In 1860, another American explorer, Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes, led an Arctic expedition up the coast of Ellesmere Island, where he, too, thought he glimpsed Kane’s Open Polar Sea. “The sea about the North Pole,” Hayes reported, “must lie within the ice belt known to invest it.” But by the time Hayes returned to the United States, the Civil War had ignited and no one seemed much interested in his claims.
The Open Polar Sea idea took a bit of a hiatus, yet the notion of a hollow planet with vents in the Arctic gained new currency with the publication, in 1864, of Jules Verne’s fantasy novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. In Verne’s story, the protagonist, a German professor named Otto Lidenbrock, drops into the crater of a dormant volcano in Iceland and soon encounters a warm subterranean sea whose shores are populated with mastodon herds and a giant proto-human creature that might be described as the missing link. In literature, at least, the concept of the polar sea had moved underground.
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, American public interest in the theory slowly rekindled. Charles Francis Hall believed in the Open Polar Sea with an almost religious fervor, but the abject failure of his expedition caused many to doubt the sanity of flinging even more men and ships at a fanciful abstraction. Silas Bent’s theories, however, injected new life into the argument: Maybe the Open Polar Sea existed after all. Maybe it was just that explorers like Hall had chosen the wrong route and had encountered the ice in an infelicitous place. They had not understood that powerful warm-water currents could do the hard work for them.
And so, with Bent’s new theory, the centuries-old obsession with the Open Polar Sea was given one last reprieve. All Bent’s hypothesis needed was a young explorer who was bold enough to test it.
Bent had written a letter (quoted in the Putnam’s article) to the president of the American Geographical Society of New York in which he drove home his point. The Gulf Stream and the Kuro Siwo, Bent said, “are the only practicable avenues” by which ships can reach the Open Polar Sea and, from there, sail to the North Pole. A future voyager would simply have to follow one of these two currents to the precise place where it meets the ice; here he would find the ice cap softened and weakened by the steady pulsing warmth of a tropical sea-river—and there he could pass through a slushy portal that would lead straight to the Open Polar Sea. Bent had an intriguing name for this theoretical portal; he called it the Thermometric Gateway to the Pole.
Putnam’s rhapsodized that “a great and solid mind has successfully bridged this polar chasm.” The article cried out for a young man like De Long to come along and prove the soundness of Bent’s ideas. “This profound and beautiful hypothesis may boast no sanction of high authority, nor count as its advocate any Arctic explorer. For a while, it may have to rest its claims on deductions of science, and be ushered into notice on the quiet authority of mathematical calculation.”
But eventually some challenger would come along, some Arctic hero, to find the “Thermometric Gateway” and pursue the grail. From the standpoint of pure discovery, the prize could not have been any richer, nor the stakes any higher. “Who shall say,” Putnam’s concluded, “that within the Arctic circle, there may not yet be found some vestige of humanity—some fragment of our race, wafted thither by these mighty currents we have heard of, whose cry of welcome is yet to greet the mariner who finds them, and amongst whom there may be found some of God’s elect?”
6 · THE ENGINE OF THE WORLD
Throughout the first week of July 1876, the week of America’s hundredth birthday, the nation’s attentions were focused on Philadelphia. Not only was the City of Brotherly Love the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed a century earlier; the city was hosting a world’s fair, which, on this sultry summer week, was drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe. The Centennial Exhibition, host to thirty-seven nations, was situated on a campus of nearly four hundred acres in Fairmount Park, across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. It was America’s first world exposition, and by summer’s end nearly ten million people would have come to gawk at the nearly thirty thousand exhibits nestled inside the fair’s 250 pavilions and halls. The grounds were so sprawling that a newly devised elevated rail system—an early type of monorail—was used to shuttle crowds back and forth between two of the most popular buildings.
The crowds had come to be dazzled, and they were not disappointed. Among the many new creations on display were the Remington typewriter, an intricate stringed apparatus called a Calculating Machine, and a curious gizmo that a bearded Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell was calling his “telephone.” (Bell would read from Hamlet’s soliloquy at one end of the hall, and attendees at the other could plainly hear the inventor’s voice issuing from a little speaker. “My God, it talks!” exclaimed one prominent visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil.)
All summer the exposition had been the talk of the land. James Gordon Bennett had been to the fair several times, and he’d made sure his best reporters stayed in Philadelphia to work the grounds and cover the comings and goings of dignitaries from around the world—the lords and monarchs, the authors and artists, the scientists and railroad magnates. The Herald ran Centennial Exposition stories every day—in fact, by special arrangement, thousands of copies of Bennett’s paper were printed on an enormous press right on the grounds. Young entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse and George Eastman could be seen at the centennial, hungrily prowling the exhibits for ideas cross-fertilized with other ideas. The twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Edison was there, too, showcasing a strange little device called the electric pen. Another brilliant American inventor, Moses Farmer, drew crowds with his electric dynamo, which he used to power a set of artificial lights—called arc lamps—that blazed through the Philadelphia night.
There were other puzzlements and oddities. At the Japanese pavilion, a miraculously fast-growing pea plant called kudzu was unveiled to an unsuspecting Western world. Elsewhere, the crowds could gaze upon new works by Rodin, listen to concerts played on the world’s largest pipe organ, or marvel at the immense handheld torch of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty (the rest of her was still under construction in France). It was here, at the Centennial Exhibition, that the American masses were introduced to a new condiment called Heinz ketchup, to a fizzy sassafras concoction sold under the name Hires Root Beer, and to the perfect novelty of a tropical fruit, served in foil with a fork, known as a banana.
BY FAR THE most popular attraction of the exposition, however, was Machinery Hall, a cavernous greenhouse structure that covered fourteen acres—nearly three times the square footage of St. Peter’s Basilica at Vatican City. The hall was a temple to machines of all kinds, and it thrummed and whirred and whined with the operation of countless pumps, turbines, generators, lathes, saws, and ingenious new fixtures of tool-and-die equipment. The floor was packed with aisle after aisle of inventions—most of them American, many of them revolutionary. There was, for example, the Line-Wolf Ammonia Compressor, a contraption for making ice. There was the Brayton Ready Motor, a practical early prototype of the internal combustion engine. There was a seven-thousand-pound pendulum clock manufactured by Seth Thomas that was calibrated to control twenty-six other clocks interspersed throughout the hall. There were new kinds of locomotive brakes, new kinds of elevators, and improved versions of the rotary cylinder press.
But the most extraordinary thing about Machinery Hall was the great motor that powered everything else. The Grand Central Engine, sometimes simply called the Centennial Steam Engine, was the largest engine in the world. Weighing more than 650 tons, constructed by the brilliant American engineer George Corliss, it supplied free steam power, via a network of underground shafts totaling a mile in length, to the more than eight thousand smaller machines on display throughout the hall.
On the fair’s opening day in May, surrounded by crowds of more than 150,000 people, President Ulysses S. Grant had tugged on a lever that set the behemoth in motion. As it sprang to life, the immense en
gine gave off a purr that seemed to emanate from the soul of the thing itself—a correspondent for Scientific American described it as a “murmuring sound … what may aptly be called mechanical music.” The machine dwarfed the president. Standing more than five stories high, parked on a platform in the center of the gargantuan hall, it was a living sculpture of plunging arms, nodding cranks, and fine-toothed gears. Its flywheel alone, turning at a stately thirty-six revolutions per minute, weighed fifty-six tons.
Over the summer, the Grand Central Engine had proved to be the sentimental favorite of the crowds and, in some eloquent way, had come to symbolize the exposition itself. It was, said Scientific American, the fair’s “great pulsating iron heart.” On the day he visited, Walt Whitman sat down in front of the elegant monstrosity and stared at it for a half hour without uttering a word. The author William Dean Howells called it “an athlete of steel” and thought that it was through new machine creations like this that “the national genius most freely speaks.”
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Howells noted how “the mighty walking-beams plunge their pistons downward, the enormous fly-wheel revolves with a hoarded power that makes all tremble, the hundred life-like details do their office with unerring intelligence.” The polished colossus was so perfect in its design that it practically ran itself. “In the midst of this ineffably strong mechanism,” Howells said, “is a chair where the engineer sits reading his newspaper, as in a peaceful bower. Now and then he lays down his paper and clambers up one of the stairways that cover the framework, and touches some irritated spot on the giant’s body with a drop of oil, and goes down again and takes up his newspaper.”
Visitors from other countries were enchanted by the technological prowess marshaled in Machinery Hall—and, specifically, in the Corliss engine. Something was happening in America, some new energy, an efflorescence of native talent. An American style of manufacturing seemed to be emerging—one that relied on automation, on interchangeable parts, on machine-made machines that fed still other machines. The Times of London gushed, “The American invents as the Greek sculpted and the Italian painted: it is genius.” Other English observers struck notes of quiet despair. “If we are to be judged by the comparison with the Americans in 1876,” a prominent British engineer named John Anderson wrote in an official report on the Centennial Exhibition, “it would be to confirm … that we are losing our former leadership and it is passing to the Americans.”
ONE OF THE most distinguished visitors at the Centennial Exposition that sweltering week in July was a German professor named August Petermann. Although Petermann was arguably the most famous and most eminent geographer in all the world, he had traveled little throughout his hermit’s life, and he had never been to America before. On a trip up and down the Eastern Seaboard, he spent ten days in Philadelphia, wandering through all the exhibition pavilions—and he was stunned and exhilarated by what he saw. The Centennial Exhibition was, he thought, “a grand achievement, eclipsing all former expositions in Europe. Here can be clearly seen what position the United States holds in the culture of the world.”
Herr Doktor August Heinrich Petermann was a grave, introverted man with small hands, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a full trim beard. He usually wore a formal dress coat with tails, accompanied by a silk vest and a cravat. Fifty-four years old, he had a jeweler’s eyes, tiny and hard, and he moved and conversed with an exactitude that many found intimidating. A polymath in the Humboldtian tradition, he could hold forth, with grandiose argumentation, on just about any topic of world science. Beneath his controlled exterior, though, he was a bit of a hothead, and had long suffered from bouts of manic depression. At times a yearning sentimentality weighed upon his face, a tug of melancholy, a Weltschmerz. He constantly fell into quarrels, the ardor of his views sharpened by the fact that he often carried a small revolver in his vest pocket. Petermann spoke impeccable English but with a slight British accent, for he had lived for many years in London, where he been a powerful, if controversial, member of the Royal Geographical Society. He had worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and had briefly served as the “physical geographer and engraver in stone” to Queen Victoria herself.
In the 1850s, Petermann had returned to his native Thuringia, in the forest-mantled heartland of Germany. It was there, in the tranquil medieval city of Gotha, that he had created a geographical institute that published the world’s most meticulous and beautiful maps. His operation was run like a finely calibrated machine, respected by scientists and adventurers around the globe. Among other projects, he was editor of the influential monthly journal Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, which published the latest maps and articles from the front lines of exploration.
The Sage of Gotha, as Petermann was widely known, had a reputation as one of the world’s leading “theoretical cartographers.” Which is to say, he concerned himself with those few remaining voids on the planet that were still unknown, places man had never touched or described. He viewed it as his personal and professional responsibility to fill in those holes, bit by bit. Petermann made a habit of systematically interviewing explorers fresh from, say, the African bush or the Australian outback, and after synthesizing their reports and field maps, he and his armies of cartographers were able to shade in the planet’s gaps with a little more detail. J. G. Bartholomew, the eminent British cartographer, wrote of Petermann’s passion for terra incognita, “The filling up of the blank spaces of the unknown in his maps had such a fascination for him that rest seemed impossible to him while any country remained unexplored.”
No place captivated Petermann more powerfully than the Arctic. For decades, in both England and Germany, he had agitated for Arctic exploration. He wrote dozens of academic treatises and delivered countless speeches on the topic. He believed that an understanding of the North Pole was central to understanding the larger workings of the planet—its currents, its winds, its systems of heat regulation, its subterranean tumults, its geomagnetic aberrations. The pole was the linchpin, the master key to solving greater mysteries. “Without a knowledge of the North Pole,” he wrote, “all geographical knowledge remains fragmentary.”
Petermann was probably the world’s most vocal and indefatigable advocate of the Open Polar Sea theory. He was quite sure that somewhere beyond the moving “girdle” of Arctic pack, explorers would find what he called a “polar basin” filled with relatively warm water. Indeed, his own company’s maps of the Arctic clearly showed an iceless pole. “The ice pack as a whole forms a mobile belt on whose polar side the sea is more or less ice free,” he argued. “Ships that break through this ice belt will find a navigable sea in the highest latitudes and to the pole itself.” It was a question of locating the right gateway, the perfect portal, through the ice. Attaining the pole, he insisted, would be a “very easy, trivial thing. A suitable steamship, at the right time of year, could carry out a trip to the North Pole and back in two to three months.”
Petermann was a big believer in the role steam engines would play in reaching the polar basin. Eventually, he felt, breakthroughs in technology would lead to an engine powerful and efficient enough to send a ship through the pack and into the Open Polar Sea beyond. This was one of the reasons Petermann was so mesmerized by the might and mastery on display at Machinery Hall. The hum of George Corliss’s Centennial Steam Engine was music to the German professor’s ears. Americans, it seemed, now had the technology to produce a motor that could propel mankind to the North Pole.
WHEN IT CAME to the Arctic, Petermann had given up on the British. English explorers, refusing to heed his theories, had stubbornly tried to penetrate the Arctic by way of the west coast of Greenland, only to meet with hardships and disasters he easily could have predicted. In recent years, Petermann had placed all his Arctic hopes on his own recently unified nation. In 1868, and then again in 1869, he had personally organized and championed two ambitious German-led expeditions that sought to reach the pole by way of the east coast of Greenland, a route he fel
t sure would provide a more favorable gateway to the “polar basin.” (Petermann himself did not venture on these voyages; he preferred to direct the odyssey from his study in his villa at Gotha.)
The two German expeditions, though heroic efforts, met with limited success. Still, Petermann clamored for his countrymen to make further pushes into the Arctic. By the early 1870s, however, cash-strapped Germany had begun to quail at the costs and risks of the whole Arctic enterprise.
But after his week at the Centennial Exposition, Petermann was certain that the Americans were next in line to lead bold thrusts into the Arctic. Petermann had followed the Polaris expedition closely, and where others saw disaster, he saw promise. “The Americans have eclipsed all other nations in Polar research,” he wrote. The British, he said, have “talked loudly for nine years, criticizing all other endeavors and opinions, while doing nothing themselves.” In the wake of the Polaris expedition, Petermann called on America to lead an ambitious new voyage into the Arctic. Such “high-toned acts of the United States government,” he said, “would shame the British into silence.”
“America,” he declared, “has given the names of Kane, Hayes, and Hall to the roll of Arctic heroes, and I am sure others will follow.”
The polar project would entail enormous risks, he admitted. There was no getting around the fact that men would probably die in the process of reaching the pole, but the benefits to society made such a hazard worthwhile. Sacrifice for the sake of discovery was infinitely more rewarding to humanity than sacrifice in battlefield trenches. “I hardly believe that this great work will be brought to its conclusion without the loss of ships and human lives,” he wrote. “[But] why should thousands of noble lives be slaughtered only in inhumane wars? Is not such a great affair also worth a few lives?”