magical to the human mind and, in their way, threatening. At that time, instead of being contrasted with science, spiritualism embraced it. The miracle of the telegraph bridged the divide of geography; séances bridged the divide of death. The Curies, along with Pierre’s brilliant student Paul Langevin, attended a number of séances with medium Eusapia Palladino, and during one evening, Pierre weighed her and discovered she’d gained six kilos (thirteen pounds). Other French spiritualists were communicating with the spirit world through planchettes, small tablets cut in the shape of a heart, with two legs and a pencil. Two men in Maryland combined the planchette with an alphabet board; another named the new contraption by merging the French and German words for “yes.” As the Great War unleashed a torrent of horror,grieving mothers and wives bought thousands of Ouija sets to communicate with their departed.
Two years before Manya’s arrival in France, Paris celebrated an 1889 World’s Fair by erecting Eiffel’s tower, and now that tower was the centerpiece of 1900’s Universal Exposition, which inspired Henry Adams to believe the age of the Virgin had been eclipsed by the age of the Dynamo. Electricity had begun to replace gaslights in Paris in 1891, but at this fair, it powered the first metro line and the trottoir roulant , a moving sidewalk of two tracks and two speeds carrying visitors—the women in the enormous, billowing dresses of that era, and the men in towering silk top hats framing topiary-like facial hair—across 277 acres. In the evenings, electrically powered fountains were lit by electrically powered lights, and the wonders of the age were displayed in the Palaces of Electricity, Civil Engineering, Transportation, Machinery, Textiles, Mining, and Metallurgy. Max Nordau, the Hungarian cofounder of the World Zionist Organization, became so alarmed by the new powers invested in science and electricity that he warned of a horrifying future where everyone would“read a dozen square yards of newspaper daily . . . be constantly called to the telephone [his era’s version of e-mail] [and] think simultaneously of five continents of the earth.” If Nordau had included “stare constantly at a blinking screen instead of living in the material world,” he would have been a prophet with a Nostradamus-like following, yet he seems to have been nearly alone with these trepidations, for everyone else in his era believed that scientific progress would solve all problems, fix all economies, end all war, and create a civilized, Edenic planet. Louis Pasteur referred to laboratories as temples of humanity, and a sensation running for three decades in both France and Italy was Luigi Manzotti’s 1881 Excelsior ballet, which chronicled the triumph of the Enlightenment over Darkness, ending with love, brotherhood, progress, and science. This fantasy ended in 1914, and as historian Barbara Tuchman noted,“A phenomenon of such extended malignancy as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age.” The Universal Exposition’s two largest exhibits were, after all, Schneider-Creusot’s immense cannon, and Vickers-Maxim’s remarkable array of automatic machine guns.
Pablo Picasso’s favorite exhibit at the fair was American dancer Loie Fuller, famed for her billowing phosphorescent veils, which she used as screens for projectors of color-shifting light. The effect was so dramatic it would appear in his revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , and Miss Fuller would ask the Curies for advice on creating “butterfly wings ofradium.” After they helped her, she danced for them privately at their home and introduced them to sculptor Auguste Rodin; the four became regular friends and perhaps the only two people in the world the Curies saw regularly who weren’t scientists or blood relatives. Their closest friends remained the next-door neighbors at boulevard Kellermann, Jean and Henriette Perrin; he was a
Two years before Manya’s arrival in France, Paris celebrated an 1889 World’s Fair by erecting Eiffel’s tower, and now that tower was the centerpiece of 1900’s Universal Exposition, which inspired Henry Adams to believe the age of the Virgin had been eclipsed by the age of the Dynamo. Electricity had begun to replace gaslights in Paris in 1891, but at this fair, it powered the first metro line and the trottoir roulant , a moving sidewalk of two tracks and two speeds carrying visitors—the women in the enormous, billowing dresses of that era, and the men in towering silk top hats framing topiary-like facial hair—across 277 acres. In the evenings, electrically powered fountains were lit by electrically powered lights, and the wonders of the age were displayed in the Palaces of Electricity, Civil Engineering, Transportation, Machinery, Textiles, Mining, and Metallurgy. Max Nordau, the Hungarian cofounder of the World Zionist Organization, became so alarmed by the new powers invested in science and electricity that he warned of a horrifying future where everyone would“read a dozen square yards of newspaper daily . . . be constantly called to the telephone [his era’s version of e-mail] [and] think simultaneously of five continents of the earth.” If Nordau had included “stare constantly at a blinking screen instead of living in the material world,” he would have been a prophet with a Nostradamus-like following, yet he seems to have been nearly alone with these trepidations, for everyone else in his era believed that scientific progress would solve all problems, fix all economies, end all war, and create a civilized, Edenic planet. Louis Pasteur referred to laboratories as temples of humanity, and a sensation running for three decades in both France and Italy was Luigi Manzotti’s 1881 Excelsior ballet, which chronicled the triumph of the Enlightenment over Darkness, ending with love, brotherhood, progress, and science. This fantasy ended in 1914, and as historian Barbara Tuchman noted,“A phenomenon of such extended malignancy as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age.” The Universal Exposition’s two largest exhibits were, after all, Schneider-Creusot’s immense cannon, and Vickers-Maxim’s remarkable array of automatic machine guns.
Pablo Picasso’s favorite exhibit at the fair was American dancer Loie Fuller, famed for her billowing phosphorescent veils, which she used as screens for projectors of color-shifting light. The effect was so dramatic it would appear in his revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , and Miss Fuller would ask the Curies for advice on creating “butterfly wings ofradium.” After they helped her, she danced for them privately at their home and introduced them to sculptor Auguste Rodin; the four became regular friends and perhaps the only two people in the world the Curies saw regularly who weren’t scientists or blood relatives. Their closest friends remained the next-door neighbors at boulevard Kellermann, Jean and Henriette Perrin; he was a
Similar Books
