by Jill Jonnes
Edison sought escape from these business travails out in the wilds of Ogden, New Jersey, where he was happily perfecting a giant ore-crushing plant that pulverized rock into powder, enabling a super-powerful magnet to extract the valuable iron ore. Outfitted in a filthy old duster coat, a broken-down hat, and a dust filter mask, which he occasionally lifted up to spit out chewing tobacco, Edison was convinced he was on the brink of a huge success. From time to time, he pulled himself away from his bleak nineteen thousand acres (and what would turn out to be the worst boondoggle of his career) to return to West Orange to work on other inventions.
Thomas Edison and his new, improved phonograph
There he and his assistants were continually improving the phonograph to make it a truly commercial entity. He was also developing the Kinetoscope, a primitive motion picture machine that played a short scene for a nickel. In 1893 Edison wrote that he was “very doubtful if there is any commercial feature in it, and fear that they will not even earn their cost.” On April 14, 1894, he was proven utterly wrong when the first small Kinetoscope parlor with five machines opened on lower Broadway, where patrons inserted a nickel to watch a ninety-second short of prizefighting. As word spread about moving pictures, customers mobbed the street, becoming so unruly that police had to control the lines of those waiting to enter.
Edison quickly built a movie studio in West Orange, a ramshackle structure called the Black Maria, which was encased in black tar paper to control the lighting. In that stifling space, his men set to churning out frenetic short films for the suddenly booming Kinetoscope market. A steady flow of luminaries—pugilists, dancers, strong men, anyone with a highly visual act or silly skit—made the pilgrimage to West Orange on the ferry and trolley to be recorded for the Wizard’s latest sensation. And so it was that once again the two most beloved Americans in the Paris of 1889—-Buffalo Bill and Thomas Edison—reunited briefly in New Jersey.
Buffalo Bill’s touring company was finishing up a run in Ambrose Park, Brooklyn, and he led fifteen of the Wild West Indians in fullest war paint out to West Orange to reenact famous frontier scenes before the battery-operated camera. Some weeks later, Annie Oakley had her turn. Edison was delighted to see how the camera captured the way her guns smoked and the glass balls shattered during her sharpshooting act. Little did Cody imagine that day in the stifling Black Maria studio that motion pictures would slowly lure away the audience for the live extravaganzas that had made him so much money.
In the coming years, Edison had to concede that his “Ogden Baby” was a hopeless white elephant, but he was rich enough not to be overly concerned with its failure. By 1904 he was selling 113,000 phonographs and seven million cylinder recordings. The motion picture business was also booming. By 1909, 8,000 theaters were featuring “movies,” typically fourteen minutes of wrecked trains, ladies rescued from villains, and terrible calamities and tragedies. Edison cheerfully informed a friend, “My three companies, the Phonograph Works, the National Phonograph Company, and the Edison Manufacturing Company (making motion picture machines and films), are making a great amount of money, which gives me a large income.”
Not long after the 1889 Exposition Universelle, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., shut down his brief-lived London Herald—English libel laws were too strict for his tastes. But the Paris Herald flourished and, once the flood tide of Americans had receded, its yearly losses of $100,000 were a matter of pride. Bennett could easily absorb the French shortfall with The New York Herald earning a million a year in profits back in the United States. As a boss, the Commodore was unchanged: imperious, terrifying, utterly erratic. The Paris staff resorted to bribing Bennett’s butler to sound the alarm whenever Bennett “left his apartment breathing fire and heading for the Rue du Louvre,” writes biographer Richard O’Connor. “The doorman downstairs was similarly alerted to warn them before he entered the premises. One night the warning system failed. . . . [T]he staff heard his heavy tread in the corridor outside and the terrible man was surveying the editorial department with blood and brandy in his eye.” Someone had placed many empty beer bottles on the sports editor’s desk as a joke. It was an infamous fact that Bennett did not tolerate employee drinking and he sternly asked about the bottles. The editor gamely claimed them as his, no doubt expecting immediate dismissal. Instead, Bennett summoned the city editor and snapped, “I want you to raise Mr. Bishop’s salary fifty francs a week. He needs it to pay his beer bills.”
One of the more oft-repeated of the Bennett the Irrational Autocrat stories took place in his luxurious apartment. Bennett was standing before his fireplace wrestling to extricate something from one of his pockets. He pulled out a thick roll of banknotes and, as they were not what he was seeking, flung them in irritation into the crackling flames of his fireplace. A guest retrieved the large sum of money, waited while Bennett located what he wanted from his pocket, and then handed it back to his host.
“Perhaps that is where I wanted the roll,” said Bennett, as he consigned the bills once again to the fireplace, this time to be consumed by the flames.
Bennett, who loved speed in all its forms, was an early enthusiast of the horseless carriage. Consequently, the Paris Herald covered these new machines in breathless detail, featuring lavish illustrations of Messieurs Peugeot’s Petroleum Phaeton and Petroleum Victoria, Messieurs De Dion and Bouton’s Remorqueur, and M. E. Roger’s Petroleum “Vis-à-vis.” Asserted one Herald story, “Not to be a ‘chauffeur’ nowadays is to be nobody. . . . ‘I never see any one driving horses nowadays without thinking of Louis XIV,’ said one of the wittiest and prettiest women in Paris society.” Among those who found the new machines an abomination was none other than Hugues Le Roux, the first writer to ascend to the top of the Eiffel Tower with Gustave Eiffel. Le Roux “said his life, and those of his wife and children, had been so often imperiled by automobiles that he now promenaded the streets of Paris with a revolver in his pocket. ‘The next chauffeur who refuses to stop after nearly running me over will get shot.’ ”
Bennett was so enamored of the automobile and the new races featuring fast machines careening across the French countryside that he could not resist sponsoring one, and naming it after himself.
If living well is the best revenge, then Gustave Eiffel, in the years after the Panama Canal scandal and his brief incarceration, could certainly console himself. His Paris domicile was a splendid Second Empire mansion, built by the Duc d’Angoulême, son of Charles X, at 1 rue Rabelais, opposite the fashionable Jockey Club and near the Champs-Élysées. He continued to live with his favorite daughter, Claire (who remained completely devoted to her cher papa), her husband, Adolphe Salles, and their children. The pedigreed mansion had an austere but elaborate façade enclosing a cobblestone courtyard. The spacious entry hall was lavish, featuring sculpted wooden paneling, towering polished marble columns, and a two-story oval skylight. The high-ceilinged salon and library were equally ornate, with tall gilded mirrors above carved mantels, antique furnishings, crystal chandeliers, Oriental rugs, and Eiffel’s collection of tapestries.
Upstairs in his study, Eiffel could often be found tending to his affairs or writing one of his scientific papers, seated at “his monumental oak desk riddled with secret drawers, bibelots such as a delicate white porcelain pipe with tooled silver cap, a book cover of fine red velvet bearing his initials in silver, an expensive amber cigar holder with ‘GE’ marked in gold, several gilt statuettes of Buddha, paying homage to the French bourgeoisie’s transient turn of the century enthusiasm for chinoiserie.” Eiffel had begun composing portions of what would eventually be a personal memoir (some of it written in the third person), titled Biographie Industrielle et Scientifique. His library lined the walls, shelf after shelf of leatherbound complete works of Voltaire, Hugo, Labiche, Zola, the de Goncourt brothers, and de Maupassant.
Never a man to be idle, Eiffel now had the time and wherewithal to devote himself to a subject that had long fascinated him: the weather. “During my engineering care
er the wind was always one of my preoccupations due to the exceptional dimensions of my structures,” he would write in his memoir. “It was an enemy against which I had to struggle constantly. My studies to determine its force led me progressively to investigate other aspects of meteorology and eventually to set up a complete weather station.” When the Eiffel Tower opened, the station Eiffel installed monitored temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, rain, mist, snow, and hail. In subsequent years, he would set up (at his own expense) another twenty-five such weather stations all across France, and even one in Algiers. Above all, Eiffel studied the wind, devising ever more precise instruments for recording the wind’s direction, strength, and changing temperature. Starting in 1903, he “published at his own expense a series of weather atlases . . . the first synoptic charts to appear in France and the foundation of modern meteorology in that country.”
As a longtime student of the dynamics of wind, Eiffel naturally gravitated toward its role in aviation. Ever the methodical engineer, he sought to discover how best to determine air’s resistance and what shapes moved most easily through it. On many days, Eiffel could be seen, attired in bowler hat, his beard now gray and white, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower observing and calculating as varied shaped objects came hurtling down a wire apparatus that hung down 377 feet from his lab. By 1905, he had dropped hundreds of objects from the tower, confirming “experimentally that the generally accepted physical law that air resistance increased as the square of the surface of the object moving through it. Further, the tests showed that the coefficient figure used by many scientists to calculate air resistance . . . was off by as much as 56 percent.”
Eiffel had long owned a country place, a château outside Paris in Sèvres, but soon after his disgrace he seemed to derive pleasure in collecting sumptuous properties in Brittany, in Bordeaux, in Vevey on Lake Léman, and in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. He may have encountered James Gordon Bennett in Beaulieu, for both men kept their steam-powered yachts in the harbor there. In these years Eiffel became a grandfather and enjoyed his role as paterfamilias, gathering his offspring for holidays at his various estates and teaching his young grandchildren how to swim and fence, activities he himself still enjoyed. His birthday, on December 15, was always a command performance, a formal gala event featuring famous classical singers and musicians.
The matter almost certainly uppermost on Gustave Eiffel’s mind in the period after the 1889 fair was the ultimate fate of his beloved Tour en Fer. While it served as a major attraction of the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, it was by no means the centerpiece. Those who had never liked the Eiffel Tower—including the architect Jules Bourdais of the proposed Sun Tower—happily contemplated its demolition in 1909, when Eiffel’s twenty-year contract expired. Public ardor for the tower had certainly cooled: half as many sightseers—a million—had ascended its heights during the 1900 fair, and otherwise it attracted about two hundred thousand visitors a year. From the start, Eiffel had labored to portray his creation as an indispensable aid to scientific study, and even the original scoffers had to concede that in that respect it had indeed proved its value.
But Eiffel had also from the first invoked the tower’s military potential, its great height offering an incomparable bird’s-eye view of distant maneuvers. As early as 1898, he had also glimpsed its possible salvation in the nascent technology of radio and wireless telegraphy. He invited French radio pioneer Eugène Ducretet to experiment with placing a transmitter on the tower. When Marconi galvanized the world the following year with cross-Channel transmissions, Eiffel instantly recognized the tower’s strategic potential. Yet not until 1903 was he able to persuade the French military command to install Capt. Gustave Ferrié of the French Corps of Engineers with a telegraphy unit atop the tower, and only because Eiffel paid for it.
Meanwhile, Paris officialdom had convened a committee to advise on tearing down the tower. In 1903, just as Captain Ferrié began spending his days in a wooden shack atop it, “with a single antenna guyed from the tower to a tree on the Champ de Mars . . . sending and receiving over distances of 250 miles,” the tower committee engaged in fierce debates pro and con. It conceded that some still found the tower an eyesore (“one would wish it were more beautiful”), but also acknowledged its proven value to meteorology, aviation, and telegraphy. “Should all this be sacrificed to a harsh aesthetic evaluation,” the committee asked, “and should this colossal building be destroyed, perhaps at great expense, with no compensation for the city?” Moreover, the committee worried about foreign opinion: “Do you not think that the world would be astonished to see us destroy something in our city which continues to be a subject of astonishment for others?” And so, the City of Paris remained ambivalent about its controversial landmark.
In spring of 1905, the big news in Paris was not the fate of the Eiffel Tower but the return of Guillaume Buffalo and his show on his last European tour. On April 2, Buffalo Bill, now fifty-nine, and his Wild West show and Congress of Rough Riders opened a triumphant two-month run to huge and ecstatic crowds. For this visit Cody’s giant arena was built on the Champ de Mars in the very shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The Rough Riders camp was artfully landscaped, with the hundreds of large tents arrayed along broad sandy walkways. “In these paths I saw all of Paris strolling!” rhapsodized Monsieur Davenay of Le Figaro: “There was official Paris, diplomatic Paris, worldly Paris, theatrical Paris, artistic Paris, rubbernecking Paris, fashionable Paris, and those who were just curious. With all these Parisians convened in one place, it is a lot of people!”
As for the new show, Monsieur Davenay was almost speechless: “The Buffalo Bill who has returned to see us is a Buffalo considerably augmented, amplified, and multiplied. Where to begin, Sir? . . . With the marvelous maneuvers of the American cavalry? Or the fantastic equestrian exercises from the heroes of Fenimore Cooper? With the Cossacks? With the cowboys lassoing and riding wild horses? Perhaps you prefer the marvels of the Japanese fighters? . . . Buffalo is open! That is the cry heard everywhere yesterday in Paris.”
As for the dapper Nate Salsbury, who had died the year before, his equestrian extravaganza lived on, enthralling the French. The artist Rosa Bonheur, who had painted Cody’s favorite portrait, was also gone, having died of the flu in 1899 at age seventy-seven. But Cody had immortalized her in his own way by featuring Bonheur at her easel on one of his most famous show posters. On June 4, Cody’s ad in The Herald declared his last performance in Paris: “Positively Farewell to Paris” and “Never Again in Paris.” Despite rain and hail and thunder, the final shows were packed. The next morning Cody and his eight hundred players and horses boarded fifty railcars, each fifty-four feet long and eight feet wide, and headed for the French provinces, starting with two nights in the cathedral town of Chartres and then on to Cherbourg, Calais, and Lille, among others.
It so happened that on the day Buffalo Bill played his last shows in Paris, across the Channel, New York Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid was arriving in London to become the new U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Sixteen years after he had dutifully served as U.S. minister to France during the 1889 World’s Fair, Reid had finally secured the diplomatic post he truly desired. The family’s new residence in London, Dorchester House on Park Lane, would also serve as the U.S. embassy, for its splendor was renowned. The London mansion had a famous interior white marble staircase, a magnificent ballroom and reception rooms, and a picture gallery. Its previous resident had been Shahzada, son of the Emir of Afghanistan.
While the Parisians still adored him, Buffalo Bill’s star power was much diminished from the glory days of 1889. The American colony had not embraced him with the same patriotic fervor, for his show was no longer really concerned with the American frontier, nor was it the folkloric novelty it had once been. People were now more fascinated by motor cars and motion pictures. Even the Paris Herald, which had so passionately embraced Cody in 1889, gave him only perfunctory coverage. While this Paris run had been lu
crative, a few subsequent weeks of inclement weather and the necessity of putting down two thirds of the show’s horses stricken with glanders had wrought fiscal havoc. From Verdun, Cody would write on July 16 to his sister Julia: “I hope you are happy in your own home. Don’t worry sister mine about paying for it. I am haveing hard times just now but I will win out—Can’t down a man—that won’t be downed. Can they Dear?”
Despite making huge sums in these years, Cody was in a perennial financial bind, for he was pouring money into his greatest pipe dream yet. Out in the new state of Wyoming, he and various partners were developing the sixty-thousand-acre Big Horn Basin farming and irrigation canal scheme. Ever the optimist, Cody rhapsodized that the Big Horn Basin was “the greatest land deal ever” and that he and his partners would retire there to “a big farm of our own that will . . . support us in our old age and we can lay under the trees and swap lies.” Instead, the parched Wyoming projects sucked up far more money than water.
The centerpiece of Big Horn Basin was a new town at the fork of the Shoshone River that the colonel founded and named after himself: Cody, Wyoming. He was also underwriting a newspaper and various mining companies, and had dispatched his sister, Julia, sixty-two, to manage his elegant (and largely empty) new Irma Hotel. It did not become the boomtown he had envisioned, and one pastor’s wife described it as having “only 1000 inhabitants and fully two miles away from the railroad station; hardly a tree and mostly one story buildings, wooden sidewalks, and a few lights at night. . . . Only two stores seem to keep everything. . . . No one ever knows when some man will be suddenly thrown out on the street from one of the saloons.”
