A tobacco shop owner from Prussia spent nine years boring a four mile tunnel into a mountain in Nevada to drain the richest silver mines in America. He finished it just in time to watch the silver run out. Then he went to San Francisco and bought about a twelfth of the city. Adolph Sutro was born in 1830 in Aachen, Prussia, the eldest of eleven children in a Jewish family that ran a cloth factory. After the upheaval of 1848 the family left for Baltimore, and Sutro got to San Francisco in 1851, where he ran tobacco shops. Then they hit the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and he went. The Comstock was the richest silver strike in American history, and it had a physical problem nobody could solve. The deeper the shafts went, the more water they hit, and the water was scalding hot. Men worked in heat that could kill them. Pumping it out cost a fortune and could never stop. Sutro's solution was almost insultingly simple. Instead of lifting the water up, bore a tunnel in from the Carson River valley four miles away, entering the mountain more than sixteen hundred feet below the workings, and let gravity take the water out. The same tunnel would ventilate the mines, give the men a way to walk out, and let ore be hauled out the bottom instead of hoisted to the top. He got a charter from Nevada in 1865 and one from Congress in 1866. He was to collect a royalty of around two dollars a ton on ore that came through it. The mine owners supported it at first. Then they thought it through and realized that whoever controlled the only drain underneath the Comstock controlled the Comstock. William Sharon and the Bank of California group turned on him and set out to make sure he never raised a dollar anywhere. They were extremely good at it. Sutro spent years getting blocked in San Francisco, in Nevada, and in Washington. Then on April 7, 1869, the Yellow Jacket mine caught fire underground, and dozens of men burned to death because there was no way out of the workings. Sutro went to the Miners' Union in Virginia City and made his case directly to the men. If the tunnel had existed, you would have walked out of there. The union put in fifty thousand dollars. It was the first real money the project ever received, and it came from the men who stood to die in those shafts rather than from anyone who stood to get rich off them. He broke ground on October 19, 1869, and raised the rest of the financing largely in London. Nine years. Over twenty thousand feet of hard rock. On September 1, 1878, the crew broke through into the Savage mine, arriving within eighteen inches of where they had aimed from four miles away. It cost around two million dollars. And it worked exactly as designed. It drained something like four million gallons a day. And it did not matter. The great bonanza was finished. The big companies were abandoning their deep workings. Sutro had built a genuinely brilliant piece of engineering to save mines that were already dying, and it never served the central role he had spent twenty years arguing it would. So the man who had been right about everything except the timing got out. He sold his interest, went back to San Francisco around 1879 with roughly nine hundred thousand dollars, and put almost all of it into land. He bought about twenty two hundred acres of San Francisco. Mount Sutro. Mount Davidson. Lands End. A piece of Rancho San Miguel. By his death those holdings were worth around three million dollars. And then he spent the rest of his life handing it to the public on purpose. He built a new Cliff House on the ocean in 1896, a seven story Victorian castle. That same year he opened the Sutro Baths, an enormous glass roofed hall of saltwater swimming pools with museums and a concert hall in it. He opened the gardens of his own estate at Sutro Heights to anybody who wanted to walk through them. And when the streetcar company charged too much to get out there, he built his own railroad and undercut them. He also assembled one of the largest private libraries in the world. In 1894 the Populists drafted him to run for mayor on a platform aimed squarely at the Southern Pacific Railroad. He won in a landslide and was, by nearly every account, a bad mayor who hated the job. He died of pneumonia on August 8, 1898, at sixty eight. His heirs fought over the estate in court for years. The Sutro Baths burned down in 1966, and the concrete ruins on the edge of the Pacific are now one of the most photographed places in San Francisco. And out in Nevada, the tunnel he spent nine years and two million dollars building, for mines that were already finished, is still draining water out of that mountain today.