| Birth Date: | 1 September 1826 |
| Birth Place: | Springfield, Massachusetts, US |
| Death Place: | New York City, US |
| Known For: | Designing the Beach Pneumatic Transit |
| Education: | Monson Academy (now Wilbraham & Monson Academy) |
| Children: | Frederick Converse Beach |
| Father: | Moses Yale Beach |
| Family: | Yale |
| Relatives: | Moses S. Beach, brother William Yale Beach, brother Charles Yale Beach, nephew Stanley Yale Beach, grandson |
Alfred Ely Beach (September 1, 1826 – January 1, 1896) was an American inventor, entrepreneur, publisher, and patent lawyer, born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is known for his design of the earliest predecessor to the New York City Subway, the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which became the first subway in America.[1] He was an early owner and cofounder of Scientific American and Munn & Co., the country's leading patent agency, and helped secure patents for Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other innovators.[2] A member of the Union League of New York, he also invented a typewriter for the blind and a system for heating water with solar power.[3]
Beach was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and was the son of a prominent publisher, Moses Yale Beach, owner of the New York Sun and member of the Yale family.[4] His brother William Yale Beach was a banker while his other brother, Moses S. Beach, took over the family newspaper and supported the policies of Abraham Lincoln during his ownership. Alfred's brother was also later a trustee and shareholder in his Broadway Underground Railway Company, along with his son Frederick C. Beach, and his nephew Charles Yale Beach.[5]
Charles Yale's brothers-in-law were Commodore Holland Newton Stevenson, and John McAllister Stevenson, a Yale graduate and board director of the Pittsfield Electric Street Railway Company in 1892, which operated electric trolley cars, replacing horsecars.[6] [7] His three nephews and his great-grandnephew, Rev. Brewster Yale Beach, all attended Yale University.[8] [9]
Alfred worked for his father at the "Sun" until he and a friend, Orson Desaix Munn, decided to buy Scientific American, a relatively new publication, becoming the early founders of that company. He also brought in the venture Salem Howe Wales, President of the New York City Department of Docks and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beach was the editor and publisher of Scientific American for fifty years, and they ran the magazine until their deaths decades later, and it was carried on by their sons and grandsons for decades more.[10]
Scientific American is now the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, and has featured prominent scientists over time such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, and Thomas Edison. They reported the invention and patent of Abraham Lincoln relating to his device that intended to help boats navigate shallows.
In 1846, Munn and Beach established a prominent patent agency within Scientific American named Munn & Co., in synergy with the scientists featured in the magazine who wanted to patent their inventions. They provided the service for the patent applications and tracked the progress once it reached the U.S. Patent Office, having their headquarters next door in Washington.
As a boy, Thomas Edison used to walk a few miles every week to get his copy of the magazine, and later on in his career, he walked in Beach's office one day and showed him a device he called the phonograph, being the first to see his invention.[11] Beach tested the device with Edison, liked it, and helped him filed the patent. Edison would become a frequent visitor of Beach.
He also helped Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel F. B. Morse, Elias Howe, R. J. Gatling, Capt. John Ericsson, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Col. John Jacob Astor IV, who later died on the Titanic, and thousand of other inventors, and the magazine's patent department eventually filed about three thousand patents a year, forcing Beach to split his time between New York and Washington, defending the patents of the inventors in court.