Eiffel's Tower
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE - We Meet Our Characters, Who Intend to Dazzle the World at the ...
CHAPTER TWO - Gustave Eiffel and “the Odious Column of Bolted Metal”
CHAPTER THREE - Troubles on the Tower
CHAPTER FOUR - “The First Elevator of Its Kind”
CHAPTER FIVE - In Which the Artists Quarrel and the Tower Opens
CHAPTER SIX - Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley Triumphant
CHAPTER SEVEN - Gustave Eiffel Holds Court amid the Art Wars
CHAPTER EIGHT - The Monarchs of the World Ascend the Republican Tower
CHAPTER NINE - In Which Thomas Edison Hails the Eiffel Tower and Becomes an ...
CHAPTER TEN - Rosa Bonheur Meets Buffalo Bill
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Afterword
Acknowledgements
NOTES
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
INDEX
ALSO BY JILL JONNES
Conquering Gotham
Empires of Light
Hepcats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams
South Bronx Rising
Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889
VIKING
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First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Jill Jonnes, 2009
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Map by Jeffrey L. Ward
Photograph credits appear on page 339.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Jonnes, Jill.
Eiffel’s tower: and the World’s Fair where Buffalo Bill beguiled Paris,
the artists quarreled, and Thomas Edison became a count/Jill Jonnes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-05251-8
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To my mother and father, Lyn and Lloyd Jonnes, and the years our family enjoyed being Americans in Paris
The Eiffel Tower and the 1889 Paris World’s Fair
CHAPTER ONE
We Meet Our Characters, Who Intend to Dazzle the World at the Paris Exposition
On the cold afternoon of January 12, 1888, Annie Oakley was sitting comfortably in her apartment across from Madison Square Garden in New York, making tea and toasting muffins, when she heard a knock at the door. Her visitor was a journalist from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, come to hear what America’s most celebrated sharpshooting female was up to. He stepped into the cozy space to find a great jumble. “The sitting-room,” he reported, “was littered with breech-loading shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, while the mantel-piece and tables were resplendent with gold and silver trophies brought back from Europe by this slender yet muscular Diana of the Northwest.” Fêted and lionized by an enthralled Old World aristocracy, Oakley, twenty-seven, had returned home triumphantly three weeks earlier bearing lavish tokens of admiration, now displayed all round the apartment: two sets of silverware, a solid-silver teapot, antique sugar bowls. As for the pure-bred St. Bernard, it was en route with her horses. “I suppose a crack shot in petticoats was a novelty and curiosity to them,” she said between sips of tea.
Nor was that all, she confided to the reporter: her fame as the star attraction of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in London had inspired “four offers of marriage, including one from a French count.” A Welshman had sent along his photo with his proposal. “I shot a bullet through the head of the photograph,” said Annie, “and mailed it back with ‘respectfully declined’ on it. . . . I am Mrs. Butler in private life, although always Annie Oakley on the bills.” She regaled the reporter with stories of meeting the king of Denmark and the Prince and Princess of Wales, laughing merrily as she told of a close scrape in Berlin, where she had found the avenue to her hotel closed during the Russian czar’s visit. Determined to reach her room, she had dashed through a police barrier and been hotly pursued: “I rolled under an iron gate and spoiled my clothes, and the enraged guards went plumb against the gate. . . . Of course, I laughed at their discomfiture, but I tell you I was a bit scared when I remembered that I had a box of cartridges with me. Why, if they had caught me I should have surely been held as a Nihilist.”
A petite, attractive woman who had started shooting game at a young age in Ohio to help her widowed mother feed the family, Annie was also a virtuoso seamstress who designed, sewed, and embroidered her own beaded and fringed cowgirl costumes. Performing with the Wild West, she had been catapulted to stardom as America’s best-known woman sharpshooter. In 1884, when Chief Sitting Bull joined the Wild West for a season, he adopted her, naming her “Little Sure Shot.”
“She looked innocent and above reproach,” observed biographer Shirl Kasper, “a sweet little girl—yet was a sharpshooter of matchless ability. That paradox was part of her appeal. She had a pleasant, wide smile, and thick, dark hair cut close around her face and worn long in back, falling over her shoulders. There was magnetism in the way she smiled, curtsied in the foot-lights, and did that funny little kick as she ran into the wings.” Of future plans after her success across the pond, Annie Oakley revealed to the World’s reporter only this: “I will practice horseback shooting,” and that Europe might beckon once again in 1889, “as I have very flattering offers from there.”
Soon enough Annie Oakley and a lively crowd of Gallic and American go-getters, artists, thinkers, politicians, and rogues would be making Belle Époque Paris their stage, for the French republican government was organizing the most ambitious World’s Fair yet, the Exposition Universelle of 1889. While the year marked the centennial of the fall of the Bastille, the government preferred to highlight more noble sentiments: “We will show our sons what their fathers have accomplished in the space of a century through progress in knowledge, love of work and respect for liberty,” proclaimed Georges Berger, the fair’s general manager. Since 1855, the French had been holding an international exposition in
Paris every eleven years (more or less), each more gigantic and wondrous than the last. This particular exposition was to be “an advertisement for the Republican system, which for 18 years had kept at bay the Royalists and Bonapartists on the right and the representatives of various socialist tendencies on the left. The philosophy in power was to be seen as humanist, philanthropic, opening its arms to all of humanity.” Already, the French and the Americans—republican allies but also rivals—were looking to make their respective marks at this World’s Fair, each determined to uphold national honor at what might be the last great international exhibition of the nineteenth century.
As 1888 began, Parisians looking at their familiar skyline, dominated by the gilded dome of Les Invalides and the towers of Notre Dame, also saw poking up over on the Champ de Mars, the tried-and-true site of the 1867 and 1878 expositions, Gustave Eiffel’s under-construction Tour en Fer de Trois Cents Mètres. Alternately mocked, despised, and admired, Eiffel’s tower was the chosen centerpiece of the upcoming Exposition Universelle. This astonishing structure had become the most conspicuous and controversial symbol of industry’s ascendancy, and the triumph of the modern. Eiffel’s tower was to be the world’s tallest structure, the thrusting symbol of republican France, visible from every direction, the perfect monument to preside over the rococo World’s Fair rapidly rising around its four latticed legs.
Gustave Eiffel had been relentlessly pushing to ensure his tower would be finished by May 1889. A self-made millionaire, France’s most successful railway bridge builder, and an engineer of global ambition, Eiffel had company offices in such colonial outposts as Peru, Saigon, and Shanghai. Attired in black frock coat, vest, and striped trousers, Monsieur Eiffel wore a high starched white collar, a cravat, and a silk top hat. His dark beard was kept neatly trimmed to a point; his hooded blue eyes missed nothing. Stolid and imperturbable, he could be found most days—sun, rain, snow, sleet—at the Champ de Mars, perched on the construction platform directing his men as they assembled the colossal wrought-iron tower. For nine months Parisians had watched in fascination as the slanting legs of the much-discussed structure rose visibly week by week. The many who loved to hate even the idea of Eiffel’s tower felt quite vindicated, for the partially built tower now looked like an ugly, hulking creature.
In England, American painter James McNeill Whistler intended to make his own mark at the Exposition Universelle, for every artist of note yearned to show off his or her best work in the city where art reigned supreme and where millions of fairgoers from around the globe could admire it. And then there were the honors and awards that boosted sales and prices. However, in early 1888 Mr. Whistler was still busy in London, having embroiled himself in yet another cultural dustup. The Society of British Artists already had cause to rue bestowing its presidency the previous year upon this aging enfant terrible of the art world, for though Whistler had brought the club unaccustomed notice and prestige, he had also banished the works of most of its members and, without any consultation and at their considerable expense, transformed the club’s gallery into something avant-garde. And so The Butterfly, as Whistler styled himself, was enjoying yet another public feud, albeit one not as riveting (or as financially ruinous) as those he had had with John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde.
By spring Whistler would be ousted from the Society of British Artists, but not before lecturing those leading the coup, “You elected me because I was much talked about and because you imagined I would bring notoriety to your gallery. Did you then also imagine that when I entered your building I should leave my individuality on the doormat?” To the Pall Mall Gazette, Whistler, apostle of the modern in art, a quasi-Impressionist ever disdainful of those painters clinging to the old ways of painting fusty historical and biblical subjects, tossed his parting shot: “No doubt their pristine sense of undisturbed somnolence will again settle upon them.” This Butterfly reveled in the powerful verbal sting, and Whistler was never happier than when scrapping with the stodgy or drawing yet more attention to his own infamous, troublesome self.
Across the Channel, in France, the very much unknown Paul Gauguin would soon enough be preoccupied with the upcoming World’s Fair, but for now, his problem was money. Tall, swarthy, commanding even in his red Breton beret, blue jersey, and rough work pants, he had been painting bold primitive landscapes and peasant scenes in Pont-Aven, in Brittany, while his finances atrophied. His wife, Mette, who had never expected her well-to-do stockbroker husband to become a full-time, let alone impoverished, artist, had decamped with their five children to her native Denmark. Gauguin’s had been a peripatetic life. Born in Paris, he had grown up in Peru, studied at an excellent Catholic boarding school in Orléans, and then sailed the world for six years with the French navy.
During his twenties, he settled in Paris, made respectable money as a clerk-accountant and speculator at the stock exchange, married Mette, started a family, and took up art. By 1879 he had begun showing with the Impressionists. When the French economy weakened in 1884, Gauguin’s stock market income dried up. He tried to make a go of it in Copenhagen, his wife’s home, before retreating to Paris. He then sailed with friends to Panama, hoping for work, but when that went badly they wound up in the new French colony of Martinique, where Gauguin spent six months on that exotic island, painting.
In November of 1887 he returned to Paris still broke but excited by radical advances in his art. He had befriended the brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, and Theo, a dealer at the venerable firm of Boussod, Valadon and Company, had persuaded his employers to take on a few of the new Impressionists. In December Theo had shown and sold several of Gauguin’s Breton paintings for 150 francs, a dispiriting contrast to the 50,000 francs routinely commanded by Boussod’s top-selling Orientalist artist, Jean-Léon Gérôme.
By late February of 1888 Gauguin had returned to Pont-Aven. Soon to be forty, he wrote to Vincent van Gogh, painting in Arles: “The few works I have sold went to pay off some of my most pressing debts, and within a month I am going to find myself completely penniless. Nothing is a negative force. I do not want to pester your brother but if you could have a quiet word with him on the subject, it would calm me down or at least help me wait patiently. My God, money questions are terrible for an artist!”
Back in Paris, although the public did not know it, Gustave Eiffel’s time of engineering truth was nearing, the moment when he would learn if he could properly align the four megalithic legs that would support the first-floor platform of his tower. Only a precisely aligned platform of perfect flatness could safely serve as foundation and support for the rest of the one-thousand-foot structure. Its creator continued to defend his design as utterly original: “Not Greek, not Gothic, not Renaissance, because it will be built of iron. . . . The one certain thing is that it will be a work of great drama.”
In March of 1888 Gustave Eiffel, at fifty-six, was in his working prime, one of the country’s wealthiest self-made men, and the celebrated engineer of the world’s highest railway bridge, in Garabit, France. There his graceful four-hundred-foot-high iron arches seemed effortlessly to uphold the railway lines crossing the gigantic valley. Eiffel had also become a major colonial force. In Tan An, South Vietnam, his firm had built a long railway bridge, and much of its overseas business involved selling ingenious, easily assembled modular bridges and buildings. In Europe, Eiffel’s huge, ornate train station in Pest, Hungary, was much admired for its combined metal and masonry architecture, while his ingenious design for the seventy-four-foot dome of the Nice Observatory included a “frictionless floating ring that permitted easy turning of the 110-ton dome by hand.” In America, Eiffel was best known as the engineer who made possible the construction of the colossal and beloved Statue of Liberty, for he had solved the problem of the interior skeleton and then built it for sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi.
When in late 1884 the French republic had announced a contest for a spectacular centerpiece for the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, it was only natural that Eiffel
’s firm would enter. Two of Eiffel’s young engineers, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, and his architect, Stephen Sauvestre, created an initial design of a one-thousand-foot iron tower, one that so pleased Eiffel he made further refinements and improvements, and began promoting it as the ideal World’s Fair monument. After all, it would rise nearly twice as high as the world’s tallest building, the recently completed 555-foot-tall Washington Monument in America, thoroughly eclipsing that landmark.
The Eiffel Tower’s first public mention appeared on October 22, 1884, in a back page of Le Figaro. The newspaper noted, “one of the most extraordinary [projects] is certainly a 300-meter iron tower that M. Eiffel . . . proposes to build.”
The French nation badly needed to demonstrate its revived gloire, which had been tarnished by Napoleon III’s disastrous defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, the bloody revolt of the Commune, and all the ensuing political and economic turmoil. Even now, an odd but potent alliance of the politically disenchanted—French royalists, nationalists, and leftists—was agitating to elevate to the presidency (or perhaps even to a new throne) the dashing former minister of war General Georges Boulanger. As the British journal Engineering noted, “Politics have done much to bring [France] into discredit among other nations; the Exhibition will do far more to restore its prestige, and to give it even greater prominence in Art, Industry, and Science. . . . With the great mass of Frenchmen, their Exhibition is the most important object within the limit of their horizon. . . . [P]olitical strife is thrust aside for the present, and the clamour of the parties is suppressed.”