by Bill Bryson
America’s industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more basked in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings over $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn’t become a regular part of American life until 1914. People would never be this rich again.
Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party—possibly the most preposterous ever staged—several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry’s, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback. Many parties cost tens of thousands of dollars. On March 26, 1883, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt broke all precedent by throwing a party that cost $250,000, though as the New York Times judiciously conceded, it did mark the end of Lent. Easily dazzled in those days, the Times ran ten thousand words of unrestrained gush reporting every detail of the event. This was the party that Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt attended as an electric light (possibly the only occasion in her life in which she could be described as radiant).
Many of the nouveaux riches traveled to Europe and began buying up fine art, furniture, and whatever else could be crated up and shipped home. Henry Clay Folger, president of Standard Oil (and distantly related to the Folger’s coffee family), began collecting First Folios of William Shakespeare’s plays, usually from hard-up aristocrats, and eventually acquired about a third of all surviving copies, which today form the basis of the great Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Many others, like Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon, built up great art collections, while some simply bought indiscriminately, none more so than the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who bought treasures so freely that he needed two warehouses in Brooklyn to store them all. Hearst and his wife were not evidently the most sophisticated of buyers: when he told her that the Welsh castle he had just bought was Norman, she reportedly replied, “Norman who?”
The new rich began to collect not just European art and artifacts, but actual Europeans. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it became a fashion to identify cash-starved aristocrats and marry one’s daughters off to them. No fewer than five hundred rich young American women elected to do so. In almost every instance the event was not so much a marriage as a transaction. May Goelet, who stood to inherit $12.5 million, was wooed by a Captain George Holford, who was rich and had three great houses. “Unfortunately,” she noted wistfully in a letter home, “the dear man has no title.” So she married the Duke of Roxburghe instead and thereby got a rotten life but a terrific title. For some families, marrying rich Americans wasn’t so much a habit as a syndrome. Lord Curzon married two Americans (serially, of course). The eighth Duke of Marlborough married Lily Hammersley, an American widow who was not hugely attractive (one newspaper described her as “a badly dressed woman with a moustache”) but was fabulously wealthy, while the ninth duke wed Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was good-looking and came with $4.2 million of railway stock. Meanwhile, his uncle, Lord Randolph Churchill, married the American Jennie Jerome, who didn’t bring the family as much money but did produce Winston Churchill. By the early twentieth century, 10 percent of all British aristocratic marriages were to Americans—an extraordinary proportion.
At home, the newly wealthy of America built houses on a grand scale. Grandest of all were the Vanderbilts. They built ten mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York alone. One had 137 rooms, making it one of the largest city houses ever built. But they had even more palatial homes outside the city, particularly at Newport, Rhode Island. In possibly the only example ever of the super-rich being ironic, they called their Newport homes “cottages.” In fact, these were houses so big that even the servants needed servants. They contained acres of marble, the most glittery chandeliers, tapestries the size of tennis courts, fittings heavily wrought from silver and gold. It has been estimated that if built today the Breakers would cost half a billion dollars—rather a lot for a summer home. The ostentation of these properties generated such widespread disapproval that a Senate committee for a time seriously considered introducing a law limiting how much any person could spend on a house.
The architect responsible for much of this was a man named Richard Morris Hunt. Hunt grew up in Vermont, the son of a congressman, but at nineteen went to Paris and became the first American to study architecture at the École des Beaux Arts—in effect, was the first American to be formally trained as an architect. He was charming and good-looking—“the handsomest American in Paris” in the view of one observer—but until 1881, when he was well into his fifties, his career was prosperous and respectable, but a touch mundane. Typical of his projects was designing the base of the Statue of Liberty—a lucrative commission, but hardly one on which to hang a reputation. Then he discovered rich people. In particular he discovered the Vanderbilts.
The Vanderbilts were the richest family in America, with an empire founded on railroads and shipping by Cornelius Vanderbilt, “a coarse, tobacco-chewing, profane oaf of a man,” in the estimation of one of his contemporaries. Cornelius Vanderbilt—“Commodore” as he liked to be known, though he had no actual right to the title—didn’t offer much in the way of sophistication or intellectual enchantment, but he had a positively uncanny gift for making money. At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States. The Vanderbilts between them owned some twenty thousand miles of railway line and most of what rolled along it, and that provided them with more money than they really knew what to do with.* And Richard Morris Hunt became, in the nicest possible way, the man who helped them spend it. He built houses of exceptional grandeur for them on Fifth Avenue in New York, in Bar Harbor in Maine, on Long Island, and in Newport. Even the family mausoleum on Staten Island was, at $300,000, as costly as many an outsized mansion. Whatever architectural whims fluttered through their brains Hunt was there to satisfy. Oliver Belmont, husband of Alva Vanderbilt, was crazy about horses. He had Hunt design for him a fifty-two-room mansion, Belcourt Castle, in which the whole of the ground floor was stables, so that Belmont could drive his coach straight through the massive front doors and into the house. The horses’ stalls were paneled in teak with sterling silver fittings. The living area was above.
In one of the many Vanderbilt mansions, a breakfast nook was adorned with a Rembrandt painting. A children’s playhouse at the Breakers was larger and better appointed than most people’s actual houses; it came complete with bell pulls connected to the main house so that servants could be summoned if a child suddenly required refreshments, needed a shoelace tied, or suffered some other crisis of comfort. The Vanderbilts grew so powerful and spoiled that they could get away, literally, with murder. Reggie Vanderbilt, son of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, was a notoriously reckless driver (as well as insolent, idle, stupid, and without redeeming feature of any type) who ran through or over pedestrians on five occasions in New York. Two of those he flung aside were killed; a third was crippled for life. He was never charged with any offense.
The one member of the family who seemed immune from the urge to be extravagant or revolting was George Washington Vanderbilt, a member of the clan so painfully shy that people sometimes assumed him to be simple-minded. In fact, he was exceedingly intelligent and spoke e
ight languages. He lived at home well into adulthood and passed his time by translating modern literature into ancient Greek and vice versa. He had a collection of over twenty thousand books, giving him probably the largest private library in America. When George was twenty-three, his father died, leaving a fortune of some $200 million. George inherited $10 million of that, which doesn’t sound a huge amount, but that’s equivalent to $300 million in modern money.
In 1888, he decided finally to build a place of his own. He bought 130,000 acres of wooded retreat in North Carolina and engaged Richard Morris Hunt to build him something suitably comfy. George decided he wanted a Loire château—but grander, of course, and with better plumbing—and so he built more with Biltmore (though he seems never to have noticed the pun). Closely modeled on the famous Château de Blois, it is a rambling, gloriously excessive mountain of Indiana limestone, comprising 250 rooms, a frontage 780 feet long, and a footprint of 5 acres. It was, and remains, the largest house ever built in America. For its construction, George employed a thousand workers at an average wage of 90 cents a day.
George Vanderbilt filled Biltmore with the finest of everything Europeans would sell him, which in the late 1880s was practically everything—tapestries, furnishings, classic works of art. The scale recalls, and in some crucial respects exceeds, the manic excesses of William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey. The dining room table could seat seventy-six. The ceiling was seventy-five feet above the floor. It must have been like living on the concourse of a major railway station.
For the grounds he brought in the aging Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park in New York, who persuaded George to turn much of the estate into experimental forest. The U.S. secretary of agriculture, J. Sterling Morton, marveled that Vanderbilt employed more men and had a larger budget for his single forest than Morton had for an entire federal department. The estate had two hundred miles of roads. It included a town—a small city, really—complete with schools, a hospital, churches, railroad station, banks, and shops to serve the estate’s two thousand employees and their families. Workers lived a prosperous but semifeudal existence, bound by many rules. They were not allowed to keep dogs, for instance. To support the estate, George’s forests were logged for timber, and his many farms produced fruit, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, poultry, and livestock. He also engaged in some manufacturing and processing.
George intended to live there with his mother for part of each year, but she died soon after Biltmore was completed, so he resided alone, in massive solitude, until 1898 when he married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, with whom he produced a single child, Cornelia. By this point it was becoming clear that the estate was an economic disaster. Annual losses were running at $250,000, and George had to keep the place afloat out of a dwindling stock of capital. In 1914, he died suddenly. His wife and daughter sold as much of the estate as they could as quickly as they could, and declined ever to have anything to do with it again.
II
We might pause here for a moment to consider where we are and why. We are downstairs in the passage, as domestic corridors were called on most architectural plans in the nineteenth century. It is the least congenial and most gloomy space in the house, since it has no windows and must take whatever natural light it can through the open doors of neighboring rooms. Slightly more than halfway along is a door that could be shut—and in earlier days no doubt was—to divide the service side of the house from the private domain. Just beyond that, near the back staircase, is a niche in the wall that can’t have been there when the house was built, for it is clearly designed to hold something that didn’t exist in 1851 but that would change the world, and change it more quickly than anyone imagined. It is that niche in particular that has brought us here.
If you have wondered in recent pages what the abundant wealth of Americans in the Gilded Age has to do with a downstairs corridor in an English house, the answer is: more than you might think. From this point onward, the direction and momentum of modern life were determined increasingly by American events, American inventions, American interests and demands. For Europeans that was a source of some dismay, but a little exciting, too, for Americans did things in ways no one had before.
They were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether or not those things would be of any use. The absolute quintessence of the phenomenon was Thomas Edison. Nobody was better (or worse, depending on how you choose to view it) at inventing things that had no obvious need or purpose. Overall, Edison was of course immensely successful and a huge generator of wealth. By 1920, it has been estimated, the industries his inventions and refinements spawned were worth, in aggregate, $21.6 billion. But he was terrible at working out which of his interests had the best commercial prospects. He simply persuaded himself, as no human being ever had before, that whatever he invented would make money. In fact, more often than not it didn’t, and nowhere was that more true than with his long and costly dream to fill the world with concrete homes.
Concrete was one of the most exciting products of the nineteenth century. As a material, it had been around for a very long time—the great dome of the Pantheon in Rome is made of concrete; Salisbury Cathedral stands on concrete foundations—but the modern breakthrough for it came in 1824 when Joseph Aspdin, a humble bricklayer in Leeds, in the north of England, invented portland cement, so called to suggest that it was as attractive and durable as portland stone. Portland cement was vastly superior to any existing product. It even performed better in water than the Reverend James Parker’s Roman cement. How Aspdin invented his product has always been something of a mystery, because making it required certain precisely measured steps—namely, pulverizing limestone to a particular degree of fineness, mixing it with clay of a specific moistness, and baking the whole at temperatures much higher than would be found in a normal lime kiln. None of this was ever going to be hit upon by chance. What gave Aspdin the hunch to alter the constituents as he did and then to conclude that they would make a product that would set harder and smoother if heated to an extreme degree is a puzzle that cannot be answered, but somehow he did it and it made him rich.
For years, Edison was captivated by concrete’s possibilities, and around the turn of the century he decided to act on the impulse in a big way. He formed the Edison Portland Cement Company and built a huge plant near Stewartsville, New Jersey. By 1907, Edison was the fifth-biggest cement producer in the world. His researchers patented more than four dozen improved ways of making quality cement in bulk. Edison cement built Yankee Stadium and the world’s first stretch of concrete highway, but his abiding dream was to fill the world with concrete houses.
The plan was to make a mold of a complete house into which concrete could be poured in a continuous flow, forming not just walls and floors but every interior structure—baths, toilets, sinks, cabinets, doorjambs, even picture frames. Apart from a few odds and ends like doors and light switches, everything would be made of concrete. The walls could even be tinted, Edison suggested, to make painting forever unnecessary. A four-man team could build a new house every two days, he calculated. Edison expected his concrete houses to sell for $1,200, about a third of the cost of a conventional home of the same size.
It was a wild and ultimately unrealizable dream. The technical problems were overwhelming. The molds, which were of course the size of the house itself, were ridiculously cumbersome and complex, but the real problem was filling them smoothly. Concrete is a mixture of cement, water, and aggregates—that is, gravel and small stones—and it is in the nature of aggregates to want to sink. The challenge for Edison’s engineers was to formulate a mixture liquid enough to flow into every corner of every mold, but thick enough to hold its aggregates in suspension in defiance of gravity, while hardening to a smooth, uniform consistency of sufficient quality to persuade people that they were purchasing a home and not a bunker. It proved an impossible ambition. Even if all else went well, the engineers calculated, the hous
e would weigh 450,000 pounds, causing all manner of ongoing structural strains.
All the technical challenges, plus problems of oversupply generally within the industry (which Edison’s huge plant did much to aggravate), guaranteed that Edison would always struggle to make money on the enterprise. Cement making was a difficult business anyway because it was so seasonal. But Edison pressed on and designed a range of concrete furnishings—bureaus, cupboards, chairs, even a concrete piano—to go with his concrete houses. He promised that soon he would offer, for just $5, a double bed that would never wear out. The entire range was to be unveiled at a cement industry show in New York in 1912. In the event, when the show opened, the Edison stand was bare. No one from the Edison company ever offered an explanation. It was the last anyone ever heard of concrete furniture. As far as is known, Edison never discussed the matter.
A few concrete houses were built and some actually still stand in New Jersey and Ohio, but the general concept clearly never caught on, and concrete houses became one of Edison’s more costly failures. That is really saying something, for Edison was good at making things the world didn’t yet have but terrible at seeing how it would choose to make use of them. He completely failed, for instance, to see the potential of the phonograph as a medium for entertainment, but thought of it only as a device for taking dictation and archiving voices—he actually called it “the speaking machine.” For years he refused to accept that the future of motion pictures lay in projecting images on screens because he hated the thought that they could become visible to someone who had slipped into the viewing chamber without buying a ticket. For a long time he held out for the idea of keeping moving images securely inside hand-cranked peepshow boxes. In 1908 he confidently declared that airplanes had no future.