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Superman on a Bicycle

With help from the LIRR and physics, Charles Murphy rode a mile in a minute

By Beth Whitehouse | Staff Writer

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Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Those lines were made famous by Superman, but they were earned by a real person: Charles M. Murphy, a man from Brooklyn who rode his bicycle faster than a Long Island Rail Road train.

The year was 1899. The whole country was in the midst of a biking frenzy. Murphy, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, mustache-wearing 29-year-old, boasted he could bike a mile in a minute, if he were fronted by a charging train that would eliminate wind resistance and create a vacuum.

It was a publicity stunt, of course. But it also had athletic chutzpah: A lone man, on a regular bicycle, riding the equivalent of 60 mph behind a train, as fast as a car flying down the Long Island Expressway today. In the jaded 1990s it might be greeted with a shrug. But a hundred years ago, well, it was bold.

Hal B. Fullerton, a public relations man for the LIRR, heard Murphy speak at a meeting of the League of American Wheelmen, a biking club. Fullerton jumped at the idea. If Murphy did it, he would drag the name of the Long Island Rail Road with him for a worldwide public relations ride.

That was important, because the Jay Lenos of the day used the LIRR for stand-up comedy fodder. ``Audiences and readers got the distinct impression that a young man embarking on the LIRR at Patchogue for New York was a decrepit graybeard before he reached Jamaica,'' wrote Fullerton's daughter Eleanor F. Ferguson in her book ``My Long Island,'' republished in 1993.

So Murphy and Fullerton devised a scheme that became the most sensational sporting event of the era, according to a plaque and photo display commemorating the race that hangs in the Babylon LIRR station.

It was front page news in The New York Times that Mile-a-Minute Murphy, as he was dubbed, rode a mile in 57.8 seconds. The reporter wrote that Murphy had proved that ``human muscle can, for a short distance at least, excel the best power of steam and steel and iron.'' The Brooklyn Eagle called the feat ``the most plucky and wonderful performance ever accomplished by any athlete.''

The ride took place Friday, June 30, 1899. Rail workers prepared a nearly three-mile stretch of lonesome line in a place called Maywood, between Farmingdale and Babylon. They laid out wood plank between the railroad tracks for Murphy to bike on.

On the day of the race, the weather was clear and cool. Thousands of spectators lined the track, abutting the open fields. An engine was attached to an observation car. Fifty reporters and VIPs sat in the car, which had a hood extending out to cover the rider and a white plank of wood attached for Murphy to focus on as he rode.

``The hood, of course, broke the force of the wind, so he was able to pump like mad,'' said Vincent F. Seyfried, a Long Island Rail Road historian. ``It was set up to favor the bicyclist.''

Murphy, at 5-foot-7 and 145 pounds, wore blue woolen tights and a thin blue jersey with long sleeves. Murphy's wife sat near the tracks with her young son.

At 5:10 p.m., Murphy held the handlebars of his Tribune Blue Streak. As the run began, the railroad's superintendent reportedly wailed, ``The poor man will be killed!''

``Outside, there was just a whiz and a rush and a cloud of dust,'' the Times wrote of the run. ``No eye could follow the stroke of his legs on the pedals.''

Observers thought that Murphy could have gone even faster had the train been able to. Six times he hit the observation car and was knocked back. Reporters said this gave Murphy the impression that the wood plank was flying up in pieces as he rode over it. He had probably hit 70 mph at the height of the run. It was a world record.

``I was riding against hope,'' said Murphy in his own account, as published in Ferguson's book. ``I expected the worst -- for the first time I realized that the eyes and minds of people thought my ride was impossible, but the sight of agonized faces on the rear platform yelling, holding out their hands, sent a thrill of determination through me.''

Murphy's wife is said to have laughed as he passed by, knowing he was meeting the challenge.

But then came the moment of truth -- as the train neared the end of the plankway. One thing that worried Fullerton was how to stop Murphy so he wouldn't plunge into the halted train. The engineer blew the whistle. Fullerton and another man leaned over the platform and lifted Murphy up and over the rail. Murphy clamped his toes in the toe tips of his bicycle, wrapped his legs around it and fished it up with him. ``In that fraction of a second, a few men lived ages,'' wrote the Brooklyn Eagle.

The place erupted into pandemonium. People hugged. Kissed. Fainted. Went into hysterics.

Murphy later became the first motorcycle policeman in Nassau County. ``I don't think his achievement revolutionized railroading or did much to change cycling, but it made a hero of Murphy and he became known all over the world as Mile-a-Minute Murphy,'' wrote Ferguson. ``He lived on this fame the rest of his life.'' Murphy died in 1950.

As for the railroad, any impact was difficult to determine, wrote Charles L. Sachs in ``The Blessed Isle: Hal B. Fullerton and His Image of Long Island 1897-1927.'' Said he: ``For Fullerton (and probably his superiors at the time), the wild public relations value -- demonstrating the railroad's technical ingenuity and speed and its commitment to a large sporting constituency -- was probably considered well worth the effort and expense.''

If nothing else, it was a day when a man became a superman, when a man kept up with a train using nothing more than the power of his legs.