Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [173]
The International Exposition of 1900 covering 277 acres in the heart of Paris displayed the new century’s energies to fifty million visitors from April to November. If they could not for this Exposition equal the Eiffel Tower of the last, the French built with the same élan a new miracle of engineering and beauty in the Pont Alexandre III, whose low graceful arch spanned the Seine in a single leap. It was considered “peerless in all the world” and the two new permanent exhibition buildings on the right bank, the Grand and Petit Palais, were unanimously acknowledged to be “suitable and grand.” Not so the Porte Monumentale, or main gate, in the Place de la Concorde, built of what appeared to one observer to be lath, plaster, broken glass, putty, old lace curtains and glue. At its top, instead of a traditional goddess of Progress or Enlightenment, a plaster Parisienne in evening gown welcomed the world with open arms. Although considered gay and chic by some, the gate was generally deplored as the epitome of the new vulgarity of the new century. Multicolored electric lights played on towering electrically powered fountains at night; the new Metro was opened in time; a track for automobile testing and racing was built at the Expo annex at Vincennes. Of all the wonders the public’s favorite was the trottoir roulant, a double moving sidewalk circling the grounds, one half of which moved twice as fast as the other. In the temporary buildings, the architects, striving for sensation, had achieved what seemed exciting originality to some and “a debauch of stucco” to others. Industrial exhibits in the Palaces of Machinery, Electricity, Civil Engineering and Transportation, Mining and Metallurgy, Chemical Industries and Textiles, displayed all the extraordinary advances of the past decade.
Of the national pavilions the most popular was the Russian, an exotic Byzantine palace with a Trans-Siberian Railway exhibit in which the visitor could sit in a sumptuous railway carriage and enjoy a moving panorama of the scenery. The Viennese was a fantasy of Art Nouveau with fretwork balconies in the form of curling vines and the sinuous lines of the new style curving through ceramics and furniture. The United States had the greatest number of exhibits but Germany’s show was the most imposing, clearly superior in quality and arrangement. It affirmed an intense will to surpass every other exhibitor. Germany’s dynamos were the largest, the spire of her pavilion the tallest, its searchlight the brightest, its restaurant the most expensive. The Kaiser himself, it was rumored, had commanded the finest china and silver, the most delicate glassware, the most luxurious service, so that one felt in the presence, as one visitor said, of a real style “William the Second.”
In all the Exposition the two largest single exhibits were Schneider-Creusot’s long-range cannon and Vickers-Maxim’s collection of ferocious, quick-firing machine guns. Beholders gazed at them with solemn thoughts. An English correspondent in particular was moved to philosophize on the real meaning of the Exposition for the new era it introduced. Schneider’s great gun seemed to him to hold the world collected in Paris under its threat and to mark the passage of war from a realm of sport to a realm of science in which the making of weapons absorbed the ingenuity of mankind. If a lull ever came, he wrote, the arts of peace might revive, “but meanwhile the Paris Exhibition has taught us that the triumph of the modern world is purely mechanical.”
The triumphs continued. In 1900 Max Planck broke the chains of classical Newtonian physics to formulate the quantum theory of energy. In Switzerland in 1905 Albert Einstein obtained