundhouse that actually reworked the two locomotives warned that in his opinion, the engineers and mechanics were dead wrong, but he was overruled. While the crowds gathered, engine crews checked the trains over at least a dozen speed tests help predict the precise point of collision. Each engine would pull six box cars behind them filled with all kinds of crazy crap, just to make them heavier. Since the couplers linking the cars were the chain and pin variety. The cars were chained together to prevent them from coming apart during the impact. The best educated guess was that upon impact, the two trains would meet and fold up together in an inverted V shape. One of the conductors chosen for the event, Charles Kine, wrote Crush the most amazing letter before the event. He wrote, the vocation of a locomotive engineer is an honorable and high calling. More than the usual honor is added to the calling by the fact that I have been selected as one of the men to get the trains together under a full head of steam. Therefore, I humbly ask that you provide a safe, sure and speedy pony, equipped and ready at the point where I am to leave the engine, so that I may mount and ride to the scene in due form, becoming and befitting the dignity of an engineer. For you yourself can readily see how undignified it would appear for me to go plodding along like a plebeian to the wreck. After all is over, I submit this to you for your consideration, hoping that you will see the dignity and gravity of the situation and save me a long walk. The steam line to the air pump was disconnected so the air brakes couldn't be set by accident. All the tools and spare pins and other loose objects were removed from the train. As an extra safety precaution, A section of rail was removed from behind each locomotive to prevent the possibility that if one of the trains derailed before the collision, somehow, it wouldn't just carry on across the desert at full speed, becoming Louisiana or New Mexico's problem. Rope barriers were set up two hundred feet from the tracks to keep the crowd out of the designated danger zone. Members of the press and honor guests were allowed within one hundred yards. The big day itself was clear and bright. The Galveston Daily News reported that men, women and children, lawyers, doctors, merchants, farmers, artisans, and clerks representing every class and every grade of society, were scattered around over hillsides, or clustered around the lunch stands, discussing with eager anticipation the exciting event they had come so far to see. People showed up by wagon, buggy and horseback. By early afternoon, thirty thousand people were already on hand, but new trains, over stuffed with people, continued to arrive every twelve minutes. The surrounding hills were covered with people standing shoulder to shoulder. Every inch of space was covered and it was a sea of human beings, some standing in wagons, others trying to climb trees. Just after three pm, one of the trains steamed slowly over the course and was cheered by the crowd. Then the other train came down from its berth on a siding and was also loudly cheered. By four o'clock, people were so excited that a huge wage of humanity surged within thirty feet of the tracks. Constables were able with no small amount of effort and club waving to push them back. With people still arriving by the trainload, the start of the event was delayed by an hour. Did you know that only one point zero three percent of all public events actually begin at their posted times. About five pm, the two trains, each pulling six cars loaded with railway ties for extra weight, slowly met in the middle of the track to the cheers of the crowd so they could be photographed huge painted canvas banners hung on the side of the cars advertising the Oriental Hotel in Dallas State Fair, of course Ringling Brothers Circus, and of course the KT Railroad. They fist bumped cowcatchers, the mounted pieces of metal at the front of an engine they used to deflect track debris, and I assume the name came from an illustrious history of bisecting cows. The engineers waved to the crowd and backed away, rolling a distance of one mile up the natural incline in the landscape to their starting points at the opposite ends of the track. Dean's Photography in Waco was given exclusive rights to capture the event. They said up three cameras on a raised platform so they could capture a sequence just before, during, and after the impact. They brought all the toys, including a kinetoscope, it's kind of a steampunk looking device where you can view a kind of a motion picture through a peephole. And they brought a new fangled kind of camera called a codeac. At five to ten pm, Crush, who was acting as the Grand Marshal, wearing a blue sash, strode back and forth before the high spirited crowd atop a high spirited horse, which pressed forward again into the roped off safety zone. When Crush waved his hat into the air, a telegraph operator forwarded a signal a mile in each direction. The throttles were shoved open to a prearrange setting. Black smoke bellowed from the stacks, steam hissed loudly, and moments later the whistles began to scream. They tied off the whistles for added effect. The trains began to move, and there was no turning back. People were filled with dread as they watched the train's speed down the slope, knowing they had set into motion something that neither man nor God could stop. The crew from one train jumped after about fifteen hundred feet, while the other thrilled the crowd by staying on board for a full half mile before they leapt from the locomotive and did a barrel roll, jumped to their feet and bowed to the crowd Charlie in the chocolate factory style. The Dallas Morning News described what happened next. The rumble of the two trains, faint and far off at first, but growing nearer and more distinct with each fleeting second was like the gathering force of a cyclone. Nearer and nearer they came, the whistles of each blowing repeatedly, and the torpedoes, which had been placed on the track, exploding in an almost continuous round, like the rattle of musketry. Yep, that's right. Because they were worried that somehow there wouldn't be enough spectacle, they actually placed explosive charges from torpedoes spaced out on the tracks, which detonated under the train wheels to add to the excitement, like wrestlers entering a main event. Jarvis Joe Dean was the photographer. He trained in Europe and lived in nearby Waco, and he of course was there to capture the moment of disaster with his old timey fold out cameras. If his timing was just right, with a little bit of skill and a little bit of luck, he would forever preserve a moment of explosive delight. As the trains neared, he began frantically photographing as fast as he could. They rolled down the track at what for the time would have been an awe inspiring and frightful speed. Nearer and nearer they approached, the rumbling increased, the roaring grew louder. It took just two minutes for them to close the gap zero to fifty miles per hour in one hundred and twenty seconds. It's really not bad. For eighteen ninety six, the trains would meet with a combined speed of somewhere between ninety and one hundred and twenty miles per hour, or between one hundred and forty five and one hundred and ninety three kilometers per hour. Although witnesses were sure they were going quite a bit faster, no one can really say. When the trains were within a few feet of each other, some of the faint hearted clapped their hands over their ears, closed their eyes, and turned away. You've got to remember this was a genteel age still swooned its stuff back then, and the biggest portion of the crowd stood with their eyes open and mouths agape. The steam whistle screamed over the roar of the engine, only stopping with the shattering impact and the wrenching sound of violence as the huge mass of iron and steel slammed together. But the collision gave the spectators a little more than they bargained for. One witness exclaimed the air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel, varying in size from a postage stamp to half a driving wheel, falling indiscriminately on the just and unjust, the rich and the poor, the great and the small. Less than a split second of mere silence came before a second, ear shattering explosion, louder than a clap of thunder. Despite all the safety precautions, as if on cue, both boilers exploded simultaneously. A reporter from the Dallas Morning News said that the force of the explosion could not be conceived nor conveyed in written or spoken words. Smoke and steam were blown hundreds of feet in the air. Pieces of iron weighing two hundred pounds were hurled hundreds of feet. The cap sheaf of the smokestack sailed nearly a quarter of a mile and buried itself in the soil within fifteen feet of a streaming, shrieking mass of men and women who had seen its flight and were making a mad effort to not be where it wanted to be. The big pieces could be seen and heard, and a nibbleman could get out of their way. For the most part, railway trucks are the gear under the train where the wheels and axles are contained. They weighed nearly a ton apiece, and two of them flew nearly a hundred feet, cleaving through a telegraph pole and tearing down the wires for hundreds of feet. A cylinder head with about two feet of piston rod sailed through the air, spinning and whistling as it went, flashing the air, passing directly over the photographer's stand and threatening a nice decapitation for anyone. It meant half of one of the spokes of a driving wheel sizzled and screamed, slicing through the air as fast as an artillery shell, and came to rest so close to the kentoscope that the operator was left uncontrollably shivering. The explosion also emitted a blizzard of millions of undistinguishable bits of iron, steel, and wood, from as small as opposed to stamp, to the size of a man's hand, and each traveling as fast as a bullet, and it quickly broke out as the crowd turned and ran. The help of spectators were packed in like sardines. They just couldn't escape it. Given what we know about their mass and speed. The trains hit with a force of impact ranging from one to two million pounds. The box cars created additional waves of force with each additional impact. One Confederate veteran said that the smoke, explosions, and people falling all around him was more frightening than Pickett's last charge at Gettysburg. Groans and cries from the injured filled the air. Injured spectators sprawled on the ground in pain and bewilderment. After all, they'd been assured that the engines boilers would not explode. Those wounded were collected, some from as far as half a mile away, and treated by doctors who had closed their offices to witness the event. And Joe dene He did get his photo. He left with an incredible cepia image of the two trains blurring into each other at the exact moment of impact. He also left with an iron bolt that flew into his smiling face. It ripped out his right eyeball and buried itself in his skull. He dropped like a puppet with a strings cut and fell into a coma. Two people standing near him weren't nearly as lucky. Ernest Darnall had braved the thorns and climbed up the scrubby branches of a mesquite tree to get a better view of the event. He was just a teenager, so of course he was scolded that he was going to get hurt up there, and as all teenagers are wont to do, he snarkily replied by telling them that they were full of apple sauce or whatever it was. Teenagers of the eighteen nineties would say the one common thread that links teenagers throughout time is that they fear nothing. They're indestructible, they know everything, and they're going to live forever, except for Darnall. Immediately following the explosion, Darnall was hit directly between the eyes by a large metal hook attached to ten pounds of break chain, which nearly split his head into killing him instantly. Dozens of people even half a mile away were injured by scalding steam and burning metal fragments. Others were splashed by scalding water that erupted from the boilers. The wit Barnes, who had been standing between his wife and another woman, was struck and killed by a flying fragment. Fourteen year old Roy Kendrick was shot in the leg by a flying iron bolt. Missus J. L Overstreet was struck on the head just above the right ear by a fragment a boiler and knocked unconscious. Local farmer Theodore Millenberger was sitting in a tree, but he became kind of woozy at the sight of all the blood, and he fell. He broke his leg, he dislocated his hip, and he gashed his own scalp open. In trying to flee the scene, a man named John Morrison stepped onto the platform of a passenger coach, but he kind of missed his step and he was thrown underneath the wheels of the caboose and was cut in hash. The thing you have to understand, I suppose about all these various injuries us You're already in an agitated state, and then suddenly the guy beside you's heads explodes, or somebody gets cut in half right in front of you while you're waiting for a train. The panic would be continuously ratcheted up and highly contagious. As soon as the dense smoke had cleared, all that remained of the two engines and twelve cars was a smoking mass of fractured metal and kindling wood, except one car on the rear of each train survived relatively unscathed. An awful lot of unblinking attendees got too close a look that day. Would you know what to do if you'd been in attendance and caught a souvenir in the eye? Remember our episode on the stadium collapse in Coralais, What did we get from that? Before you go pulling anything out of anybody, you want nice clean hands, not for rubbing. Never rub an injured eye. You want to create a gentle stream of clean, warmish water to lightly carry away the invading object while you hold your eyelids open as much as you can. If you were in the shower, you do the same thing, but you let the water bounce off your forehead and flow over your eye. You do not want to shoot a shower head directly into your unblinking eye. I once had to use an eyewash station at work, but it had never been used before, so all I got was an unblinking eyefall of dust and desiccated spider parts. What if you got something in your eye like a branch or a bull horn? Three steps first, grab a towel, throw it over the horror and get thee to a specialist. Now what happens if your eye came out. First, don't throw up on the poor thing. Second, if you call it globe luxation, people won't immediately run away from you, and you will not have to scream my eye fell out to let people know. You wouldn't have to do any of that if you memorize the following technique for popping your own eye in back all by yourself. First, direct your days downward. Now, pinch and pull your upper eyelid with the thumb and index finger of one hand. Lay a finger from your other hand on the top part of your luxaated globe, taking care to press only on the white part because it's the least sensitive. While you continue to hold your eye lid up, push your eyeball gently down and back at the same time until it's part of the way back in. Then try to look upwards. If everything goes right, your eyeball will rotate under the upper lid and back into its socket. If your eye is too swollen to put in by yourself, a for effort you tried, take a bench call nine one one. You're going to be fine. But the medical text I read said that if the optic nerve is severed or damage, your outlook won't be as clear. For many who traveled a great distance to attend this spectacle and hadn't already disfigured themselves catching a piece of train in their torso or scalp, their immediate impulse was to fix that they were not to be denied to their souvenirs. Thousands rushed to the smoking heap of ruins, breaking down the rope barricade, climbing over bushes, and even running over other people who were slower and stuff umbled. Here's the thing about fire explosions worth noting. The metal gets incredibly hot. People burn their hands comically and repeatedly between two cranes that had been brought in for the event and the souvenir hunters. The site had been cleared the same day. The entire town was depopulated by midnight. Rumor had it that William Crush was immediately sacked by the KDI, only to be immediately re hired when their new train line became an overnight sensation. CRUSH's crash had led to a big boom in business. That illiterative pun was intended the KDI Railroad quickly settled lawsuits from victims families with offers of cash and lifetime rail passes. Joe Deane, the cyclops photographer, he received ten thousand dollars and a lifetime of free travel on the KD. That's right, he survived. A few months after the crash, he put this notice in a Waco newspaper. Having gotten all the loose screws and other hardware out of my head, I am now ready for all photographic business. I don't know if skipping the pronoun and going straight into the verb was a result of his injury or not. You could be forgiven for thinking that a disaster like this would put an immediate end to train crashes. People didn't go ramming boats and icebergs after the Titanic sank, But that is not even close to what happened. There were around one hundred deliberate train crashes at state fairs between eighteen ninety six in nineteen thirty two, But once the stock market crashed again and one in four people found themselves out of work smashing trains, it just finally lost its luster. This tragedy didn't spell the end of William Crush either. Ten years later, he took part in another promotional spectacle, a twelve day race that matched the KDI and Frisco lines against the Missouri, Pacific and Cotton Belt lines. The fastest team would win a contract to deliver US mail between Dallas and Saint Louis, and the race actually ended up in a tie, so the railroads ended up splitting the contract. In nineteen forty, at the age of seventy four, William George Crush retired from the railroad. He never lost his sincere love for the industry, and even after retirement, he went to his local station every day to meet the passenger trains. No one in the company's long history ever forgot the crash a Crush. Today, the collision is only commemorated by a historical plaque in West Texas, several miles from the site, which was stolen twice. So, dear listeners, if you went to a marketing event and had all your hair burned off with boiling steam, do you accept coupons for more of that service? Is that how your mind works? Some will argue that marketing is inherently evil. It encourages desire, it creates dissatisfaction, and it drives over consumption. These are three very outdated concepts in light of where society inevitably needs to head. I mean, it's taught kits to smoke. It's interfered with electoral processes. It's convinced people to try medicines that were worse than their ailments. It also taught people to at the polio vaccine. It's been used to make women feel empowered. Sometimes it honestly brings people together and unites them for a cause. Ask me if advertising is evil, Well, I've worked in marketing and advertising for decades and the simple answer is no. I mean, I've seen lots of people do crazy shit, but with anything like music, or social media or free speech, no form of communication is inherently evil. It all comes down to what you do with it. The train Wreck as a form of pr was consigned to history and William Crush would never receive recognition as a pioneer in experiential marketing. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire us an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review or screw that, just tell a friend. If you'd like to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com slash Funeral Kazoo or buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. If you're after cool episode specific swag, you're welcome to visit Evil reindeershop dot com. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Metic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they've helped three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot ca. On the next episode, We're gonna witness a disaster so awful it could make you and everyone you know and love not do think so good and then make fallover dead. It's the Lake Nios disaster of nineteen eighty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.