Steam drills - driverless cars - and much more to come, I hope and fear. (Law professors?) John Henry may lay down 15 feet to the steam drill's nine. But ...

John Henry, an African American, was supposed to be the biggest — in spirit, in appetite, in the bulging of biceps — and best driver of all. When companies started to employ steam-powered drills to ...

Mitch Mac Donald has more than 30 years of experience in both the newspaper and magazine businesses. He has covered the logistics and supply chain fields since 1988. Twice named one of the Top 10 ...

Over the next thirty five years, many hundreds of drills were built, no doubt replacing scores of John Henry’s. Compressed air replaced steam as the power source and by 1905 the Ingersoll-Sergeant ...

In almost 200 folk songs, John Henry drives steel into the Allegheny Mountains for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad in a race against a steam drill: “John Henry, O John Henry, Blood am runnin’ red!

Whitehead takes the still-debated myth of John Henry, the 19th-century steel-driving black man who dared to take on a steam-powered drill machine, and crafts an interconnected narrative of how the ...

As a convict, Henry was forced into labor on the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Railroad. It killed him. “The standard line is that the John Henry song is about the tenacity and hard work and plight of ...

John Henry the folk legend was said to be a “steel-driving man,” a.k.a., a man whose job was to hammer a steel drill into rock in order to make new tunnels for the railroad after the Civil War.

John Henry may lay down 15 feet to the steam drill’s nine. But even if he doesn’t drive so hard that he breaks his poor heart, Steam Drill 2.0 is always on the way; John Henry 2.0 is not.