by Gay Talese
Dr. Mattison’s Bromo Caffeine—advertised as a palliative for the frayed nerves of “the neurasthenic woman or the congestive or anaemic headaches of the fin de siecle man”—was the most famous of his curatives; but nearly as popular was his Alkalithia for rheumatism, and his Cafetonique for dyspepsia.
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, in 1881, while he was in his laboratory testing one of his remedies that contained milk of magnesia, it was reported that he accidentally spilled some of the solution on a hot pipe, where he soon noticed that it clung steadfastly to the metal—alerting him to the insulating properties within magnesium carbonate and prompting his subsequent experiments with magnesia, asbestos, and other substances to create eventually insulation cloth that could be wrapped around steam pipes in homes to reduce fuel costs greatly.
This departure from his preoccupation with pharmaceutical preparations gradually led Dr. Mattison to an entirely new career, one in which he would manufacture not only insulation materials but also a brand of fabric and millboard that was fireproof and could be used in construction materials to increase the safety of private homes, workshops, and schools. As a result of his desire to specialize in fireproof products, Dr. Mattison became increasingly dependent on the use of asbestos, an unburnable, often whitish substance found in the crystallized veins of certain rock formations of volcanic origin in many parts of Africa, as well as in Canada, Russia, China, Australia, and Italy. In its most valuable condition, asbestos is a silky, unctuous, thread-thin fiber two or three inches in length, with the tensile strength of steel wire and flexible enough to be spun with cotton or flax to form yarn that is resistant to heat and repellent to fire. Asbestos fibers that are too short for spinning can be ground up and mixed with cement to be made into incombustible roof shingles, wallboards, and floor tiles.
In ancient times, asbestos was commonly referred to as “the magic mineral.” The Emperor Charlemagne was known to have enjoyed duping his visitors occasionally by tossing his asbestos tablecloth into a fire and then pulling it out, unburnt by the flames; and medieval conjurers wearing hooded robes made of cotton blended with asbestos were able guilefully to exhibit their flame-thwarting talents before astonished crowds of naive spectators. In the pre-Christian era the Greeks and Romans covered the bodies of their dead leaders with asbestos shrouds during cremation ceremonies. But the widespread use of this always rare and costly mineral was not possible until the discovery of huge deposits of it in Quebec during the 1870s.
First British industrialists became its major consumers, then such Americans as Henry Ward Johns (whose company was the forerunner of Johns-Manville); but no less active, beginning in the early 1880s, was Dr. Mattison, who, as he continued to experiment with asbestos in his laboratory, became almost obsessed with the mineral’s wondrous and profitable possibilities. And he also saw himself as one day heading a giant firm that mass-produced asbestos items on a national or even international scale—fireproof asbestos curtains for theaters, asbestos uniforms for firemen, asbestos linings for kitchen ovens and factory kilns, asbestos gloves for foundry workers and bakers, asbestos conveyer belts to bear smoldering objects, asbestos toasters and iron holders, asbestos knobs on radiator valves, asbestos awnings over the porches of summer homes.
But before he could venture into the business so grandly, he first had to build a manufacturing plant equal in size to his ambitions—meaning that he had to vacate his modest quarters in Philadelphia and relocate somewhere in the expansive Pennsylvania countryside. His multimillionaire partner, Henry G. Keasbey, a mild-mannered individual who considered Dr. Mattison a genius and rarely took issue with him, accompanied him on weekend carriage rides outside the city to explore stretches of farmland that might be quickly adaptable for industrial development. Wearing dark suits and bowlers, and carrying walking sticks as they stepped in and out of the cow dung in weedy pastures, the two men represented an odd sight to the dairy workers, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights who stood quietly observing from the sides of dirt roads that had not been widened since William Penn himself had claimed the territory in the 1680s for his fellow English Quaker immigrants, at the expense of the eased-out Indians.
At six feet, four inches, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and such disproportionately long, thin legs that he seemed to be walking on stilts, the sternly spectacled Dr. Mattison towered over the five-foot-seven-inch Mr. Keasbey, who had a round ruddy face and muttonchop whiskers and nodded affirmatively at nearly everything he heard the talkative doctor say. Bystanders could have justifiably assumed that Dr. Mattison, and not Mr. Keasbey, was the scion of a powerful family of Anglo-Americans who had been social leaders and philanthropists for generations, and who decorated their grand residences in Morris County, New Jersey, with mounted moose heads over the mantels, and burnished medieval-style breastplates flanking the staircases beneath staffs of jousting banners and suspended battle-axes. In deference to Keasbey’s wealth, and with the understanding that he would continue to underwrite his aspirations, Dr. Mattison placed Keasbey’s name in the primary position on their joint enterprise. It was called Keasbey & Mattison Company.
On one of their weekend excursions into the countryside in 1882, the partners came upon a 408-acre spread of land that had been called Wissahickon by the Indians but was now a declining village of obsolete gristmills and small farms, called Ambler. The most newsworthy happening in Ambler history had been a long-ago train wreck, in 1856, a year after the Pennsylvania Railroad had ceremoniously introduced trains to this part of the state. The first rescuer to arrive at the disaster was a tiny Quaker woman named Mary Ambler, the widowed mother of nine, who came in a buggy packed with her petticoats and bedsheets, which she would soon tear into bandages after pulling as many bodies as she could from the flames. Twelve years later, months after Mary Ambler’s death in 1868, some of the passengers she rescued attended a dedication ceremony in which the railroad company renamed its Wissahickon station in honor of Mary Ambler. In 1869 the village of Wissahickon also changed its name to Ambler.
When Dr. Mattison and Mr. Keasbey first visited Ambler in 1882, it had a decreasing population of fewer than three hundred, and several large plots of land and vacated mills for sale at low prices in the vicinity of the railroad tracks. The railroad that had been heralded as an economic stimulant to the village had become instead its financial nemesis. Farmers who had once lined the roads into Ambler with their horsecarts filled with grain to be ground by Ambler’s millers could now more conveniently load their unground grain onto freight trains and send it directly to large urban food distributors that provided their own grinding service. Since milling had long been the sole industry in Ambler—in the mid-1800s the town had seven gristmills, a sawmill, and a silk and fulling mill—the influence of the railroad was profound. By 1880 the mills, which in some cases had existed for two hundred years, and which during the Revolutionary War had supplied food, clothing, and firewood to General George Washington’s nearby military encampments, were either bankrupt or operating unprofitably. Ambler’s antiquated sawmill was similarly affected by the changing conditions, and the silk and fulling mill—which had once kept dozens of looms busy with wool weavers making fringed shawls for women around the nation—was additionally victimized during the 1870s, when the fringed shawl gradually went out of fashion. Large quantities of these unsold garments were stored for years by one of the owners of the mill, a wool and silk importer in New York City named Eberhard Flues; and after his death in 1896 his surviving partners donated some of the shawls, still in good condition, to Admiral Robert E. Peary when the latter announced plans for his first expedition to the North Pole.
But when Dr. Mattison rode past the abandoned grounds of Ambler’s once popular county fair, having earlier seen the defunct mills and other examples of a village in decline, he did not pause to reflect on his decision to make this his home and the locale of his ambitious enterprise. On the contrary, he was pleased by Ambler’s weakened condition—it was now malleable for
his remaking. Its economy was stagnant, but its strong and abundant streams of pure spring water that had once powered the mills would flow ideally through his chemicals, mixing more predictably with his concoctions than had the waters of Philadelphia’s polluted river. The railroad could swiftly and regularly carry tons of asbestos into Ambler from the big mines in Quebec. The limestone in Ambler’s surrounding hills could be quarried to form factories along the tracks, convenient for the receipt of raw materials and the delivery of finished products. Dr. Mattison and his partner could pave the wide dirt road that cut through the center of town, perpendicular to the tracks, and they could also brighten all the village routes and walkways with electric streetlamps. They could loan money to the village businessmen for the renovation and repainting of the weatherworn buildings in the vicinity of the train station—the general store, the barbershop, the carriage repair shop, the rooming house, and the corner apothecary that (Dr. Mattison was pleased to observe) was well stocked with bottles of Bromo Caffeine.
Dr. Mattison and his partner would surely need more than one architect to design all the new buildings that were planned—not only the factories but also the domestic residences for the workers, the foremen, the top executives and chemists who would be employed by Keasbey & Mattison. These dwellings would not be the common clapboard bungalows or shantytown rows that characterized most company towns in the United States; they would instead be thick-walled, enduring structures of stone bedecked with the special features and ornamentation that appealed to the doctor’s aesthetic sensibilities. Dr. Mattison had always been enamored of Gothic architecture. During the previous summer he had become more enraptured by it than ever as he toured western Germany and looked upon the conical turrets, finials, and dormer windows of Rhineland mansions, which reawakened in him a responsiveness that he had first felt as a young boy while staring at the Hänsel and Gretel illustrations in a book that his teacher had passed among the students in the one-room Bucks County schoolhouse. He had often dreamed after that of living in a turreted mansion, and he freely revealed that fantasy to his fellow students in a paper he read in English class. And now in Ambler two decades later, as he was about to transform an agricultural community into an industrial mecca—following his own route from farm boy to magnate—his youthful dreams were taking a realistic shape, thanks to his deep thinking and to Mr. Keasbey’s deep pockets.
This was an era of unlimited possibilities across America. Industrialists of vision and determination were converting raw materials and raw energy into gold and were living like kings—residing in mansions, and even castles, while ruling over masses of people and vast factories with an audaciousness, and at times a gallantry, that was unprecedented in American history. Dr. Mattison had read about some of these men—J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, George Pullman, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, the late Cornelius Vanderbilt. And new men were on the horizon—William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford, and dozens more. Fortunes had been made, and would continue to be made, in an astonishing variety of ways; and now Dr. Mattison saw his chance, in this age of steam, through insulating the nation’s pipes and boilers, from its household basements to its battleships, and through fireproofing thousands of its private and public buildings with his Ambler-made shingles and siding encrusted with the asbestos fibers that the ancients believed were magic.
As for the workers who would first build Dr. Mattison’s Gothic town, and then be employed in the factories that would manufacture his products, he had already arranged for the arrival of a trainload of men from southern Italy. He had advanced the cost of their Atlantic crossing through a New York steamship company that docked at Naples, and he had been assisted in recruiting these workers by an Italian immigrant in Philadelphia who had earlier been a custodian and general factotum in Dr. Mattison’s pharmaceutical laboratory. The man’s name was Carmine Lobianco. He had arrived in Philadelphia from Naples in the mid-1870s, initially as a construction worker on a riverfront road-building project that extended past the Keasbey-Mattison property on Front Street. During Dr. Mattison’s early-morning strolls, which constituted his only exercise, he had often paused to watch the Italian workers, to listen to their strange language, and, although they tended to be short and more wiry than muscular, to admire how robustly they swung their sledgehammers and pickaxes, and hurled the heavy chains around the boulders and beams that were then hoisted high in the air by the cables of a steel crane powered by a team of sweating horses. Dr. Mattison observed this activity with keen interest while wondering about these dark-skinned exotic workmen, their origins, their motivations, their dreams of the future. He was a man of incorrigible curiosity—this characteristic traceable in part to his intrinsically laboratorial nature, his training as a dissector and an experimenter, and in part to his intemperate personal nosiness. He could not walk down a street without staring at people, analyzing their faces and body movements, even eavesdropping whenever possible. His propensity for prying would bring him severe pain during his final year in Philadelphia, 1882, when—while peeking into the windows of a competitive pharmaceutical factory one night in an attempt to learn why its employees were working so late—his large, two-hundred-twenty-pound body fell through a trap door on the sidewalk and his jaw was fractured in three places. His jaw would never be reset properly; and for the rest of his life he would have to avoid eating heavy meat, such as steak, and the lower part of his face would display the scars of his misadventure—and this was why, at the age of thirty-one, Dr. Mattison began to grow a beard.
But he was an unscarred, beardless man of twenty-nine when he first caught sight of the Italian road gang during his morning constitutionals; and he was particularly drawn to a spirited, snub-nosed crane operator wearing a helmetlike hat and lashing the horses with a long whip, while calling persistently down to his dust-covered colleagues swinging their axes—evoking for Dr. Mattison the image of a Roman chariot driver engaged in a heated skirmish. As the doctor stepped forward on the dirt road to get a closer look, he felt an empathy with this vigorous man in the crane, this high-riding ruffian seated determinedly above the obscurity of pick-and-shovel enterprise; and at the first opportune moment, after the men had paused to share a bucket of water, the doctor approached the man and doffed his bowler.
“Good morning,” he said, “I am Dr. Mattison.”
“Good morning,” the crane operator replied, in surprisingly good English and with a lively smile. “I am Carmine Lobianco. And I am at your service.”
Dr. Mattison reached inside his jacket for the small prescription pad on which he never wrote prescriptions, scribbled down his name and address, tore off the page, and handed it to the crane operator. Two months later, when the road project was completed and the Italians were laid off, Lobianco appeared at Dr. Mattison’s office in search of a job. The only position available was that of a janitor. Lobianco accepted it with alacrity.
But in his eagerness to become more useful he was soon doing other work as well. He stood on the assembly line with the laboratory technicians filling the unending procession of bottles with Dr. Mattison’s various cures. Twice a week he delivered carefully packed boxloads of these by wagon to apothecaries throughout the city, as well as to the train depot for distribution around the nation and overseas. On weekends, after Dr. Mattison and Keasbey had decided to expand their business in the countryside and leave Philadelphia—soon after Dr. Mattison had fallen through the trap door—Lobianco drove their carriage as they scouted locations; and he was with them during their first visit to Ambler. When they began to make inquiries for architects to design the new factories and Gothic community, Lobianco was given permission to bring in his Italian workers from Philadelphia to begin unearthing stone from the quarry and digging ditches for water pipes; and when Dr. Mattison said that many more laborers were needed, in addition to some highly skilled stone artisans, Lobianco announced that he knew just where to find them. The best stone artisans in the world, Lobianco said, came from the mountains of sout
hern Italy, near his home village, where centuries of building and rebuilding villas and monasteries amid rock slides and earthquakes had provided such men with abundant opportunities to practice their craft. Lobianco also told Dr. Mattison that he had cousins and friends employed in and around the Naples seaport who could quickly recruit excellent artisans and hardworking laborers at reasonable rates if the doctor would advance payment for their passage. Lobianco did not tell Dr. Mattison that his cousins and friends were revolutionary Socialists and anarchists wanted by the Italian police. He assumed that what mattered most to Dr. Mattison was getting the job done quickly and well. And what mattered most to Lobianco was getting his share of the proceeds that the steamship company kicked back to recruiters, as well as the considerable profits to be earned from the incoming Italian workers for his efforts as their padrone.
Lobianco had long aspired to become a padrone, which was a somewhat exalted title given to those opportunistic Italian immigrants who functioned as ethnic middlemen during the first years of the mass movement of Italian workers into America. The padrone was enriched both by the American employer, to whom he delivered cheap labor, and by the laborers themselves, who surrendered to him a percentage of their salaries. In addition to providing jobs and shelter, the padrone in the beginning was the guiding influence, if not the outright enforcer, of all that the newcomer did during almost every hour of every day into the night. Lacking a family or friends in America, and not speaking the language, the average worker was totally dependent on his padrone. Since at least half of the workers were illiterate even in their own language, the padrone handled all their postal correspondence between Italy and America. Having never before been away from home, these workers were now involved for the first time with composing letters, including love letters, which were not only written but sometimes embellished by padroni with florid prose styles. Much of the exaggerated operatic longing expressed in some of these letters was more indicative of the padrone’s amorous fantasies, or his devil-may-care roguishness, than of what actually existed within the heart of the worker. In their helpless state of dependence on padroni many workers remained nonetheless aware that a single sentence of overstated affection in a letter to a village maiden might be interpreted by her—and also by her family, who were never remiss in learning the content of such letters—as a vow of eternal love, and an irrevocable proposal of marriage.