While much railroad technology advanced during the nineteenth century, some remained primitive, including the link-and-pin method used to link freight cars and passenger cars together. To accomplish linkage between cars, a switchman had to stand between the cars as they came together and drop a coupling link into a slot. To achieve this, the brakeman had to signal the engineer to back up into exactly the right position. Timing errors of even a few seconds could be fatal. As the number of railroad cars attached to a train became longer, visual contact in the operation became more difficult to maintain.

The result was an ever-increasing loss of limbs and lives. Moreover, coupling pins suffered metal fatigue or were uneven in size and frequently broke. In fact, there was no standard design for a coupling pin, and train crews wasted valuable time trying to match pins and links. Also wasted were money and lives, since coupling-pin failure was a common cause of railroad accidents.

The knuckle coupler was invented by Eli H. Janney in 1873 and provided some relief for link-and-pin coupling problems. However, it was only used after 1888 in freight cars carrying heavy loads and had several drawbacks, including the all-too-frequent need to manually align cars after linkage failures. Hundreds of other coupling devices were patented after Janney's, but none proved efficient or appealing.

Andrew Jackson Beard's "Jenny coupler," patented on November 23, 1897, eliminated the need for workers to be used in the coupler process by having two horizontal jaws attached to the cars that locked together automatically. Because of its reliability and reasonable cost, Beard's invention gained rapid acceptance.

In 1893, Congress passed the Railroad Safety Appliance Act, which took effect in 1900, making it unlawful to operate railroad cars that did not have automatic couplers. During the last year that link-and-pin coupling was legal in the United States, three hundred railroad worker deaths due to coupling accidents were recorded. . .

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