by Jill Jonnes
Thomas Edison poses with Monsieur Salles atop the Eiffel Tower.
CHAPTER NINE
In Which Thomas Edison Hails the Eiffel Tower and Becomes an Italian Count
On Sunday, August 11, at 6:00 a.m. La Bourgogne was steaming through the morning sea mists toward Le Havre, bringing to France and the World’s Fair a new, modern kind of royalty: the great American inventor Thomas Edison. At the urging of his wife, Mina, Edison and a small entourage had joined the flood tide of Americans come to see the marvels of the Paris Exposition. On the upper deck of the sleek black steamship with smoke plumes trailing from its two dark funnels, the Wizard of Menlo Park stood waving his white handkerchief. Edison had spotted racing toward him a fast tender carrying his electric company’s European executives and a small herd of reporters.
Soon enough, the latter were clambering up the steamship’s ladder and had gathered in the first-class salon, where Edison announced, “I have come to Europe not for business, but for rest and recreation. Like everyone else I’ve come to see the Eiffel Tower.” His decision to attend the World’s Fair was a complete surprise to all those outside his inner circle, for he had given no public inkling of his plans.
The French were rhapsodic, for they revered “Le Grand Edison” and viewed his unexpected first-ever visit to Paris as a wondrous endorsement of their fair and nation. “The famous inventor Edison has come from America to study Paris and the Exposition,” reported Le Journal Illustré. “He speaks only English, but he may use his time here to learn a bit of our language. . . . With his long redingote, he seems like a clergyman and appears to everyone to be simple and affable.” “The French public,” noted one American somewhat tongue in cheek, “considers Edison is the sole inventor of the telegraph, telephone, electric light, and even electricity itself, if not the solar system as well.” Edison, a stocky man of forty-two whose hair had gone gray, was on the whole plainspoken, folksy, and genial, and so was thoroughly bemused (and pleased) by the enthusiastic welcome on this, his first trip to the Continent.
Alfred O. Tate, having quietly made all of Edison’s Paris arrangements, expected to be on that fast boat greeting him. Instead, the Channel ferry had been late, and Tate’s train steamed into Le Havre just in time for him to spot his boss “strolling down the long platform of the railroad station with a box of cigars under his arm and behind, hurrying to overtake him, a little uniformed Customs official.” Edison was getting an earful in French about the duty due on American cigars when Tate caught up with him and intervened, explaining to the Customs official that this was “Monsieur A-de-sohn! Comprenenez? Monsieur A-de-sohn!” Tate shook Edison’s hand as the Customs officer regarded the inventor with awe. Explained Tate to his boss, “Tobacco over here is a government monopoly. Shake hands with him and that’ll pay the duty.”
Ever good-natured, Edison did just that. The Customs officer took the famous hand, made a “deep, reverential bow and then,” recalled Tate, “as we proceeded to the train compartment where the rest of our party awaited us, he followed, walking on tiptoe and breathing, ‘Ah-a-a, M’sieu A-de-sohn,’ until we disappeared.”
The unheralded arrival of the world’s greatest inventor in Paris was a huge triumph in a summer of triumphs for the city. Tate had arranged for the Edisons to stay in a luxurious suite of rooms at the Hôtel du Rhin on the south side of the Place Vendôme, one of the city’s seventeenth-century architectural gems. Stately identical cream-colored mansions with Corinthian columns, mansard roofs, and sidewalk-level arcades enclosed the cobblestoned square, which had at its center a bronze spiral obelisk topped by a statue of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor. The Ministry of Justice had long occupied two of the buildings. Three blocks south was the Jardin des Tuileries, immediately north the rue de la Paix, with its crowded shopping streets devoted to such denizens of fashion and luxe as the House of Worth, the great Paris couturier, exclusive milliners, tiny parfumeries, and glittering jewelry shops.
In the Edisons’ suite at the Hôtel du Rhin, all was bustle amid the gilded furniture, velvet curtains, and lace hangings, as the bellboy knocked yet again to deliver another basket of rare flowers. Outside in the Place Vendôme, a permanent crowd gathered hoping for a glimpse of the renowned inventor. Elsewhere in Paris, French powerbrokers were frantically organizing banquets and soirées to honor this most famous of Americans. On Monday evening, the day after his arrival, Edison held court for a mob of journalists in his chandeliered salon. The predictable first question: “How do you like Paris?” Edison, attired in his somewhat rumpled dark suit, leaned against the marble mantel with its tall silvered mirror, puffing away on his cigar: “I think Paris is immense, at least what I have seen of it. . . . The boys propose to show me some of the sights this evening.” That afternoon, he and his entourage had made their first visit to the World’s Fair, braving the huge throngs and heat: “It is simply overwhelming, and the Eiffel Tower surpasses anything I had imagined.”
But what Edison most enjoyed talking about were his ideas and inventions. “When I was on shipboard coming over I used to sit on deck by the hour and watch the waves. It made me positively savage to think of all that power going to waste. But we’ll chain it up one of these days along with Niagara Falls and the winds. That will be the electric millennium.” What else had he been up to? “I am and have been at work at an invention which will enable a man in Wall Street not only to telephone a friend near Central Park, say, but to actually see that friend while speaking to him. That would be a practical and useful invention and I see no reason why it may not soon become a reality.”
A master of the nascent art of PR and a veteran proselytizer for the wonders of modern technology, Thomas Edison had not, in truth, come across the Atlantic to the Paris World’s Fair simply to sightsee and relax. Certainly, he had planned to visit the Eiffel Tower, inspect his company’s wildly popular exhibit, study the fair’s vast technical offerings, meet eminent Gallic men of science and engineering, and see firsthand some of his own Société Industrielle Edison’s hundreds of electric light installations. But always, at every step of the way, he would be advancing the Edison companies.
A shrewd and brilliant promoter, Edison had brought along dozens of phonographs, as well as hundreds of wax cylinders, which he intended to deposit strategically about town, where journalists who had gathered from all over the globe to cover the fair would write about him and his products. Among Edison’s small entourage was Francis Upton, president of the Electric Light Company, who was combining business with romance, for he was honeymooning with his new bride, Margaret. Edison’s English partner in the phonograph, Col. George Gouraud, was also on hand, ostensibly to make himself useful. Unfortunately, Edison already knew from his young private secretary, Alfred O. Tate (fresh from several frustrating months in England), that Gouraud, lacking capital and organization, was now a hindrance in their pursuit of rapid commercialization of the phonograph.
For the French republicans, Edison was the embodiment of all they held dear: the hardworking self-made modern citizen. Paris shop windows were filled with framed photos of the inventor, still boyish looking despite his thatch of gray hair. Crowds surrounded him wherever he went. Edison, always good-natured about his enormous fame, did not hesitate to exploit it. Alfred O. Tate had deliberately set himself up around the corner from the Hôtel du Rhin. “This was done to divert from Edison the procession of visitors of various kinds who might wish to see him, all of whom, inquiring at his hotel, were directed to me at the Hôtel Castiglione. And they came in droves, mostly aspiring young inventors seeking advice or endorsement of their inventions. Many carried models in their arms, and usually these were flying machines. Indeed, it seemed to me from the numbers of models left with the concierge, delivered by mail and by express, that half the population of France must have been engaged in attempts to solve this problem.”
Aerial navigation fascinated Edison, too, and despite “some hard work” on the subject, he had “met with great discouragement
—great discouragement . . . [However,] these fellows fussing around with gas bags are wasting their time. The thing can’t be done on those lines. You’ve got to have a machine heavier than the air and then find something to lift it with. That’s the trouble, though, to find the ‘something.’ I may find it one of these days. Who knows?”
Like Edison’s wife, Mina, Tate found the tremendous hullabaloo surrounding Edison’s visit a bit overwhelming. “The strenuous work which I had to perform in attending to a heavy mail with the aid of two stenographers, one French and the other English, the reception of visitors, and attendance at the various functions organized in Edison’s behalf, left me little time for rest.” But when there was time, Parisian nightlife beckoned. Tate’s friend Dickie, who had come months earlier to help William Hammer set up Edison’s World’s Fair exhibit, had become quite a regular in the Latin Quarter. On one of Tate’s rare free nights, Dickie invited him to a students’ bal masque. “When we reached the place,” wrote Tate, “the dancing had been in full swing for an hour or more, and as we were standing at the periphery of the whirling circle trying to identify our host amidst a confusion of kaleidoscopic colors, a tall young lady in mask and domino detached herself from her dancing partner and stood for a second in front of us.
“Then there were two swift flashes disclosing a profusion of flounced white lace lingerie and our hats soared aloft in the general direction of the chandeliers. We never saw them again. . . . [And so Tate experienced the infamous can-can.] Well, legs were a treat to us and we glimpsed many of them that evening and enjoyed it hugely.”
On Thomas Edison’s third day in France, the morning dawned crisp, cool, and clear, ideal weather for the day’s signal event: a visit to the Eiffel Tower. By 9:00 a.m., Edison (bearing a gift phonograph), his wife, and her sisters had crossed the Seine, where gaily decorated bateaux-mouches ferried visitors to and from the fair, and assembled at the foot of the tower. As they marveled at the sheer enormity of the structure soaring above them, Monsieur Salles, Gustave Eiffel’s son-in-law, greeted them. Eiffel himself—unaware of Edison’s imminent arrival—had departed several days earlier to take the waters in Évian, near Switzerland. Russell Harrison, who spoke French, had joined Edison’s entourage, as had many Edison executives and several journalists. “An elevator was reserved for us,” Margaret Upton wrote her mother of their visit, “and soon we were on the biggest landing stage [second platform]. Here Mr. Eiffel’s sister, a maiden lady, introduced herself, a typical autocratic French woman of fifty or more years. She was accompanied by an attendant in livery with immense silver buttons with Mr. Eiffel’s monogram.”
Edison and his party rode the elevator halfway up, changed cars, and then continued to the tower’s summit. As they debarked and exclaimed over the panorama of Paris unfolding all around, they were startled to hear loud ululating howls. What strange phenomenon was this so high above Paris? American Indians! Chief Rocky Bear and several dozen Sioux, big strapping fellows attired in buckskins, their long hair beaded and feathered, were whooping and crying, with Major Burke in attendance and beaming. The Indians, like everyone else in Paris, were thrilled to meet their famous compatriot. Had they not just listened and spoken into his miraculous talking phonograph in an earlier visit to the fair?
The Indians “saluted him in their own way,” Le Figaro reported: “unleashing all together a gutteral cry while slapping their cheeks with their hands, which means in their language, Long Live Edison! They made the same salute in honor of Mr. Harrison, son of the president of the United States, and for M. Salles, M. Eiffel’s son-in-law, to the delight of all people present.” “Mr. Edison was not quite prepared for this reception,” said The Herald’s man covering Edison’s day. Ever jocular, Edison regained his self-possession enough to ask the Indians what had become of Sitting Bull.
After a tour of this top platform, Monsieur Salles ushered his American guests up the tiny staircase into Eiffel’s private apartment and aerie with its comfortable plush sofas and chairs with fringe, paintings and sculptures, and carved wooden sidepieces. There a host of French luminaries—politicians, businessmen, musicians, and editors—waited eagerly to meet Edison. Margaret Upton wrote to her mother, “We were invited, after gazing a long time at the magnificent view, into Mr. Eiffel’s private salon up there and served the very daintiest luncheon you ever saw of chicken and truffle sandwiches not an eighth of an inch thick, cakes, and bon-bons, and the finest of wines which Mademoiselle Eiffel herself poured to the guests.
“We listened to some lovely music by three of the finest musicians in Paris—a flutist, violinist, and singer. A phonograph had been carried up there and these musicians performed in front of it—the sound was registered—and then all the guests had the pleasure of hearing it repeated as often as they chose. As there were numerous tubes attached to the instrument several could listen at once. It was a most delightful affair. . . . Everyone pays homage to Edison. The day he arrived the papers all had long articles calling him His Majesty Edison, Edison the Great, Vive l’Edison.” After the musicale ended, Monsieur Salle invited the whole party to dine at Café Brébant.
Not surprisingly, Edison was eager to see Le Figaro’s newsroom in the sky. Monsieur St.-Jacques was more than happy to help the always-hands-on Edison operate their printing press, which produced a few numbers of a Farsi-French edition of the paper created for the Shah of Persia. The editor presented a souvenir copy to Mina Edison, and then the whole party signed the paper’s visitor register, their names appearing not far down from those of Major Burke and the Wild West Indians. The Edison party’s visit to the second platform complete, they descended to the savory smells and lunchtime clatter of Brébant. Margaret Upton was pleased to be seated in the place of honor next to Edison. “Toasts of all kinds were given and a most delightful affair it was. At the end each lady was presented with a beautiful rose. I forgot to mention that Mademoiselle Eiffel presented each lady with a gold bronze medal of the tower in a little leather case as a souvenir.”
On Friday morning, August 16, just days after Edison’s first visit to the Eiffel Tower, Major Burke was up atop the tower again, this time with Annie Oakley, various Wild West managers and staff, and a few Mexican cowboys. Oakley had finally found time between Wild West shows and private matches at French shooting clubs to make her own ascent. True to her reputation for being tight with money, rather than purchasing postcards of the Eiffel Tower to send to all her myriad friends and relations back home, she bought just one, affixed a stamp, and sent it to American Field. Wrote the magazine’s editors, “Miss Annie Oakley has probably taken the longest sight of any in her life as under date of August 16, top of ‘Tour Eiffel, Exposition Universelle, Paris,’ she sends greetings to American shooters.”
Annie Oakley knew people viewed her as cheap, and very late in life, she wrote, “If I spend one dollar foolishly I see tear-stained faces of little children beaten as I was. . . . I’ve made a good deal of money in my time but I never believe in wasting a dollar of it . . . it is not right to squander that money in selfish, extravagant living. . . . [I] must try to do good with it. I have never had any children of my own but I have brought up eighteen of them and last fall I started on the nineteenth. I do not adopt them legally but help them out with money as it is needed.”
On the same morning that Annie Oakley visited the Eiffel Tower, the well-known English journalist Robert Sherard navigated the ever-present crowd to enter the Hôtel du Rhin, where he asked for Edison’s suite. Sherard, twenty-eight, was the great-grandson of the poet Wordsworth and had been making his own way as a writer ever since his father disinherited him a decade earlier, forcing him to leave Oxford. Edison had granted Sherard an interview, writing in a note: “All right, Friday about 11 in morning. I’ll be sane by that time. My intellect is now making 275 revolutions a minute.” The journalist entered the inventor’s front salon, which was headily perfumed by all the flowers, joined now by piles of visiting cards and numerous framed signed photographs o
f prominent French officials. Sherard found Edison “standing by the mantelpiece listening to an excitable little man who was dressed in the height of fashion and who was waving a box in his hand which looked like a jewel-case. . . . He was most verbose and gesticulative.” Edison was smiling sweetly in response.
Colonel Gouraud pulled Sherard aside and explained that the foreigner was Cavaliere Copello, dispatched “on a special mission from the King of Italy.” His Highness had been so dazzled by Edison’s gift of a phonograph that he was (via the Cavaliere) conferring the title of count upon the American inventor. When Edison, who had been partially deaf since his teens, grasped the cavaliere’s message, he gave a hearty laugh.
Sherard was up next, and Edison, who had spent the early part of the morning touring the fair, was feeling loquacious: “The Exhibition is immense. . . . So far, however, I have seen very little of it. Still, this morning I saw a tool which will save me six thousand dollars a year. It is a chisel worked by hydraulic pressure. I just saw it as I was passing by—just a glance. I shall order some and send them out; they will enable us to reduce our labor by eighteen hands.”
Edison, a man so absorbed with his work he rarely came home for dinner, had evidently been chafing at what he had observed in the past week of the leisurely French way of life: the long meals, the strolling and ambling flâneurs, the crowded cafés where men and women sipped coffees or enjoyed an ice cream. And so when Sherard inquired just what Edison thought of the fabled city of Paris, Edison could not hold back. “What has struck me so far chiefly is the absolute laziness of the people over here. When do these people work? What do they work at? I have not seen a cart-load of goods in the streets since I came to Paris. People here seem to have established an elaborate system of loafing. These engineers who come to see me, fashionably dressed, with walking sticks in their hands, when do they do their work? I can’t understand it at all.” What made it especially mystifying was that France was the world’s fourth most important industrial nation, with America just ahead, in third place. Edison himself had confirmed the industrial stature of France by attending its World’s Fair.
