Murphy persuaded a railway company to board in two miles of track and run a train so he could ride a mile in a minute in its slipstream. It took him 57.8 seconds. He said in the "Farmingdale Post" that the idea came to him after an argument with friends at his home in Brooklyn, New York. "I was asked to give an opinion of the quality and relative speed of various prominent riders of the time", Murphy recalled. "My answer was that there is no limit to the speed of a bicycle rider, that speed depended largely upon the bicycle, gears, tracks and pacemaker. I declared there was not a locomotive built which could get away from me. The more people laughed, the more determined I became to accomplish the feat. I figured that the fast-moving locomotive would expel the air to such an extent that I could follow in the vacuum behind."