The Meigs Elevated Railway was an experimental but unsuccessful 19th century elevated steam-powered urban rapid transit system, often described as a monorail but technically pre-electric third rail. It was invented in the US by Josiah Vincent Meigs (also known as Joe Meigs or Joe Vincent Meigs), of Lowell, Massachusetts, and was demonstrated in a suburb of Boston called East Cambridge from 1886 to 1894. History Joe Meigs Josiah Vincent Meigs, who answered to "Joe", was born into a well-connected professional family of Nashville, Tennessee (his attorney father was a friend of Abraham Lincoln). He served as captain of the Union Army during the American Civil War, and made a personal appeal to President Lincoln for permission to raise a detachment of black troops for a colored artillery battery. This was the first of such to serve in the war. After the war he was a lawyer at Washington. There he became close friends with a fellow veteran, General Benjamin Butler, and the two moved together to Lowell, Massachusetts where they built adjacent houses. Butler became an influential state politician, and was to serve as governor from 1882. Joe Meigs was proving himself to be a capable inventor, and was responsible for the Meigs rifle as well as taking out several other firearms patents. In the 1880 US census and in the 1889 Lowell city directory, inventor was given as his profession. Company Joe Meigs thought out his rapid transit system in the early 1870s, and patented it in 1875. Compare the Aldershot narrow-gauge suspension railway, built in England in 1872. As a result of exploiting his social connections in Massachusetts, he attracted substantial backing including that of his friend General Butler. So, the two set up the Meigs Elevated Railway Company with Butler as president in 1881. The company hung out its shingle at 225 Bridge Street (now Monsignor O'Brien Highway) in East Cambridge, on a site in an industrial area previously occupied by the works of the Bay State Glass Company. It then began to lobby for a state charter to allow it to build rapid transit lines in the streets of Boston and its suburbs. The company was finally chartered under state law in 1884. The authorised share capital was $200,000 (about $5,000,000 in 2020 values). However the company was not yet free to construct publicly, because the charter required the approval of Boston City Council for any