Niagara

by Pierre Berton

He was also one of the most puzzling – a product of invention’s golden age, an example of the Alger hero, and an embryonic millionaire who railed against the system that nurtured him, who taught that the doctrine of individualism was a disease, who lambasted both wealth and competition. He was out to destroy capitalism, which he thought of as a dirty, rotten and inefficient system. Would he have postulated his revolutionary theories had his invention and subsequent wealth come first? Perhaps; perhaps not. For the fact remains that Gillette held to that philosophy for the rest of his life – until his death in 1932. Indeed, he used his wealth to promote his ideals. By 1910 he was rich enough to offer Theodore Roosevelt a million dollars to act as president of his Utopia, a position that the hero of San Juan Hill quickly declined.

  Gillette was in his fortieth year when he published The Human Drift. The son of a small businessman and part-time inventor who had lost everything in the Chicago fire of 1871, he set off on his own as a travelling salesman, eventually peddling bottle stoppers for the Crown Cork & Seal Company. It was William Painter, the inventor of the Crown cork, who gave him the piece of advice that eventually led to the invention of the safety razor: “Try to think of something like Crown Cork; when once used, it is thrown away and the customer keeps coming back for more.”

  With Painter’s words percolating quietly in his subconscious, Gillette had his first flash of inspiration. Looking out of his hotel window in Scranton one wet day, he noticed a grocery truck that had broken down on its way from the wholesalers to the railroad depot. The resultant traffic snarl convinced him that there must be a more economical and efficient system of distribution. What was needed, Gillette reasoned, was a world corporation to replace the present system.

  As its frontispiece, The Human Drift carried a photograph of Niagara Falls. But, though Gillette was obsessed by the idea of building a garden city on a scale never before conceived, the beauty of the waterfall and its value as a natural attraction escaped him. In Gillette’s concept, nature must be bent to man’s will and replaced by a vast and rational pattern of geometric parks, lawns, flower beds, and hedges. It was Niagara’s raw power that interested him – that and its size.

  This was an era when bigness was worshipped for its own sake. The turbines at Niagara were the biggest in the world. So were the powerhouses and the industries, not to mention the Falls themselves. Bigness spilled over into architecture. The modern skyscraper had been made possible by the addition of the electric motor to Elisha Otis’s earlier elevator. The biggest buildings in the world were under construction, but none so gargantuan as those Gillette projected.

  A big man physically, he thought big. His plan for Niagara Falls would have dwarfed the cataract. He foresaw a city of sixty million – almost the entire population of the United States at that time – housed in twenty-four thousand gigantic apartment houses, each twenty-five stories high, each accommodating twenty-five hundred tenants, all feeding on Niagara’s “unlimited power” and “free from all the annoyances of housekeeping.” Like so many others of his time, Gillette was obsessed and elated by the prospect of so much power locked up within those waters. “Here is a power,” he wrote, “which, if brought under control, is capable of keeping in continuous operation every manufacturing industry for centuries to come, and, in addition, supply all the lighting facilities, run all the elevators, and furnish the power necessary for the transportation system of the great central city.”

  Gillette’s great central city was designed as a vast rectangle, 135 miles long and 45 miles wide. There was nothing vague in his grandiloquence. He had worked it all out to the foot and drawn up detailed plans showing cross-sections of apartment buildings, floor plans of typical apartments, and a bird’s-eye diagram of the city itself. Seen from the air, Metropolis would resemble nothing so much as a giant beehive – hexagonal high-rises, surrounded by star-shaped lawns and flower borders, each building exactly six hundred feet in diameter, each with its 250-foot dining-room. He went so far as to detail the materials – steel, firebrick, and glazed tile of various colours. There would be, he said, fifteen thousand miles of avenues, “every foot of which would be a continuous change of beauty.”

  Metropolis would be “the heart of a vast machine, to which more than a thousand miles of arteries of steel, the raw material of production, would find its way, there to be transformed in the mammoth mills and workshops, into the life-giving elements that would sustain and electrify the mighty brain of the whole, which would be the combined intelligence of the entire population working in unison, but each and every individual working in his own channel of inclination.” Metropolis “would make London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and New York look like the work of ignorant savages in comparison.”

  Money would not be needed in Metropolis. Each citizen would work for a given number of hours a week. Elitism would not exist. The citizens would select what they needed, without money and without the price tag, from a variety of emporiums where goods “all of the highest grade and quality” would be arranged “in attractive display,” the products of “the highest developed intelligence.”

  These pretentious phrases and glowing descriptions also have a resonance for our time. What Gillette envisaged was a benevolent dictatorship, and he outlined it with all the fervour and naïveté of a Marxian idealist extolling the workers’ paradise. Free food and clothing for all – just for the taking? “Many will maintain that the people would abuse the privilege, but such would not be the case,” he argued. “For under a state of material equality there is no incentive to hoard up, and no one would load themselves down with the care of clothes which they did not need and could not wear. And no one would fill their apartments with a lot of useless trash and furniture which is neither useful nor ornamental, and would be in the way.”

  As for the Falls, in Gillette’s ideal city they would cease to be seen. The entire Metropolis would be built on a vast three-level platform, one hundred feet thick, that would cover the entire countryside, Falls, gorge, and all. Within the lowest of its three chambers would be installed all the water pipes, sewers, and power lines. A middle chamber would be a transportation corridor – a subway. Above that a third chamber, fifty feet high, would be reserved for strolling and recreation. Domes of glass would provide light for a perpetual garden. How the Falls could be fitted into this the author did not say. Nor did it really matter. In spite of his offer to Roosevelt and the publication of two more books, nothing ever came of King Camp Gillette’s grandiose concept.

  In 1896, two years after the publication of The Human Drift, another worshipper at the cult of bigness matched Gillette’s conception with one of his own, which he called the Great Dynamic Palace and International Hall. Leonard Henkle, a Rochester inventor, drew up a detailed set of architectural plans for his gigantic project. Half a mile long and forty-six stories high, it would stretch across the Niagara River just above the brink of the cataract. There are echoes of Henkle’s conception in the work of Paolo Saleri, the twentieth-century “arcologist” in Arizona, whose high-density megastructures have aroused such controversy. Unlike Gillette, Henkle proposed to “combine the most imposing grandeur of art with the natural beauty of Niagara Falls.” But he, too, saw the cataract primarily as a power source, which, he claimed, would supply all the needs of every city in the United States and Canada.

  None of these visionary schemes for Niagara ever reached fruition, but one Utopian dreamer did achieve his objective. Henry D. Perky, a health fanatic, determined to build “the cleanest, finest, most hygienic factory in the world” on a hilltop overlooking the American Falls. He succeeded in doing just that.

  A tall, bespectacled figure, his face half concealed by a luxuriant walrus moustache, Perky had enjoyed an extraordinary career. Raised in Ohio, he had started life as a schoolteacher, switched to manufacturing, and then switched again to law. He headed west to Nebraska, became a state senator at the age of twenty-five, and then, with his health failing, decided in 1879 to move to the crisp mountain a
ir of Colorado.

  There, drawing on his experience as a railroad lawyer, he built the Denver Central, organized a mammoth industrial exposition, and constructed the first steel passenger cars in the world. Yet he still suffered dreadfully from stomach troubles; indeed, his health deteriorated in spite of the mountain atmosphere. He tried various remedies before hitting on the idea of eating whole unground wheat. That seemed to do the trick, or at least he thought so. But boiling the grain was a laborious process and produced an unpalatable mush. The search for a tastier product led to his greatest invention.

  In 1891 Perky devised a machine that would separate the whole wheat kernel into fibres in such a way that its nutritional value wasn’t lost. These fibres would then be made into biscuits and baked. Eaten with milk or cream, they made an acceptable breakfast cereal. Thus, in 1893, Shredded Wheat was born in a Denver cracker bakery, and the ailing Perky was transformed, so it was said, from an “almost abject and physical wreck” to perfect health.

  Henry Perky was the last of a triumvirate of health addicts who helped change the breakfast habits of the continent. The Battle Creek Sanitarium, operated by the vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventist sect, had already spawned W.K. Kellogg, the future Corn Flakes king, and C.W. Post, whose Grape-Nuts, Postum, and Post Toasties were fixtures on the grocery shelves. Now Perky, as much an evangelist as a merchandiser, proposed to make Shredded Wheat a household word. At first he had thought only in terms of manufacturing the machine that created the product. But why sell the device to let others profit from the cereal? The real money lay not in the shredder but in the shredded cereal.

  A quirky health faddist, Perky was convinced he had found the answers to the world’s ills. He blamed the educational institutions for not emphasizing the benefits of natural foods. He set out to proselytize the globe and incidentally to sell his Shredded Wheat, for he was convinced that mankind’s propensity to do evil sprang from bad nutrition.

  He set up a small factory in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1895. But manufacturing was not enough; he needed missionaries to peddle the finished product. The Oread Castle caught his eye. A monumental pile of battlements and towers perched on a hill in the finest residential section of town, it had once been a girls’ finishing school. In this Gothic environment he established a school of nutrition, underwriting both board and tuition for the young women who studied under his direction and who were then sent out to spread the gospel. He lived among them, took his meals with them in the dining-room, and trained them as after-dinner speakers and lecturers. He was himself a lively, if eccentric, speaker, a master of the broad gesture and staccato delivery. Sometimes he embroidered his enthusiastic arm-waving addresses by indulging in his hobby of Swiss yodelling, at which he was adept.

  Perky soon realized that lectures, articles, and even books – he had already published one entitled The Vital Question – were not enough to sell Shredded Wheat. If he was to spread the word he must do something spectacular. He would not wait to bring Shredded Wheat to the people; he would, instead, bring the people to Shredded Wheat. The obvious site for such an attraction was the one place where hundreds of thousands congregated. He had had his eye on it since his first visit in 1895. At Niagara Falls he would build a temple to nutrition that would attract thousands of visitors annually.

  He knew exactly what he wanted. Standing with his vice-president, William Birch Rankine (who was also secretary-treasurer of the Niagara Falls Power Company), on the site of the old Augustus Porter mansion on Buffalo Avenue, he exclaimed, “If I am to come to Niagara I must have this property … I want my conservatory to be located on the State Reservation with the rapids of Niagara in front of them [sic] where nobody but God Almighty can interfere with them.”

  He bought a 1,300-foot strip along the avenue facing the rapids – an old residential district that had once housed Niagara Falls’ first families. There he planned his conservatory, a handsome 65,000-square-foot complex of buildings, unlike any other factory in the world. He promised to spend ten million dollars on the site and hire one thousand workers to make his dream come true. When that news was published in 1900, the community went manic “Crowning Triumph For Niagara Falls,” read the huge block headlines in the Gazette. “It Sounds Like a Dream, Reads Like a Fairy Tale, Seems Too Good to Be True But Is Positively True.” The paper reported, correctly, that it was “the biggest piece of news affecting Niagara Falls.”

  Perky’s special railroad car spirited the mayor, the council, and the press to his Worcester plant, where they were served a Shredded Wheat drink, Shredded Wheat Biscuit Toast, roast turkey stuffed with Shredded Wheat, and Shredded Wheat Ice Cream. They diplomatically pronounced the meal delicious and waxed even more enthusiastic about the promised factory and the prospects for their community.

  Perky’s industrial centre opened in May 1901 and fulfilled his promise that it would be “one of the largest and most far-reaching in its design of any in the country.” In an era when factories were virtually windowless – dark, stuffy, and airless – Perky had planned buildings for the future. His vision went beyond Shredded Wheat. He wanted to turn Niagara Falls into an industrial paradise and was not above using a little personal clout to achieve his ends. He threatened D.O. Mills, head of the Industrial Paper Company, “Stop that malignant smoke in your plant else I won’t come to Niagara.”

  In this last crusade he was largely unsuccessful. But his own “Conservatory of Natural Science,” as he called his complex, was everything he had dreamed of – “a temple of cleanliness,” in one description, containing two hundred tons of marble. Covered in glazed, cream-coloured brick, it was one of the first factories to be air-conditioned, with the heat automatically controlled. Its 844 windows carried thirty thousand panes of glass, making it “the cleanest, finest, most hygienic factory in the world.” The women working on the line wore white aprons and caps; the men wore white jackets. A sign posted in the biscuit-packing room read: “This is the only time in our entire process of manufacturing where our products are touched by human hands. Every provision is made to ensure absolute cleanliness.”

  The company was one of the first to install men’s and women’s rest rooms – and these were decorated with marble and mosaics. In one spacious dining-room, the women were served a free lunch. (In the men’s dining-room, lunch cost a dime.) The complex boasted 13 bathtubs and 13 showers for employees, as well as 104 sinks. The reception room looked like the lobby of a palatial hotel, complete with palms and a gigantic globular chandelier containing thirty-six electric lights. Reading rooms for the public, their floors covered with handsome rugs, lay off the main lobby. There were also an eight-hundred-seat theatre and a roof garden from which visitors could view the Falls.

  Perky’s bold venture paid off. The factory was soon playing host to 100,000 visitors a year. When they tired of munching on Shredded Wheat they could enjoy the music of the company’s choral society or its marching band. Perky was an enthusiastic amateur musician who played several instruments, his favourite being the violin.

  Every box of Shredded Wheat, Perky decided, would carry a picture of his plant, making it one of the best-known buildings on the continent. It was this graphic trademark that made Shredded Wheat and Niagara Falls inseparable.

  Perky died in 1904. Eventually, Shredded Wheat was gobbled up by the National Biscuit Company – NABISCO. But each package still bears a small picture of the great cataract as a kind of homage to Henry Perky, the Utopian businessman who saw his dream come true.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  Arthur Midleigh’s folly

  2

  The ice bridge

  3

  Annie

  4

  Fame and fortune or instant death

  5

  Aftermath

  1

  Arthur Midleigh’s folly

  In the dying days of September 1889, the year that saw Edward Dean Adams take over as president of the Cataract Construction Company, a young Englis
hman named Arthur Midleigh arrived at Niagara Falls, Ontario, disconsolate, bored, and not a little frustrated.

  This was the twilight of the Victorian Age, when certain adventurous Englishmen sought fleeting fame in the far corners of the world – assaulting the rapids of the Congo, climbing the Matterhorn, pursuing wild boars in the Punjab, exploring the cannibal islands of the Pacific. Arthur Midleigh caught the fever. One cousin had ascended Mont Blanc. Another had gone after tigers in the jungles of India. Midleigh opted for the life of a cowboy in the American West, lured there by Ned Buntline’s romantic novels of Indian wars and reckless gunfighters. He had gone out to Wyoming in 1888 to work on a ranch, only to discover that Buntline’s Wild West was a fiction. The buffalo had long since vanished; the Indians were depressingly friendly; the bad men had all been shot or – worse – had settled down to a respectable existence.

  As for the life of a cowboy, Midleigh found it boring, filthy, and wearisome: to his disgust, he had become nothing more than a common herdsman. After the best part of a year of bunkhouse life, he decided to go back home.

  On his way back to England, Midleigh – a dashing figure with his unshorn locks, sombrero, and chaps – decided to stop briefly at Niagara Falls. He had, unwittingly, come to the right place, for he was determined to perform some impossible feat and thus return home in triumph. There were more impossible feats waiting to be performed at Niagara than at any other place on the continent.

  The town itself reflected Midleigh’s sombre mood, for here, as in the so-called Wild West, all was anticlimax. The tourist season had ended. The itinerant peddlers had packed away their bead work and knickknacks, folded their tents or shut their booths, and departed. The crowd of tourists was already thinning, and in the newly created Queen Victoria Park, the gravel pathways were yellow with the falling leaves of autumn. As Midleigh discovered, it was no longer difficult to get a room at the Clifton House.