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• CHAPTER X •

THE PASSAGE

I

His full name was Alexandre Gustave Boenickhausen-Eiffel, and he was headed for a life of respectable obscurity in his uncle’s vinegar factory in Dijon when the factory failed and he took up engineering.

He was, to put it mildly, very good at it. He built bridges and viaducts across impossible defiles, railway concourses of stunning expansiveness, and other grand and challenging structures that continue to impress and inspire, including, in 1884, one of the trickiest of all, the internal supporting skeleton for the Statue of Liberty. Everybody thinks of the Statue of Liberty as the work of the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, and it is of course his design. But without ingenious interior engineering to hold it up, the Statue of Liberty is merely a hollow structure of beaten copper barely one-tenth of an inch thick. That’s about the thickness of a chocolate Easter bunny—but an Easter bunny 151 feet high, which must stand up to wind, snow, driving rain, and salt spray; the expansion and contraction of metal in sun and cold; and a thousand other rude, daily physical assaults.

None of these challenges had ever been faced by an engineer before, and Eiffel solved them in the neatest possible way: by creating a skeleton of trusses and springs on which the copper skin is worn like a suit of clothes. Although he wasn’t thinking of what this technique could do for more conventional buildings, it marked the invention of curtain-wall construction, the most important building technique of the twentieth century—the form of construction that made skyscrapers possible. (The builders of Chicago’s early skyscrapers also independently invented curtain-wall construction, but Eiffel got there first.) The ability of the metal skin to twist under pressure neatly anticipated the design of airplane wings long before anyone was seriously thinking about airplanes at all. So the Statue of Liberty is quite a piece of work, but because all that ingenuity is underneath Liberty’s gowns, almost no one appreciates it.

Eiffel was not a vain man, but in his next big project he made sure no one would fail to appreciate his role in its construction by creating something that was nothing but skeleton. The event that brought it into being was the Paris Exposition of 1889.

As is usual with these things, the organizers wanted an iconic centerpiece and invited proposals. A hundred or so were submitted, including a design for a nine-hundred-foot-high guillotine, to commemorate France’s unrivaled contribution to decapitation. For many that was scarcely more preposterous than Eiffel’s winning entry. Large numbers of Parisians could not see the point of placing an enormous functionless derrick in the middle of the city.

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications—that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper reaches—but eventually even he admitted that mostly he wished to build it simply for the slightly strange pleasure of making something really quite enormous.

Many people loathed it, especially artists and intellectuals. A group of notables that included Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Paul Verlaine, and Guy de Maupassant submitted a long, rather overexcited letter protesting at “the deflowering of Paris” and arguing that “when foreigners come to see our exhibition they will cry out in astonishment, ‘What! This is the atrocity which the French have created to give us an idea of their boasted taste!’ ” The Eiffel Tower, they continued, was “the grotesque, mercenary invention of a machine builder.” Eiffel accepted the insults with cheerful equanimity and merely pointed out that one of the outraged signatories of the petition, the architect Charles Garnier, was in fact a member of the commission that had approved the tower in the first place.

Eiffel’s Tower under construction, Paris, 1888 (photo credit 10.1)

In its finished state, the Eiffel Tower seems so singular and whole, so couldn’t-be-otherwise, that we have to remind ourselves that it is an immensely complex assemblage, a fretwork of eighteen thousand intricately fitted parts, which come together only because of an immense amount of the very cleverest thought. Consider just the first 180 feet of the structure, up to the first platform—already the height of a ten- or twelve-story building. Up to that height the legs lean steeply inward at an angle of 54 degrees. They would clearly fall over if they weren’t braced by the platform. The platform just as clearly couldn’t be up there without the four legs underneath to support it. The parts work flawlessly when brought together, but until they are brought together they cannot work at all. Eiffel’s first challenge, therefore, was to devise some way to brace four immensely tall and heavy legs, each straining to topple inward; then, at the right moment, be able to ease them into position so that all four came together at exactly the right points to support a large and very heavy platform. An incorrect alignment of as little as one-tenth of one degree would have put any leg out by a foot and a half—far more than could be corrected without taking everything down and starting all over again. Eiffel effected the delicate operation by anchoring each leg in a giant container of sand, like a foot in a large boot, which held them securely during construction. Then, when work on them was complete, the legs could be eased into position by letting sand out of the boxes in a carefully controlled manner. The system worked perfectly.

But that was only the start of things. Above the first platform came another eight hundred feet of iron framework made from fifteen thousand mostly large, unwieldy pieces, all of which had to be swung into place at increasingly challenging heights. Tolerances in some places were as little as one-tenth of a millimeter. Some observers were convinced that the tower couldn’t support its own weight. A professor of mathematics filled reams of paper with calculations and concluded that when the tower was two-thirds up, the legs would splay and the whole would collapse in a thunderous fury, crushing the neighborhood below. In fact, the Eiffel Tower is pretty light at just 9,500 tons—it is mostly air, after all—and needed foundations just seven feet deep to support its weight.

More time was spent designing the Eiffel Tower than building it. Erection took under two years and came in well under budget. Just 130 workers were needed on-site, and none died in its construction—a magnificent achievement for a project this large in that age. Until the erection of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930, it would be the tallest structure in the world. Although by 1889 steel was displacing iron everywhere, Eiffel rejected it because he had always worked in iron and didn’t feel comfortable with steel. So there is a certain irony in the thought that the greatest edifice ever built of iron was also the last.

The Eiffel Tower was the most striking and imaginative large structure in the world in the nineteenth century, and perhaps the greatest structural achievement, too, but it wasn’t the most expensive building of its century or even of its year. At the very moment that the Eiffel Tower was rising in Paris, two thousand miles away, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, an even more expensive structure was going up—a private residence on rather a grand scale. It would take more than twice as long to complete as the Eiffel Tower, employ four times as many workers, cost three times as much to build, and was intended to be lived in for just a few months a year by one man and his mother. Called Biltmore, it was (and remains) the largest private house ever built in North America. Nothing can say more about the shifting economics of the late nineteenth century than that the residents of the New World were now building houses greater than the greatest monuments of the Old.

America in 1889 was in the sumptuous midst of the period of hyper-self-indulgence known as the Gilded Age. There would never be another time to equal it. Between 1850 and 1900 every measure of wealth, productivity, and well-being skyrocketed in America. The country’s population in the period tripled, but its wealth increased by a factor of thirteen. Steel production went from 13,000 tons a year to 11.3 million. Exports of metal products of all kinds—guns, rails, pipes, boilers, machinery of every description—went from $6 million to $120 million. The number of millionaires, fewer than twenty in 1850, rose to forty thousand by century’s end.

Europeans viewed America’s industrial ambitions with amusement, then consternation, and finally alarm. In Britain, a national efficiency movement arose with the idea of recapturing the bulldog spirit that had formerly made Britain preeminent. Books with titles like The American Invaders and The “American Commercial Invasion” of Europe sold briskly. But actually what Europeans were seeing was only the beginning.

By the early twentieth century, America was producing more steel than Germany and Britain combined—a circumstance that would have seemed inconceivable half a century before. What particularly galled the Europeans was that nearly all the technological advances in steel production were made in Europe, but it was America that made the steel. In 1901, J. P. Morgan absorbed and amalgamated a host of smaller companies into the mighty U.S. Steel Corporation, the largest business enterprise the world had ever seen. With a value of $1.4 billion, it was worth more than all the land in the United States west of the Mississippi and twice the size of the federal government if measured by annual revenue.

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 eight 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 house 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.

After his costly failures with cement, Edison moved on to other ideas that mostly proved to be impractical or demonstrably harebrained. He developed an interest in warfare and predicted that soon he would be able to induce mass comas in enemy troops through “electrically charged atomizers.” He also concocted a plan to build giant electromagnets that would catch enemy bullets in flight and send them back the way they had come. He invested heavily in an automated general store in which customers would put a coin in a slot and a moment later a bag of coal, potatoes, onions, nails, hairpins, or other desired commodity would come sliding down a chute to them. The system never worked. It never came close to working.

Which brings us at last to the niche in the wall and the world-changing object it contained: the telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, no one anywhere, Bell included, saw its full potential. Many didn’t see any potential for it at all. Executives from Western Union famously dismissed the phone as “an electrical toy.” So Bell proceeded independently and did rather well out of it, to say the least. The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent ever granted. All Bell did really was put together existing technologies. The components necessary to make telephones had existed for thirty years, and the principles were understood. The problem wasn’t so much with getting a voice to travel along a wire—children had long been doing that with two tin cans and a length of string—as with amplifying it so that it could be heard at a distance.

In 1861, a German schoolteacher named Johann Philipp Reis built a prototype device, and even called it a “Telephon,” for which reasons Germans naturally tend to credit him with the invention. The one thing Reis’s phone didn’t do, however, was actually work, at least as far as could be told at the time. It could send only simple signals—primarily clicks and a small range of musical tones—and not effectively enough to let it challenge the preeminence of the telegraph. Ironically, it was later discovered that when the contact points on Reis’s device became fouled with dust or dirt, they were able to transmit speech with startling fidelity. Unfortunately, Reis, with Teutonic punctiliousness, had always kept his equipment impeccably shiny and clean, and so went to his grave never knowing how close he had come to producing a working instrument. At least three other men, including the American Elisha Gray, were well on the road to building working phones when Bell had his breakthrough moment in Boston in 1876. Gray actually filed something called a patent caveat—a sort of holding claim that allowed one to protect an invention that wasn’t quite yet perfected—on the very day that Bell filed his own, more formal patent. Unfortunately for Gray, Bell beat him by a few hours.

Bell was born in 1847, the same year as Thomas Edison, and grew up in Edinburgh, but emigrated to Canada* with his parents in 1870 partly in response to a family tragedy after his two brothers died just three years apart from tuberculosis. While his parents settled on a farm in Ontario, Bell took up the post of professor of vocal physiology at the recently founded Boston University—a rather surprising appointment, for he had no training in vocal physiology and no university degree of his own. All he had, really, was a sympathetic interest in communications and a long-standing family attachment to the field. His mother was deaf and his father was a world expert on speech and elocution at a time when elocution was regarded with something close to awe. The senior Bell’s book The Standard Elocutionist had recently sold 250,000 copies in the United States alone. In any case, Bell’s position at BU was not quite as grand as it sounds. He was employed to give just five hours of lectures a week at a salary of $25. Luckily, this suited Bell because it gave him time to get on with his experimental work.

Bell sought ways to amplify sounds electrically as an aid to the hard of hearing. Soon it occurred to him that this work could equally be used to send voices across distances to make “speaking telegraphs,” as he termed them. To assist in this new line of development, he hired a young man named Thomas A. Watson. Together the two threw themselves at the problem in early 1875. Just over a year later, on March 10, 1876, a week to the day after Bell’s twenty-ninth birthday, the most famous moment in telecommunications history occurred in a small lab at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, when Bell spilled some acid on his lap and sputtered, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” and an astonished Watson in a separate room heard the message clearly. At least that was the story Watson related fifty years later in a series of anniversary advertisements commemorating the telephone’s invention. Bell, who had died four years before the anniversary, had never actually mentioned spilled acid in any of his own recollections, and it would be odd, when you think about it, for a person startled by a searing pain in his lap to voice such a calm request, at normal volume, to someone who was not in fact present. Moreover, because of the prototype phone’s primitiveness, Watson could hear a message only when his ear was pressed to a vibrating reed, and it seems a touch unlikely that he would have had an ear cocked to a listening device on the off chance that Bell, seized by acidic pain, would call out to him. Whatever the precise circumstances, Bell’s notes confirmed that he did ask Watson to come to him and that Watson, in a separate room, heard the request clearly. History’s first telephone call had been made.

Watson deserves more attention than history has given him. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1854, seven years after Bell was born in Scotland, Watson left school at fourteen and worked in various undistinguished jobs before hooking up with Bell. The two men were bound by the deepest feelings of respect and even affection, yet they never progressed to first-name terms, despite half a century’s friendship. It is impossible to say exactly how vital Watson’s role was in the invention of the phone, but he was certainly far more than a mere assistant. During the seven years he worked for Bell, he secured sixty patents in his own name, including one for the distinctive ringing bell that was for decades an invariable part of every phone call made. Remarkably, before this, the only way to know if someone was trying to get through to you was to pick up the phone from time to time and see if anyone was there.

For most people the telephone was such an incomprehensible novelty that Bell had to explain exactly what it did. “The telephone,” he wrote, “may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.… The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.”

Displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876, it attracted little attention. Most visitors were far more impressed by an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison. The pen worked by rapidly punching holes in a sheet of paper to form an outline of letters in a stencil fashion, permitting ink to be injected onto pages below, which allowed multiple copies of a document to be made quickly. Edison, ever misguided, was confident that the invention would be “bigger than telegraphy.” Of course it wasn’t, but someone else was taken with the idea of the rapidly punching pen and redeveloped it to inject ink under skin. The modern tattoo gun was born.

As for the telephone, Bell persevered and gradually built up a following. The first telephone installation began functioning in Boston in 1877. It allowed three-way communications between two banks (one of them the interestingly named Shoe and Leather Bank) and a private company. By July of that year Bell had two hundred phones in operation in the city, and by August the number had leaped to thirteen hundred, though mostly these were two-way connections within offices—more like intercoms than telephones. The real breakthrough was the invention of the switchboard the following year. This allowed any phone user to talk to any other phone user in his district—and soon there were lots of those. By the early 1880s, America had sixty thousand telephones in operation. In the next twenty years that figure would increase to over six million.

Phones were originally seen as providing services—weather reports, stock market news, fire alarms, musical entertainment, even lullabies to soothe restless babies. Nobody saw them as being used primarily for gossip, social intercourse, or keeping in touch with friends and family. The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd.

Because it was based on so many existing technologies, and because it proved so swiftly lucrative, a stream of people and companies challenged Bell’s patents or simply ignored them. Luckily for Bell, his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard, was a brilliant and tireless lawyer. He launched or defended six hundred legal actions and won every one. The biggest was against the great and monolithic Western Union, which teamed up with Edison and Elisha Gray to try to get control of the phone business by whatever means it could. Western Union was by now a central component of the Vanderbilt empire, and the Vanderbilts just hated not to come first. They had every advantage—financial resources, an existing network of wires, technicians and engineers of the highest caliber—whereas Bell had only two things: a patent and Gardiner Hubbard. Hubbard sued for patent infringement and won the case in less than a year.

By the early twentieth century Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph, was the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. (When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became a U.S. citizen, and devoted himself to worthwhile pursuits. Among other things, he invented the iron lung and experimented with telepathy. When President James A. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled lunatic in 1881, Bell was called in to see if he could help locate the bullet. He invented a metal detector, which worked beautifully in the laboratory but gave confused results at Garfield’s bedside. Not until much later was it realized that the device had been reading the presidential bedsprings. In between these pursuits Bell helped found the journal Science and the National Geographic Society, for whose magazine he wrote under the memorable nom de plume of H. A. Largelamb (an anagram of “A. Graham Bell”).

Bell treated his friend and colleague Watson generously. Though he had no legal obligations to do so, he awarded Watson 10 percent of the company, allowing Watson to retire rich at the age of just twenty-seven. Able to do anything he wanted, Watson devoted the rest of his life to just that. He traveled the world, read widely, and took a degree in geology at MIT for the simple satisfaction of improving his brain. He then started a shipyard, which quickly grew to employ four thousand men, producing a scale of stress and obligation way beyond anything he wished for, so he sold the business, converted to Islam, and became a follower of Edward Bellamy, a radical philosopher and quasi communist who for a short period in the 1880s enjoyed phenomenal esteem and popularity. Tiring of Bellamy, Watson moved to England in early middle age and took up acting, for which he showed an unexpected talent. He proved particularly adept at Shakespearean roles and performed many times at Stratford-upon-Avon before returning to America and a life of quiet retirement. He died, contented and rich, at his winter home on Pass-Grille Key, Florida, just shy of his eighty-first birthday in 1934.

Two other names deserve passing mentions with respect to the telephone. The first is Henry Dreyfuss. A young theatrical designer whose previous experience had been with designing stage sets and the interiors of movie theaters, Dreyfuss was commissioned by the new AT&T in the early 1920s to design a new type of phone to replace the upright “candlestick” design. Dreyfuss came up with a startlingly squat, slightly boxy, sleekly modern design in which the handset rested laterally in a cradle slightly above and behind a large dial. This of course became the standard model throughout most of the world for much of the twentieth century. It was one of those things—rather like the Eiffel Tower—that did its job so well and seemed so inevitable that it takes some effort to remember that someone had to imagine it, but in fact nearly everything about it—the amount of resistance built into the dial, the low center of gravity that made it next to impossible to knock over, the brilliant notion of having the hearing and speaking functions contained in a single handset—was the result of conscious and inspired thinking by a man who would normally never have been allowed anywhere near industrial design. Why AT&T engineers chose the youthful Dreyfuss for the project is forgotten, but they could not have made a better choice.

Dreyfuss didn’t design the dial itself. That had already been designed in-house, in 1917, by a Bell employee, William G. Blauvelt. It was Blauvelt who decided to put three letters with most, but not all, of the numbers. He assigned no letters to the first hole because in those early days the telephone dial needed to be rotated slightly beyond the first hole to generate a signal initiating a call. So the sequence ran 2 (ABC), 3 (DEF), 4 (GHI), and so on. Blauvelt left out Q from the outset, because it would always have to be followed by a U, limiting its utility, and eventually dropped Z as well because it didn’t feature enough in English to be useful. Every exchange was given a name, usually derived from the street or district in which it stood—Bensonhurst, Hollywood, Pennsylvania Avenue, for instance, though some exchanges used the names of trees or other objects—and the caller would ask the operator to be connected to “Pennsylvania 6–5000” (as in the Glenn Miller tune) or “Bensonhurst 5342.” When direct dialing was introduced in 1921, the names were reduced to two-letter prefixes and the convention became to capitalize those letters, as in HOllywood and BEnsonhurst. The system had a certain charm, but became increasingly impractical. A lot of names—RHinelander or SYcamore, say—were susceptible to confusion among those whose spelling was not of the first order. Letters also made it difficult to introduce direct dialing from abroad since foreign phones didn’t always come with letters, or had letters and numbers placed in different arrays. So the old system was slowly phased out in America beginning in 1962. Today the letters serve only as a mnemonic device, enabling users to remember to dial 1-800-FLOWERS or whatever.

As for the rectory, it is impossible to say when the telephone first came to the house, but its installation was almost certainly an event of great excitement for some early-twentieth-century rector and his family. The niche today is empty, however. The days when houses had a single phone at the foot of the stairs are long gone, and no one now wants to talk in such an exposed and comfortless place.

III

For many people, the new age of enormous wealth in America meant being able to indulge slightly peculiar whims. George Eastman of Kodak film and camera fame never married. He lived in an enormous house in Rochester, New York, with his mother, but kept many servants, including a house organist, who woke him—and presumably quite a lot of the rest of Rochester—with a dawn recital on a giant Aeolian organ. Eastman’s other endearing quirk was that he had a private kitchen in the upstairs of the house where he liked to go and put on an apron and bake pies. Rather more extreme was John M. Longyear, of Marquette, Michigan, who, upon discovering that the Duluth, Mesabi & Iron Range Railroad had won the right to lay tracks to carry iron ore right past his house, had the entire property dismantled and packed up—“house, shrubs, trees, fountains, ornamental waters, hedges and drives, gatekeeper’s lodge, porte-cochere, greenhouses, and stables,” in the words of one admiring biographer—and had the whole transferred to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he replicated his previous tranquil existence down to the last flower bulb, but without trains running past his windows. By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.

For pure commitment to spending, it would be hard to beat Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury—Queen Eva, as she was known. As an economic entity she was a wonder. She once spent half a million dollars taking a party of friends on a hunting trip simply to kill enough alligators to make a set of suitcases and hatboxes. On another occasion, she had the whole of the ground floor of El Mirasol, her Florida home, redecorated overnight, but neglected to inform her long-suffering husband, who, when he awoke the next morning and came downstairs, was for some time not at all certain where he was.

The husband in question, Edward Townsend Stotesbury, made his fortune as an executive in the banking empire of J. P. Morgan. Though a distinguished banker, he didn’t have a lot of presence: he was, in the words of one chronicler, “a dignified hole in the atmosphere, the invisible hand that wrote the checks.” Mr. Stotesbury was worth $75 million when he met Mrs. Stotesbury in 1912—she had recently exhausted the goodwill and bank balance of her first husband, Mr. Oliver Eaton Cromwell—and with dizzying efficiency she helped him spend $50 million of his fortune on new houses. She began with Whitemarsh Hall in Philadelphia, a house so big that no two accounts ever describe it in quite the same way. Depending on whose figures you credit, it had 154, 172, or 272 rooms. All agree that it had fourteen elevators, considerably more than most hotels. It cost Mr. Stotesbury nearly $1 million a year just to maintain. He employed forty gardeners and ninety other staff there. The Stotesburys also had a summer cottage at Bar Harbor in Maine (with a mere eighty rooms and twenty-eight baths) and an even more palatial Florida home, El Mirasol.

The architect of this last-named extravaganza was Addison Mizner, who is now almost entirely forgotten but was for a brief and glittering period perhaps the most sought-after, and certainly the most extraordinary, architect in America.

Mizner was born into an old and distinguished family in northern California. His brother was the playwright and impresario Wilson Mizner, who, among much else, co-wrote the song “Frankie and Johnnie.” Before becoming an architect, Addison led a remarkably exotic life: he painted magic lantern slides in Samoa, sold coffin handles in Shanghai, peddled Asian antiquities to rich Americans, panned for gold in the Klondike. Returning to the United States, he became a landscape architect on Long Island and finally took up conventional architecture in New York City, though he had to abandon that career abruptly when the authorities realized he had no training in the field—“not even a correspondence course” in the words of one amazed observer—and no license. So, in 1918, he took his architectural practice to Palm Beach, Florida, which wasn’t so fussy about qualifications, and began to build houses for very, very, very rich people.

In Palm Beach he befriended a young man named Paris Singer, one of twenty-four children of the sewing machine magnate Isaac M. Singer. Paris was an artist, aesthete, poet, businessman, and gadfly who wielded mighty power in the neurotic world of Palm Beach society. Mizner designed for him the Everglades Club, which instantly became the most exclusive outpost south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Only three hundred members were permitted, and Singer was ruthlessly selective in whom he allowed in. One woman was banished because he found her laugh annoying. When another member pleaded for clemency on behalf of her distressed friend, Singer told her to back off or be banished herself. She backed off.

Mizner sealed his success by securing a commission from Eva Stotesbury to build El Mirasol, a winter home of predictably vast extent. (The garage alone held forty cars.) It became a more or less permanent project because each time anyone else in Palm Beach threatened to build something bigger Mrs. Stotesbury had Mizner slap on an extension, so that El Mirasol remained ever supreme.

It is fair to say that there has almost certainly never been another architect like Addison Mizner. He didn’t believe in blueprints and was notoriously approximate in his instructions to his workmen, using expressions like “about so high” and “right about here.” He was famously forgetful, too. Sometimes he installed doors that opened onto blank walls or, in one interesting case, revealed the interior of a chimney. The owner of a smart new boathouse on Lake Worth took possession of his prize only to discover that it had four blank walls and no way in at all. For a client named George S. Rasmussen, Mizner forgot to include a staircase and so put an external one up on an outside wall as an afterthought. This compelled Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen to put on rainwear or other appropriate attire when they wished to go from floor to floor in their own home. When asked about this oversight, Mizner reportedly said it didn’t matter because he didn’t like Mr. Rasmussen anyway.

According to The New Yorker, Mizner’s clients were expected to accept whatever he felt like building for them. They would present him with a large check, disappear for a year or so, and come back to take possession of a completed house, not knowing whether it was a Mexican-style hacienda, a Venetian Gothic palazzo, a Moorish castle, or some festive combination of the three. Particularly infatuated with the worn and crumbling look of Italian palazzos, Mizner “aged” his own creations by boring artificial wormholes in the woodwork with a hand drill and defacing the walls with artful stains meant to suggest some vague but picturesque Renaissance fungal growth. After his workmen had created a well-crafted mantelpiece or doorway, he would often pick up a sledgehammer and knock off a corner to give it an air of careworn venerability. Once he used quicklime and shellac to age some leather chairs at the Everglades Club. Unfortunately, the body heat from the guests warmed the shellac to a renewed gooeyness and several found themselves stuck fast. “I spent the whole night pulling dames out of those goddam chairs,” recalled a club waiter years later. Several women left the backs of their dresses behind.

Despite his idiosyncrasies, Mizner was widely admired. He sometimes had as many as a hundred projects on the go at once and was known to design as many as two houses in a day. “Some authors,” wrote Alva Johnston in The New Yorker in 1952, “have classed his Everglades Club, in Palm Beach, and his Cloister, in Boca Raton, among the most beautiful buildings in America.” Frank Lloyd Wright was a fan. As time passed, Addison Mizner grew increasingly stout and eccentric. He was often seen shopping in Palm Beach in his dressing gown and pajamas. He died of a heart attack in 1933.

The Wall Street crash of 1929 brought an end to most of the more notable excesses of the day. E. T. Stotesbury was hit particularly hard. In a futile effort to calm his bank balances, he begged his wife to limit her expenditures on entertainment to no more than $50,000 a month, but the redoubtable Mrs. Stotesbury found that a cruel and impossible restriction. Mr. Stotesbury was well on his way to insolvency when, providentially, he too dropped dead of a heart attack on May 16, 1938. Eva Stotesbury lived on until 1946, but had to sell jewelry, paintings, and houses to keep herself modestly afloat. After her death a property developer bought El Mirasol and demolished it to put more houses on the same piece of land. Some twenty other Mizner houses in Palm Beach—the greater part of what he built, in short—have since been torn down as well.

The Vanderbilt mansions with which we began this survey didn’t fare much better. The first having been built on Fifth Avenue in 1883, the Vanderbilt mansions were already being demolished by 1914. By 1947, all had gone. Not one of the family’s country houses was lived in for a second generation.

Remarkably, almost nothing was saved from inside the buildings either. When the eponymous head of the Jacob Volk Wrecking Company was asked why he didn’t salvage the priceless Carrara marble fireplaces, the Moorish tiles, the Jacobean paneling, and other treasures contained within the William K. Vanderbilt residence on Fifth Avenue, he gave the questioner a withering look. “I don’t deal in second-hand stuff,” he said.

* Commodore Vanderbilt was also intimately acquainted with the frailties of iron mentioned in Chapter IX. In 1838, a train he was riding on the Camden and Amboy Railroad derailed when an axle broke. Vanderbilt’s carriage was sent crashing down a thirty-foot embankment. Two passengers were killed. Vanderbilt was seriously injured but survived. Also on the train but uninjured was the former president John Quincy Adams.

* Edison’s family was also in Canada till shortly before he was born. It is interesting to consider how different North American history might have been if Edison and Bell had both stayed north of the border and done their inventing there.