by Jill Jonnes
One story accounting for that talisman had Bennett senior upbraiding his son for not staying at The Herald until it went to press: “Young man, your future career depends upon night work on the Herald, and eternal vigilance. . . . [T]he owl—bird of Minerva—should be your fetish, and not the eagle or anything else.” Others insisted the hooting of an owl had awakened young Bennett when he fell asleep on watch in the navy during the Civil War and saved him from running aground. Whatever the reason, all of Bennett’s homes, estates, offices, and yachts featured collections of owls, hundreds of every size and material: stuffed, bronze, wooden, painted, ceramic. Owls also adorned his stationery, coaches, and newspaper mast-head.
Within weeks of the persuasive hoot heard from his balcony, Bennett had purchased a small English-language paper, The Morning News, started in Paris in 1874 by expatriate Vermonter William Alonzo Hopkins. The city’s only other and far older Paris English-language daily, the sclerotic Galignani’s Messenger (its last moment of journalistic glory being an 1815 report of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo), had eluded his overtures.
To serve as his Paris editor, Bennett imported the charming and often inebriated Samuel S. Chamberlain, a veteran newspaperman revered on Gotham’s Park Row for his reporting triumphs and brilliant editorial sensationalism. The slim, blue-eyed Chamberlain was fastidious, a dandy who favored flowered cravats with his frock coats, a gardenia in his lapel, and a monocle, and who moved with equal ease in Newport mansions or low-rent saloons. From time to time, he plummeted into deepest melancholia and disappeared on epic drunks. “Who but Chamberlain,” wondered one journalist, “could go off on a bender, wind up in Amsterdam (Holland), and return to his desk a month later as though he’d stepped out for a cup of coffee?” Bennett and Chamberlain, a well-suited pair of bon vivants, had launched themselves full force into organizing the new European edition of The Herald.
On September 3, 1887, as the Eiffel Tower’s legs were steadily rising, Bennett issued a one-time-only French-language dummy version of the paper to mark possession of the title The New York Herald, European edition. He had hired a primarily English staff, rented space at 5 rue Coq-Héron, and invited the newly hired editors and reporters to his luxurious apartment for a grand luncheon. “I want you fellows to remember that I am the only reader of this paper,” lectured Bennett. “I am the only one to be pleased. If I want it to be turned upside down, it must be turned upside down. I consider a dead dog in the rue du Louvre more interesting than a devastating flood in China. I want one feature article a day. If I say the feature is to be Black Beetles, Black Beetles it’s going to be.”
Bennett also proclaimed the arrival of this new American enterprise by opening a business office at 49 avenue de l’Opéra, at the heart of fashionable Paris and near its most elegant cafés: Café de la Paix and the Grand Café on the boulevard des Capucines, the Café Anglais on the boulevard des Italiens, and the Café de Paris. Here American tourists exhausted from a day’s sightseeing could install themselves at a sidewalk table and recover while “watching the never-ending procession of fellow idlers, dandies of the day, journalists and society personalities, and the great ladies of both the monde and the demi-monde displaying the latest fashions.” American visitors could now also drop in at the glass-fronted ground-floor office of The New York Herald, announced by huge brass letters. Inside the reception area and reading room, those who signed their names in a registry could look forward to seeing them appear in the Paris edition within a day or two.
Tuesday, October 4, 1887, a day that dawned cold with a lowering gray sky, a classic Parisian morning, was the new paper’s official first day. Horsedrawn carriages had fanned out from the printer’s shop at rue Coq-Héron, clattering toward the city’s kiosks and more elegant hotels. Those passing in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower could see its four slanted legs heading steadily skyward—almost ninety feet high now. In such favorite American hotels as The Grand (“The best cuisine and best wines in Paris . . . large addition to the personnel . . . No more complaints of service”) many an American tourist was no doubt pleasantly surprised—and puzzled—to awake and find The New York Herald on his or her breakfast tray. Below the mast-head was the explanation: “European edition—Paris.” The price was listed as ten centimes. To the far left was the notation “Whole No. 18,670.” The cognoscenti knew this marked the number of issues put out since Bennett the Elder had set up fifty-two years earlier in a basement with two barrels and a plank for a desk.
This first four-page Paris issue had arrived with neither fanfare nor formal announcement, only plenty of news, leading with “The New York Letter” (“The Anarchists were kicked out of the Labor Convention by Mr. Henry George”) and moving on to such lesser matters as New York Yacht Club notices, and a roll call of notable visitors to Gotham. A separate story (“By commercial cable to The Herald”) described President Cleveland’s visit to Terre Haute (where a man clung dangerously to his carriage) and detailed the presidential travel itinerary for the rest of the month. Wall Street, the London stock market, and La Bourse were thoroughly covered on the front page, with Bennett hinting that Jay Gould was toying with the market “so that certain somebodies might get rid of their other stocks.”
Also on the front page was news of the Vatican, a report that the Sultan of Morocco was very ill, and a short Paris piece titled “An enjoyable evening at the American Church,” which listed every singer and pianist who had entertained. Bennett was convinced, as would be the editor of any local newspaper, that people loved to see the names of people they knew, especially themselves. From this debut issue on, page 2 was devoted to the haut monde of which Bennett was such an active member, specifically the restless comings and goings of this mobile new moneyed class (“Mr. William K. Vanderbilt will return from London to the Bristol on Wednesday”) or their extravagances (“Joe Andrews, the San Francisco diamond collector, wears a $15,000 cluster of diamonds on his necktie”). And there, under the headline “American Visitors,” were the names of thirty-two Americans (and their temporary abodes) who had registered at The Herald’s rue de l’Opéra office.
Two days later, when a reader had written to the editor perplexed by the lack of any introduction, Bennett had responded in his usual peremptory way: “This is not a new newspaper. The Herald is over a half century old. The fact that we have chosen to publish a European edition is a detail. We do not, moreover, believe in buncombe articles about ‘long felt needs’ and telling what one intends to do, and what not to do. A good newspaper speaks for itself.” While James Gordon Bennett viewed his core readership as the expatriate American colonies in permanent residence across the Continent, as well as the many wealthy American tourists and travelers floating about from Paris to Rome to Étretat to Carlsbad, he also intended to attract Europeans by reporting all manner of court news and the travels of European aristocracy and their followers. And so, Monsieur Gordon-Bennett and his new Paris edition began gearing up for the wave of visitors coming for the World’s Fair.
The Eiffel Tower on December 7, 1887
By mid-October 1887, the Eiffel Tower’s four inclined box pier legs had reached a height of 92 feet, and Eiffel had constructed a supporting system of scaffolds so they would not fall over as they rose farther, to 180 feet, the underside of the first platform. The legs rested not against the actual wooden scaffold, but against sand boxes that would play a crucial role—along with the sixteen hydraulic jacks down under the four legs—in the all-important alignment of the four piers.
Then another nervous neighbor filed suit, and the work was halted. After all, every French citizen of the late nineteenth century was all too familiar with such industrial disasters as the Tay Bridge collapse. Who was to say this monstrous set of metal girders would not come crashing down on them all at the first punishing wind? In fact, a French professor of mathematics “predicted flatly that if the structure ever reached the height of 748 feet, it would ineluctably collapse.” Eiffel, pressed for time, agreed once again to acce
pt liability, as well as the cost of demolition if the tower proved impossible to complete.
In November of 1887, Gustave Eiffel was surprised to hear from Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal and president of the company now constructing the sea-level Panama Canal. “I had never believed in a sea-level canal,” explained Eiffel, “and I was one of the few who voted against it at the meeting in 1879 at the Geographic Society. Monsieur Ferdinand de Lesseps had never forgotten that vote over the years. Still, I had followed the work on the canal closely.” Since 1881 some eight hundred thousand ordinary Frenchmen and women had bought shares of stock in de Lesseps’s Panama company, believing the national hero’s assurances that, yes, there had been delays, but all in good time the Panama Canal would be finished and open, to the greater glory of France and their bank accounts. There had in fact been setbacks, troubles, and disquieting reports that the sea-level canal was a disastrous folly, which resulted in the constantly falling value of Panama Canal stock. De Lesseps had gone back into the bond markets again and again, but so much money was being wasted on a plan that was technically doomed that he always needed more. Now he began to pull all possible political strings to have the government bail him out via a state lottery.
By the time he contacted Eiffel, de Lesseps had finally admitted that his sea-level plan was a botch. “I was visited by Baron de Reinbach,” said Eiffel, “who proposed I enter into negotiations with the company. Monsieur Ferdinand de Lesseps called for my help in terms that touched me.” Eiffel spent several weeks mulling over de Lesseps’s flattering proposal that he, Eiffel, should rescue the canal by designing and building a system of locks. “Oh, I hesitated. I hesitated a long time,” admitted Eiffel later. But in mid-November 1887, unable to resist the appeals to his patriotism and pride, nor the opportunity to show France leading the world, Eiffel reluctantly agreed to bail out de Lesseps. He took over as the general contractor in Panama, plunging ahead with a new $25 million “gigantic ten-lock liquid staircase.” By January of 1888, Eiffel’s firm arrived in Panama, and work began.
In Paris, the first icy days of 1888 found Gustave Eiffel supervising the installation of a second huge scaffold on the Eiffel Tower to hold in place the four separate piers that would join into one giant square frame—the tower’s first floor—as the four legs (or piers) rose and pressed down. Once joined together atop the piers, this four-section frame would also provide support for the iron girders and trusswork that would encircle and unite the four piers, a thick metal belt. This would constitute the first platform, the all-important foundation for the rest of the tower. However, Parisians, used to seeing the tower growing in height almost daily, now assumed the worst. The popular daily Le Matin declared in a headline, “The Tower Is Sinking,” and urged that all “building should stop and sections already built should be demolished as quickly as possible.”
As Eiffel began the months-long process of completing and aligning the first platform, he faced the critical question of whether the twenty-five-foot-deep trusswork and girders that were to belt together the four piers into a solid base could do that and still maintain an absolutely horizontal platform. The tower’s four legs each had four corner columns, and each of those sixteen columns had to meet the belt at precisely the right height and at exactly the predetermined spots where the rivet holes had been bored, or the first platform would be slightly and fatally askew. In that case, the remaining eight hundred feet of the tower could not be safely built atop it. Eiffel and his men began with amazing finesse to install the girders and trusswork. By March they were minutely calibrating the four piers, each weighing 440 tons. “If a column was found to be too high by even a fraction of an inch, the plug could be pulled and the fine sand allowed to run out until the piston—and the column—was lowered to the correct position,” wrote Eiffel Tower historian Harriss. “If, on the other hand, a column was too low, the jack beside the cylinder could be operated to push the column back to the proper angle. If simplicity of conception and economy of means are signs of genius, it is such touches that define Eiffel.”
A reporter for L’Illustration dropped by the construction site at the beginning of March and came away deeply impressed. “Despite all the snowfalls and exceptionally cold temperatures of this winter, the workers at the Eiffel Tower have never eased up on their work. As of now, the tower has reached 197 feet.” He watched the riveting operation in fascination. “Each team has four workers and a portable forge. A kid called the ‘deck boy’ is in charge of fanning the forge; he carries the rivet heated to a white heat to the worker known as the ‘keeper of things,’ who drives the rivet into the holes by pounding on the rivet’s head. On the other side, another worker strikes, smashing the emerging rivet swiftly to begin forming a second head; the fourth man, known as the striker, finishes up the second rivet head with a snap rivet that he pounds into place with a sledge hammer weighing 13 pounds.
“At this time there are twenty teams of riveters all going strong.”
On March 26, 1888, Eiffel and his engineers once again measured the first platform. It was absolutely perfectly horizontal. He would later write, “Joined by a belt of girders, the piers formed a solid table with a wide base. The sight of it alone was enough to brush aside any fears of its overturning. We no longer had to worry about a major accident, and any minor ones that might occur now could not compromise completion of the structure.”
However, Eiffel still faced an entirely different but unsolved challenge of utmost importance: the elevators, a “very complex, intricate problem, full of danger and uncertainty.” As no one had ever erected a tower of one thousand feet, no one had any experience with building elevators to reach such heights. If the crowds could not ascend safely and swiftly up the Eiffel Tower, what sort of attraction would it be?
The Eiffel Tower with the first platform finished
CHAPTER THREE
Troubles on the Tower
Was there any place quite so delightful as Paris in the spring, when the chestnut trees bloomed a frothy pink, the fountains in the formal parks burbled to life, and the flâneurs strolled the boulevards, twirling their canes and tipping their silk top hats to ladies in passing fiacres? Out and about on the city’s bustling sidewalks, “the oyster peddler tosses shells at our legs, the distributor of broadsheets bars the passage, the perambulating salesman draws a crowd ideal for pickpockets; deprived of the sidewalk, we must hop quickly into the street, where the omnibus waits to run over us, if we have, happily, escaped the carriage.” Mark Twain had reveled in Paris street life: “so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and wonderfully Frenchy! . . . Two hundred people sat at little tables on the sidewalk, sipping wine and coffee; the streets were thronged with light vehicles and joyous pleasure-seekers; there was music in the air, life and action all about us.”
By May of 1888, some of those cheerful Parisian crowds had taken to enjoying the warmer days by drifting over to the Champ de Mars, drawn by the never-ending spectacle of the Eiffel Tower under construction. “M. Eiffel’s Tower of Babel is rising steadily,” reported the Paris correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, “and the enormous mass of iron which the constructors have already piled up against the clouds is the amazement of everybody. When you stand at the base of the gigantic monument and look up to the skies through a colossal spider’s web of red metal the whole thing strikes you as being one of the most daring attempts since Biblical days.” Inevitably, when the weather was favorable, the photographers would be out taking yet more pictures of the already famous structure, their sequential images documenting the tower’s rapid rise.
Each morning, soon after the workmen arrived, the rapid blows of the riveters could be heard, and on gray or foggy days the flames of the forges could be seen flickering red and orange in the upper reaches of the tower. “The four cranes—one for each pillar—which brought up the pieces for this vast metallic framework one by one, stood out against the sky with their great arms at the four corners of this lofty site.”
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br /> Eiffel’s two years of planning were now paying off. “Each piece [of the tower] had to be designed separately, taking into account the variable inclination of columns and braces along every foot of the tower’s height. In addition, every rivet hole had to be drawn in at precisely the right spot, so that all the on-site workers would have to do was to place one-third of 2.5 million rivets, the rest being placed at the shops in advance . . . all calculations had to be accurate to one-tenth of a millimeter.”
As soon as Eiffel had his all-important first platform balanced, he opened a canteen there to serve food and save his men the time and trouble of clambering up and down for coffee or a meal. Now on lovely spring days at noon his men had their lunch up in the open air and breezes. Here, “a chunk of coarse bread serves as the pièce de résistance to a toothsome bit of boiled meat, or a spoonful of mutton gravy, or an artichoke, or a trifle of chicory salad.” This system also enabled Eiffel to make sure that no worker drank too much wine, thus becoming a danger to himself and others. Pay increased along with the height of the tower, ranging from eight cents an hour for unskilled labor to fourteen cents an hour for most skilled. The construction pace was relentless.
As May turned to June, the weather in Paris became far hotter than normal. July brought sweltering days, with the temperatures sometimes nearing one hundred. Although Eiffel had equipped the tower with lightning rods—twenty-inch-wide cast-iron pipes for each pier, buried sixty feet deep and rising up through the wrought-iron girders above the top portion of work—thunderstorms not infrequently swept in and forced the men working on the tower to scramble down to safety. When the lightning passed on, work resumed and continued until it was too dark to see. There could be no days off.
