The Hyperloop: A 200-Year History of Hype and Failure

Written by Vaclav Smil on January 29, 2025. Posted in Current News

Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha is another overhyped venture, recycling 200-year-old dreams and exaggerated claims of innovation

On August 12, 2013, Elon Musk, at that time the chairman of Tesla, released his Hyperloop Alpha paper.

At its very beginning, when outlining the background of the idea, he asked whether there was “a truly new mode of transport — a fifth mode after planes, trains, cars and boats” that would be safer, faster, cost less, and be more convenient while being immune to weather, sustainably self-powering, resistant to earthquakes, and not disruptive to people living along its route.

He noted that “many ideas for a system with most of those properties have been proposed and should be acknowledged, reaching as far back as Robert Goddard’s to proposals in recent decades by the Rand Corporation and ET3. Unfortunately, none of these have panned out.”

While the second sentence of this quotation was quite correct, the first one greatly understated the origins of the idea and the time that has elapsed since its first coherent formulation, a reality that should lead to exceedingly cautious and highly skeptical appraisals concerning its near-term commercial realization.

But first I must note Musk’s wrong label: A loop is a shape that is produced by a curve that bends around and crosses itself, and I leave it to your imagination what shape it would take to make it a ‘hyper loop’.

Hyperloop is thus an incorrect — indeed, a highly misleading — term for the means for rapidly transporting people enclosed in pods inside a very low-pressure and overwhelmingly straight metallic tube.

The misleading classifier aside, this fifth mode of transportation consists of several distinct components whose specific attributes can vary.

The visible infrastructure is a tube with a diameter only large enough to accommodate the pods capable of carrying a small number of passengers. This tube can be built on pylons aboveground or it can be placed in an underground tunnel.

The pod size depends on the number of people (Hyperloop Alpha specified 28; other designs range between four and 100) and on their accommodation: comfortably seated in reclined chairs or supine.

High speeds — ranging from subsonic to near sonic (the speed of sound is 1,235 km/h) — are achievable only in a complete vacuum or in very low-pressure atmospheres. Hyperloop Alpha specified an internal pressure of 100 Pa, that is, less than 1/1,000th of the pressure at sea level.

Pods can ride on air cushions or be magnetically levitated. Modern systems would be energized by advanced linear motors.

The historical record shows that there is nothing new about any of these ideas, that the basic concept for the fifth mode of transportation has been around for more than 200 years, and that during the intervening time various patents were filed, several detailed proposals were made, and some models and mock-ups of specific components were built.

And yet not a single (near) vacuum- or low-pressure-tube, super-fast transportation project (be it for people or goods, or both) has been completed and put into operation, not even a trial short-distance link encompassing all of the design’s basic components.

A tube is the component with the longest history, but the idea of using very low pressure is also more than two centuries old. Remarkably, the proposals for both these key features of the supposedly revolutionary fifth mode of transportation are older than the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first steam-powered intercity transportation conveyance, which began to carry passengers and freight in 1830.

George Medhurst, an English clockmaker and inventor, was the pioneer and determined proponent of rapid travel in tubes. In 1810 he published a brief pamphlet titled “A New Method of Conveying Letters and Goods with Great Certainty and Rapidity by Air,” proposing to send letters in small hollow vessels propelled by air pressure in tubes (generated by steam engines), and concluded that the same principle (with commensurately raised pressure) could be used to move goods at speeds at least 10 times those achievable with canal or wagon travel.

In 1812 he presented the more detailed “Calculations and Remarks, Tending to Prove the Practicality, Effects and Advantages of a Plan for the Rapid Conveyance of Goods and Passengers Upon an Iron Road Through a Tube of 30 Feet in Area, by the Power and Velocity of Air.”

He revisited the proposal once more, in 1827 (the year of his death), in a publication with an even longer title: “A New System of Inland Conveyance, for Goods and Passengers, Capable of Being Applied and Extended Throughout the Country; and of Conveying All Kinds of Goods, Cattle, and Passengers, with the Velocity of Sixty Miles in an Hour, at an Expense That Will Not Exceed the One-Fourth Part of the Present Mode of Travelling, Without the Aid of Horses or Any Animal Power.”

These short pamphlets were not widely known, but in 1825 the British public could read about a much bolder proposal for using tubes, vacuum, and high speeds to cover the distance of just over 600 kilometers between London and Edinburgh in five minutes (yes, minutes, not hours).

The proprietors of the newly formed London and Edinburgh Vacuum Tunnel Company, after “having carefully matured their plans,” published (in the Edinburgh Star) their prospectus for a joint stock project “with a capital of Twenty Millions Sterling, divided into 200,000 shares, of £100 each, for the purpose of forming a Tunnel or Tube of metal between Edinburgh and London, to convey Goods and Passengers between these cities and the other towns through which it passes.”

Boilers would be placed every two miles along the two side-by-side tunnels (tubes), and the steam they generated would be used to create a vacuum. When the vacuum seal was broken right behind the train at the departure end, the inrushing air would instantly propel the train into the tube by pushing on “a very strong air-tight sliding door, running on several small cylindrical rollers, to lessen the friction.”

The train would carry only goods because the tube would be just four feet (1.2 meters) in diameter, and passengers would be seated in railway carriages running on rails fastened to the tube’s top and coupled by strong magnets to the freight train inside the tube whose rapid progress would drag on the passenger train, covering nearly 800 kilometers in five minutes.

The London Mechanics’ Register, a new periodical established to diffuse scientific knowledge “among the operative classes of society,” reprinted the notice in order “to throw ridicule upon some of the preposterous plans now before the public for the investment of money.” Precisely!

The country’s unfolding steam-based industrialization offered many new opportunities for outrageous claims, financial scams, and false prophecies of technical miracles, and the decade’s leading satirical illustrator did not miss his opportunity to lampoon the early promise of travel in a vacuum.

William Heath (1794–1840) initially called himself a “portrait & military painter,” but during the 1820s he published many satirical colored etchings, often alluding to political affairs of the day or lampooning generic human follies.

In 1829 Thomas McLean in London published Heath’s colored etching “March of Intellect. Lord how this world improves as we grow older.”

Image: Wellcome Library

The busy image is crowded with such would-be futuristic contraptions as a suspension bridge from Cape Town to Bengal, a four-wheeled steam-powered horse called VELOCITY, a gun-carrying platform that was lifted by four balloons, and a large winged flying fish crammed with convicts being transported from England to Australia.

But the etching’s center of interest is a large seamless metallic tube that is conveying passengers from Greenwich Hill (in East London) directly to Bengal, thanks to the innovative acumen of the Grand Vacuum Tube Company.

By the time Heath pictured in color the intercontinental Britain-India conveyor, enough was known about vacuum to realize that it would be the best option for attaining unprecedented speeds inside a tube, but the material requirements made any realization highly premature.

In the 1820s there was plenty of cast iron but no mass production of affordable high-tensile steel (material available in bulk only after the invention of Bessemer’s converter, patented in 1856) to build such a tube, no reliable means to create and sustain very low pressures inside tubes extending for hundreds of kilometers, and no ready means to enclose people safely in vacuum-enveloped containers.

The decades following the rapid demise of the notion of a five-minute trip from London to Scotland saw assorted proposals, exploratory rail schemes, and even some actual projects involving unusual modes of propulsion, above all attempts to commercialize “atmospheric” railways.

These railways did not need any locomotives and relied on air pressure to push freight cars along the rails. An airtight pipe with a piston was laid between the rails; steam engines situated along the track pumped the air out of the pipe in front of the piston, creating a partial vacuum; and the higher air pressure behind the piston propelled railway cars (connected to the piston by a metal plate protruding through a slot at the top of the pipe).

Obvious advantages were the absence of noise, smoke, and sparks from locomotives, as well as the ability to climb steeper grades than locomotive-driven trains.

These efforts began with a proposal for the National Pneumatic Railway Association in 1835. In 1839 Jacob and Joseph Samuda conducted trial runs on a short track, reaching maximum speeds of 48 km/h and a 50 percent vacuum, and in the early 1840s the first commercial line, the Kingstown and Dalkey Railway, operated briefly in Ireland.

These trials impressed Isambard Kingdom Brunel, perhaps the country’s most famous engineer, so much that he pushed (against the warnings of his engineering peers: Robert Stephenson, the country’s leading locomotive designer, called it a “great humbug”) its installation on a 52-mile section of the South Devon Railway between Exeter and Plymouth.

Work began in 1844, and even before it was completed Brunel had installed an atmospheric railway on a shorter part of the Croydon Railway.

But by September 1848, after less than a year of “atmospheric” operation (steam locomotives were used until 1847 as the system kept malfunctioning) and after a substantial monetary loss, it was all over.

For months, Brunel kept promising success, but the lines were plagued by too many insurmountable problems. Perhaps the trickiest part was the moving slot in the pipe: it required an airtight seal to maintain a partial vacuum in front of the piston, but the tallow-treated leather flap, even when not chewed on by rats, provided a poor seal and kept drying out and turning brittle.

Additional short-lived (and short-distance) atmospheric railways ran between 1847 and 1860 near Paris, at London’s Crystal Palace in 1864 (just 550 meters), and under New York’s Broadway between 1870 and 1873 (a pneumatic subway track of a mere 95 meters).

More powerful (and more efficient) steam locomotives, and before the century’s end also new electric traction, made all unwieldy “atmospheric” projects clearly uncompetitive.

This is taken from a long document, see it here thereader.mitpress

Header image: hyperloopdesign.net

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