Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  Republican France had invited every nation of the world to its fête. The great European powers responded with hostility, for while the republican government might insist its fair was celebrating liberty, science, and technology, Europe’s monarchs viewed it as a celebration of the downfall and beheading of kings and queens. Lord Salisbury, speaking for Great Britain, protested the very idea of the French celebration. The Russian czar bluntly denounced the French revolution “as an abomination.” Germany dismissed universal exhibitions as “ ‘out of date. Their inconveniences are not balanced by their advantages.’ . . . Austria used as a pretext the Parisian manifestations in favor of Hungary. Italy said: ‘The expense is greater than we could bear.’ ” Spain had declined, as had Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Romania. Turkey, like Italy, had pleaded poverty. Only the Central and South American nations had enthusiastically RSVP’d, as had Japan; the United States had yet to formally accept. The French republicans dismissed the royal whiners, confident that the fair would showcase France’s role “as educator, benefactor, and distributor of light and bread.”

  Gustave Eiffel was not the first to envision the sort of colossal tower that would be the fair’s centerpiece. The original dreamer was British railroad engineer Richard Trevithick, who in 1833 had suggested erecting a one-thousand-foot cast-iron tower in London. It would have a one-hundred-foot-wide masonry base, with the tower narrowing at the top to ten feet and surmounted by a huge statue. With Trevithick’s untimely death, the project, intended to celebrate passage of the First Reform Act, came to naught—a fortunate development, as later engineers declared the design fatally flawed. In 1874 the American engineers Clarke and Reeves revived the idea, proposing a one-thousand-foot iron tower for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Their design was a cylinder thirty feet in diameter, stabilized and anchored by thick cables attached to its masonry base. An enthusiastic Scientific American championed the idea: “We will celebrate our centenary by the most colossal iron construction that the world has seen.” This hideous chimney was also never built. Now, Eiffel was building a far sleeker version, much to the chagrin of Americans, who just four years earlier were more than pleased to have finally completed the Washington Monument.

  Naturally, many French were swelling with pride at the mere prospect of dwarfing the gigantic American obelisk. Engineer Max de Nansouty, a friend of Eiffel’s, had described the whole fantastic project for the first time in great detail in the December 13, 1884, issue of the French journal Civil Engineer, and he began by noting, “For a long time it seemed as if the Americans were to remain the leaders in these daring experiments that characterize the investigations of a special type of genius that enjoys pushing . . . the strength of materials to their extreme limits.” But now, he proclaimed, in Eiffel and his firm, France could claim engineers undaunted by “the colossal aspects of the problem . . . they seem to have considered these aspects as a natural extension of the enormous metal structures [Douro and Garabit] that they executed earlier, and in fact they do not feel that these aspects represent the maximum achievement possible in the erection and superimposition of metal. . . . This is the first time anyone has dared to propose anything of this height.”

  Among those Americans eyeing the Paris fair for its publicity potential was that unrivaled master of self-promotion Thomas Edison. Edison’s products had been a star attraction at the 1881 Paris Electrical Exposition, and recently the Wizard of Menlo Park, living Yankee embodiment of the genius and potential of modern technology, had been busily perfecting his new improved phonograph. In bucolic West Orange, New Jersey, Edison, forty-one, was entertaining the New York press and fellow “electricians” at his new “invention factory,” an elaborate sixty-thousand-square-foot laboratory complex equipped with “eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goat, minx, and camel.” Agents for British inventors of a rival phonograph system had had the temerity to propose that Edison consolidate interests with them, whereupon Edison cabled George Gouraud, his longtime London-based impresario and investor, to dismiss these overtures: “Have nothing to do with them. They are bunch pirates.”

  Thus galvanized, the man who had invented the lightbulb and whose companies lit up cities across America returned to the fray. On May 11, he held court in his wood-paneled library, with its ten thousand scientific volumes, puffing away at his beloved cigar while showing off the updated phonograph. “The ‘talking machine’ of a dozen years ago has disappeared,” reported The New York Times in its story on the sophisticated new product: “Edison’s literary and musical experiments with the invention yesterday were wonderful. Not only were words and sentences reproduced but the voices of the readers were readily recognized. The piano, cornet, violin, and clarinet were repeatedly tested singly and together with marvelous success. The phonograph has been so far perfected that next week the work of erecting a factory on the Edison plant will be begun. . . . [The machine’s] possibilities are beyond calculating.”

  As spring gave way to summer, a weary but triumphant Buffalo Bill, strikingly handsome with his graying chestnut tresses, goatee, fringed buckskins, and jaunty scout’s hat, sailed into New York Harbor on the chartered Persian Monarch, bringing his Wild West spectacle home to a tumultuous welcome. Buffalo Bill, forty-two, had been the toast of London, his show such an astonishment of frontier pageantry, buffalo stampedes, dazzling sharpshooting, broncobusting, and western whoop-’em-up that Queen Victoria herself had ordered up a special command performance for her jubilee.

  Returning to their old showground at Erastina on Staten Island, the troupe’s hundreds of cowboys and Indians and large herds of horses and buffalo debarked and set up improbable camp. Soon they were “Taming the West” twice daily before huge sold-out crowds, which arrived on special ferries. And as The New York Times reported, the Indians were once again indulging their taste for dog flesh: “New Shirt yesterday devoured with apparent relish an expensive poodle that had been used to much better treatment.” (As for star attraction Annie Oakley, she was noticeably absent. Having declined to tour the English provinces, she had come home early and, worse yet, was now touring with a rival outfit, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West.)

  Buffalo Bill, né William F. Cody, had always earned big money and yet was always somehow verging on being broke. That summer he wrote his favorite sister, Julia: “I am tired out. This continual strain on mind & body is wearing me out.” But after an anticipated restful October with his family at Scout’s Rest Ranch in Nebraska, Cody began to plan a new show, one too fabulous for his competitors to copy, an extravaganza worthy of the upcoming Paris World’s Fair. He wrote his sister: “I ain’t even going to tell you & Al what it is till I spring it on the public in December—Oh I am a pretty lively dead man yet—and I ain’t downed by a good deal—Keep your eye on Your Big Brother.”

  By 1888 James Gordon Bennett, Jr., forty-seven, publisher of the immensely powerful New York Herald, was one of the better known Americans in Paris, a very wealthy man, tall, imperious, with fierce blue eyes, a prominent beak of a nose, and large mustachios. Bennett had fled Gotham eleven years earlier after an infamous incident on New Year’s Day of 1877. On that snowy evening, an inebriated Bennett had entered the Manhattan mansion of his affianced, Caroline May, for a party and made his way unsteadily to the crowded parlor. Feeling a pressing need to relieve himself, and oblivious to the festivities around him (not to mention the ladies), he had unbuttoned his fashionable pants, stood before the warming fire, and there directed a comforting stream of piss. The crowd’s good cheer shifted to affronted wrath.

  Men angrily shouting “Sir!” roughly hustled Miss May’s beloved out the front door and into the falling snow, down the front stoop, and into his sleigh. The next day her brother flogged Bennett in front of his club, whereupon Bennett felt compelled to challenge him to a duel with pistols. No blood was shed, but Bennett, now persona non grata in New York society, fled to Paris.


  Thanks to the miracle of the transatlantic cable, Bennett had run America’s greatest and richest newspaper from Paris for more than a decade with an iron hand. He worked from one of his two luxurious apartments on the Champs-Élysées, the city’s best address, where large trees shaded the bucolic beaten-earth boulevard and the palatial residences of the Duchesse d’Uzès, the Duc de Trévise, and the Duc de Massa, as well as such charming sights as merry-go-rounds and children’s goat-drawn cart rides. As the favored route to reach the Bois de Boulogne, the Champs-Élysées was crowded mornings and afternoons with “fine equipages, drawn by pairs of prancing high-steppers; on the boxes, coachmen and footmen in livery; and in the open carriages, beautiful ladies dressed in chic and costly Parisian gowns, carrying bright-colored parasols as they wended their way to the Bois.”

  The New York Herald, started by Bennett’s father, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., had been a powerhouse of reporting ever since the Civil War, and Bennett junior gladly expended vast sums to inform and educate Americans about the rest of the world. He took great pride in The Herald’s foreign correspondents’ routinely scooping all others as they braved the most remote jungles and tundras to report the rise and fall of empires, the spread of colonialism, the gathering might of capitalism, or simply some charming exotic scene. It was Bennett junior who in 1869 had dispatched the intrepid Henry Morton Stanley to find the missionary explorer Dr. David Livingstone in darkest Africa. As ever, expense was no object, and Bennett junior instructed: “Draw a thousand pounds now, and when you have gone through that, draw another thousand . . . and so on; but find Livingstone.” Stanley did, becoming the most celebrated journalist of his day. Bennett also introduced the interview story, and early in his career had signed on then-young luminaries such as Mark Twain for regular columns. Bennett’s own obsession with the weather and shipping news ensured that these were scrupulously covered in The Herald.

  Monsieur Gordon-Bennett, as the French insisted on calling him (even as he once again fumed, “My name is Bennett!”), could easily have returned to Manhattan to live a few years after the scandal, but he had come to prefer his sybaritic self-exile in Paris, beauteous capital of Western civilization. Several thousand fellow expatriates made up the rather sizable American colony there, including artists such as Mary Cassatt and the famous dentist from Philadelphia Thomas Evans, whose services to the crowned heads of Europe enabled him to live in palatial splendor with his wife and a vast aviary, maintain a voluptuous mistress he shared with poet Stéphane Mallarmé, publish the weekly American Register, and supervise the American Charitable Fund for impecunious “unfortunates” marooned in the French capital.

  Since moving to Paris, Monsieur Gordon-Bennett had startled the natives (and confirmed the French in their view of Yankees as uncouth savages) by occasionally stalking into his favorite restaurants, Maxim’s and Voisin, and, thoroughly drunk, marching “down the aisle, yanking off the tablecloths and sending a cascade of china, crystal and silver crashing to the floor, looking straight ahead and paying not the slightest attention to the distress that marked his passing.” Despite such outrages, the finer Parisian restaurateurs valued Bennett as a free-spending regular who spoke flawless French (he had passed his adolescence in Paris), and as a fascinating specimen of this new transatlantic type—the boorish American millionaire. One of Bennett’s French paramours, the actress Camille Clermont, summed him up succinctly: “Beneath his thin veneer of civilization, J.G.B. was in reality a Barbarian.” This judgment was merely confirmed by Bennett’s occasional naked nocturnal rampages in his splendid coach-and-four down the Champs-Élysées.

  Still, the great publisher missed having a newspaper near to hand, and in the fall of 1887 he had opened a Paris office to publish a European edition of The Herald—a proper newspaper, with a busy city room, a staff, the smell of printer’s ink, fast-working presses, and all the ensuing glory and influence. The timing was not accidental, for Bennett assumed waves of Americans would soon descend upon Paris for the exposition, guaranteeing the paper’s success. A European edition of The Herald would both serve as an American presence in Paris, and make The Herald’s publisher a man of consequence on two continents. As in New York, the new Paris Herald served up high-minded political reporting and the most lurid criminal coverage, as well as such oddities as death by a too-tight corset at a Russian ball.

  With the months ticking rapidly by until the fair’s opening day in May 1889, the French fair commissioners and such nations as Argentina, Venezuela, and Japan had been spending the previous year moving the proverbial heaven and earth to complete their respective elaborate structures and exhibit halls in the 228 acres allotted the fair in three areas along the Seine. Crowds coming from the Trocadéro Palace on the Right Bank would cross the Pont d’Iéna and enter the fair by passing under the massive archways of the Eiffel Tower. Before them they would see, in what was now a jumble of construction, the parklike Court of Honor, its series of huge fountains pulsating with frothy sprays of water. Straight ahead would loom the gorgeous faience-blue Central Dome, encrusted with colored tiles and statuary, a gleaming burst of color to contrast with the iron tower. Behind it the gigantic Galerie des Machines was rising.

  France intended to dazzle the world (and especially its hostile neighbors) with its shimmering city occupying the Left Bank, showcasing not just its technical and industrial prowess, but also its world-famous artists and architects, its celebrated wines and food products, its history and heroes, and the exotic cultures of Senegal, Congo, Tonkin, and Cambodia, “les pays chauds,” the hot nations, as many referred to the new French colonies in Asia and Africa. The Baron Delart was replicating a Cairo market street using authentic architectural bits and pieces and arranging for the market to be peopled with hundreds of real Egyptians, including many artisans—goldsmiths, weavers, sweets makers, and sculptors—who would work and sell their wares in little shops.

  Undaunted by the lack of official foreign exhibits, fair commissioner Georges Berger, seasoned veteran of the 1867 and 1878 fairs, was busy wooing private foreign companies to the show. The British editors of Engineering , which viewed the English queen’s boycott as silly and very bad for business, had no doubt the French would mount “a national exhibition as the world has never seen . . . and which will last long after the rumours of war have died away and the din of the politicians, placemen, agitators, and communards has ceased.”

  Although the United States had been dilatory in conveying its official acceptance, American committees, companies, and artists, fired by chauvinism and competitive zeal, were already busily concocting ways to outshine the French and all others at the fair. The United States had become astonishingly rich since the Civil War, and with its technology, industry, and agriculture reshaping the global economy, its citizens felt entitled to a more prominent place on the world stage. It was galling, as writer and expatriate Henry James complained in The Nation, when an American “finds Europeans very ignorant of a country, very indifferent to a country [i.e., America] which, in spite of irregularities, he may be pardoned for thinking a magnificent one.”

  James Gordon Bennett certainly believed the Old World required educating about the rising greatness of America, a task he intended to undertake through his new Paris edition of The New York Herald, which was determined “to put American ideas and American achievements on the news map of the world.” The French-American relationship had long been fraught with admiration, envy, and one-upmanship. Mark Twain had caught that jousting spirit when he jibed, “France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.” A World’s Fair was just the occasion to heat up the long-standing rivalry between the world’s two sister republics, a gilded battlefield for France and America to vie for supremacy and honors.

  Thomas Edison certainly intended to create a big splash this time around, making his new improved phonograph the heart of a large and elaborate exhibit at the Paris fair. In late July 1888, when Francis Upton, president of
the Edison Lamp Company, received official word of the impending Exposition Universelle, he had immediately advised Edison, “I think that you should make a display, particularly of your Loud Speaking Telephone, and Phonograph, your Ore Separator; these in actual operation. Then a display of your other inventions without keeping them running.

  “I strongly recommend that Mr. [William] Hammer be sent in charge of the Exhibition for you, as there is no doubt he has a genius for such displays.”

  And so, ten months hence, accomplished and ambitious men and women of the modern world would converge upon the boulevards of Paris to be players in this drama of the World’s Fair, acting out all the passions, ambitions, rivalries, gaiety, and pleasures of Belle Époque France and Gilded Age America. This was, after all, the city that had inspired artist Thomas Gold Appleton’s famous quip “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” But first, they would attend the fair.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gustave Eiffel and “the Odious Column of Bolted Metal”

  In mid-March of 1888, Gustave Eiffel stood amid the scaffolding of his partially built tower, directing the proper alignment of its four latticed legs. What was this supremely confident engineer thinking in his chilly wrought-iron perch high above Paris? Perhaps he was simply savoring the fresh breezes and “magnificent panorama,” the pure pleasure of being so high and overlooking what he loved: “this great city, with its innumerable monuments. Its avenues, its towers, and its domes; the Seine, which winds through it like a long ribbon of steel; farther off the green circle of hills which surround Paris; and beyond these, again, the wide horizon.”

  Or perhaps Eiffel was in a less joyful mood, remembering all the abuse he and his Tour en Fer had endured—insults, lawsuits, political jockeying—in the two years since fair commissioner Gen. Édouard Lockroy had bestowed upon him the coveted prize of building the fair’s main attraction. Certainly Eiffel was thinking about how to ensure the perfection of the tower’s first-floor platform. For if it was even “infinitesimally out of plane, the deviation would throw the tower disastrously off vertical when it reached full height.” Then his enemies would rejoice, for what could he do then but dismantle his partly built tower and admit defeat? If nothing else, Eiffel had discovered during this period the joys of affronting the status quo. For as all the world knew, his magnum opus, his “dazzling demonstration of France’s industrial power,” this tower of unprecedented height, with its unique design of spare and simple wrought iron, had stirred up endless vitriol and controversy.