Unsuspecting Souls Read online

  But look, we’re in a park, and it’s all about the great cogs and wheels of the Industrial Revolution turning over and over in the service of our pleasure. It’s technology from the workplace usurped and transplanted to the fun zone, to the palace of pleasure. Here, at Coney, no one has to fear the machine, for here the machine is your friend. Mister Ferris’s wheel goes round and round, and at its top it looks as if one could see forever but, unfortunately, the wheel ends up, well, back where it started, which is to say, absolutely nowhere. So goes the merry carousel, the Shoot-The-Chutes, the parachute drop—all of it just like the daily grind: machines moving fast and faster and ending up exactly where they began. There’s a lesson here, but who the hell cares—it’s Coney, and it’s time for a five-cent frankfurter and an ice-cold soda or even a beer.

  Tilyou and the string of businesspeople who came after him made Coney out of reach to all competitors. No one could touch their state-of-the-art amusement park. Nevertheless, even though it represented the highest standard of fun at the end of the nineteenth century, we should not forget that amusement parks—what a glorious Americanism!—pitched their tents and erected their buildings and thrill rides all across the country. In Boston, it was Paragon Park and Revere Beach; in Philadelphia, Willow Grove Park and nearby Atlantic City; in Atlanta, Ponce de Leon Park; in Cleveland, Euclid Beach; in Chicago, Cheltenham Beach, Riverview Park, and White City; in St. Louis, Forest Park Highlands; in Denver, Manhattan Beach Park; in San Francisco, the Chutes. None of them as wild and as large and as popular as that place that was not an island and that had few conies (rabbits), that went by the name of Coney Island. But those other places threw open their doors and in rushed families in great numbers. Was anyone working? Was anyone feeling pain? Did anyone take anything—from poverty to immigration to war—seriously? It certainly did not seem so.

  Certainly, the numbers say no: On a single day at Coney two hundred thousand people came to swim and splash and get prodded by a midget clown and soaked by a fast dash down a slide in a boat. At Luna Park, one of the three separate parks at Coney, five million people paid admission to get inside in a single season. They all came to get humiliated and to feel small and oh so out of control. They paid for their pleasure; they walked and ate and smiled and felt so damned good. How can anyone knock such good-natured entertainment? It was here to stay. It is here to stay. It has, today, taken over our lives with a thoroughness that few if any people could have imagined in the nineteenth century. Entertainment expanded into an industry in the nineteenth century. It enjoys a monopoly in the twenty-first century. American entrepreneurs knew how to take technology and turn it toward fun. Americans responded. They were waiting for such an opportunity. They learned quickly how to have fun.

  In that kind of world of unlimited fun, Coney Island, America’s first entertainment park, offered the ideal. “A dream world,” one advertising brochure said of Luna Park. “Abandon your cares here,” beckoned another flyer, “at Steeplechase Park.” “Come to Coney and forget yourself” (or more accurately, “forget your self”). Coney Island lay where the land ran out and the sea took over wave by wave. It was a place to go where few if any people might know you; it was a safe haven, a resort where you could re-create yourself. At Coney, you found yourself at the edge of the world; you had been pushed and could not be pushed any further. In a very real sense, to go to Coney was to undertake a pilgrimage to the border, to the liminal edge of experience. Once there, anything could happen; anything was possible. And, because of the invention of the postcard, in 1869, for a penny people could tell their friends, “Having a great time. Wish you were here!” (A person could buy the first postcards in America in 1873, and find ample supplies of them at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Which makes utter sense, for the fair, or the World’s Columbian Exposition, was certainly something to write home about.)

  It’s as if the entrepreneurs of Coney Island had read their Freud diligently, but most likely they did not. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud points out three or four recurring, or what he calls “typical” dreams: falling from great heights, finding oneself disoriented, experiencing the great exhilaration of leaving the ground and flying, and showing up in front of strangers nearly or totally naked. At Coney, some amusement ride would provide a person a living example of each of those dreams. One could fall from a great height on the parachute drop, feel oneself disoriented in the house with the tilted floors and walls, and get the feeling of defying gravity on the roller coaster. In the Blowhole Theater, people walked through a funhouse only at the end to find that the floor had fallen away. They then slid down a chute and landed in front of an audience, and then walked across a brightly lit stage, where a blast of air would blow women’s dresses over their heads, much to the delight of the audience, who had gone through the funhouse themselves. The people who had paid admission to go through the house found themselves now as the entertainment, in full display before a battery of strangers, a confused and jumbled-up reality that might appear in a dream.

  Of course, people had plenty of chances for entertainment in the earlier part of the nineteenth century—a long list of opportunities, such as vaudeville, chautauqua, the music hall, the concert hall, burlesque, and minstrelsy performances, including the genre called blackface. Some of these attracted a lower-class audience, like the music and concert halls, and some, like the vaudeville house, a slightly higher-class clientele. But even the largest of the venues, like the Palace Theater in Manhattan, could accommodate only several hundred people. Coney and its kindred parks offered something entirely new in the period, and that was mass entertainment. The time was perfectly ripe for its opening.

  The ends of years make people both sad and righteously giddy. It’s a time of resolutions, of lament for the past but also of a desire to make amends for the future. Janus, the two-faced god, watches intently over December 31, at midnight hour. He can afford to be judicious because he can look both ways at once—to the past and to the future. The New Year is a new chance, a brand new opportunity to get it right. It comes upon us with a certain air of euphoria—bubbly, effervescent champagne perfectly captures the mood for the turn of the year, as the old year drifts away. It’s easy enough to feel giddy and lightheaded, if only to get the last year off our backs. This year, by God, I intend to get it right. Hope springs fairly eternal.

  The ends of centuries come larded with even greater expectations than the ends of years. Moving from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, people knew that something was ending, but they also felt that something not just new but actually monumental was beginning. The countdown comes with surprises. The end of the 1800s was no exception. In the century’s last years, businesspeople directed a good deal of technological know-how toward changing great masses of people’s attitudes toward leisure time, and more important, toward fun. Since most workers had begun to feel no more important than cogs or robots, they desperately needed recreation—one is tempted to say, re-creation. In the process, those adventurous businesspeople who turned their entrepreneurial skills to entertainment became very wealthy. Fun paid off big. (The collusion between technology and amusement would eventuate in today’s own highly sophisticated computer-generated images in films, and in wildly violent, realistic, and popular video games.)

  At every social level, people sought out and found new ways of amusing themselves. Thomas Alva Edison helped in a big way toward satisfying that need for entertainment. One of his inventions in particular made a remarkable impact in a fairly short time. In 1878, he received a patent for a machine he called a phonograph (sometimes referred to as a gramophone)—a talking and singing machine—which captured, through a mysterious process, the human voice on a piece of tinfoil. Some audio historians believe that a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded ten seconds of “Au Claire de la Lune” almost two decades earlier than Edison, on April 9, 1860, on an instrument he called a phonautograph—an odd name suggesting the revelation of oneself through
one’s voice. Scott had designed a machine to record sounds visually; his machine etched sound waves onto sheets of paper that had been blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. But Scott had intended his recordings not for listening but for seeing. He sought only to create a paper record of speech, an autograph of sorts that others could later decipher and analyze if they so desired. The idea of playback did not come until Edison.

  Edison’s phonograph quickly got pressed into service as an instrument of entertainment, designed, as the advertisements would later claim, for “America’s listening pleasure.” (Phonograph, “writing with sound,” is of course distinct from photograph, “writing with light.”) Edison’s advertisements for his new machine took people off to unimagined possibilities. Think about being able to sit in the privacy of your own living room, listening to the voices of the most famous musical stars in the world. All this for just a few dollars. Disembodied, ghostly voices need not be scary; they could be entertaining and fun. Thomas Alva Edison was a madman; he was a genius. He was the most prolific inventor in America, perhaps in the world. Above all else, in the context of the period, Edison was a consummate dreamer.

  Edison came to the invention of the phonograph as a result of his work on two other machines, the telegraph and the telephone. To Edison must go the title of the king of the body snatchers, for his perception exactly matched the period’s emphasis on disembodiment, developing several machines that could speak and talk without the aid of any physical body. And that’s the spirit that he wished to exploit to the fullest. And so, the editors of the magazine Scientific American, in the December 22, 1877 issue, reported on Edison’s initial and bold visit to their offices with his new talking machine: “Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.”

  Notice that the machine has at this early date already assumed human properties: The machine, or rather the crude tinfoil sheet on the machine, “inquires” and “informs” and “bids,” just as we talk of our computers today as if they were in actual possession of a memory and of language. None of this, by the by, did Edison do accidentally. On January 24, 1878, he established the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, choosing a name that suggested that the machine itself was capable of conjuring its own sentences. By this time, the average person in America had already invested machines in general with enormous power; machines could perform tasks faster and more efficiently than even the most skilled person. But here was something entirely new and frightening: This machine seemed to exhibit decidedly human attributes—speech and memory and intelligence.

  The world’s superstars quickly latched on to the allure of Edison’s magical machine. Edison could do for singers, for instance, what Johannes Gutenberg had done for letters. Both of them made for the possibility of a lasting impression. Always on the lookout for more and inventive ways to promote herself, one day in 1879, unannounced, none other than Sarah Bernhardt showed up at the Edison factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Technology had early on pulled one of the world’s superstars into its vortex; she simply could not resist the call of an apparatus that in effect guaranteed immortality. Sarah Bernhardt was possessed of the true celebrity’s uncanny sense that, in its ability to preserve her voice for generations to come, the phonograph would become the machine of the future. But again, like the true star, she was not quite sure that the crude machine would capture the real qualities of her voice. According to the company’s publicists, Edison convinced her with a well-planned demonstration that he would be producing “perfect records.” Even though it took some time, Edison kept his word: The Edison company finally introduced wax cylinders in 1888, which did in fact greatly improve sound quality.

  After much enticement and an intentionally undisclosed amount of money, Sarah Bernhardt signed an exclusive contract with Thomas Edison and his company. No slouch himself when it came to publicity, Edison pressed every one of his dealers to write their local newspapers with the announcement of the monumental signing, for after all, he told them, “No paper will refuse to publish the news, as everything that the immortal Bernhardt does is eagerly seized upon by the press.”9

  Edison was his own best booster. Choosing the oldest continuing literary magazine in the country, The North American Review, Edison wrote a letter, in the June 1, 1878 issue, pointing out the possible future uses of his invention and, in the process, revealing once again his belief that the machine had life. His first suggestion for the phonograph was for “[l]etter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenograph.” The machine itself would stand in for the stenographer, performing the work better and faster, Edison contended, than the person. He suggested many other things, including remaking clocks so that they could “announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.”

  Edison got the idea of time correct; it does in a great sense exert control over us. The timepiece some of us wear on our wrists, the watch, carries the same name as the verb “watch.” Both words come from the same Latin root, vigilia, which produces words like wake, as in the Catholic watch over the body, or to be awake—that is, to be “vigilant.” One watches one’s watch, but the watch really “watches” the person who wears it, subtly directing by indicating the exact time to be somewhere, or simply by noting the passing of time on the person’s way to fame and fortune. This is not unlike the television we so blithely watch without thinking that the executives behind it all know exactly our viewing and buying and after-hour proclivities, habits, and desires. We are watching the Big Brother that is watching us.

  Not only did Edison link speech with time in his talking clock, but he also proposed a further connection with another appliance, the telephone, “so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.” With that stroke, he conceptualized the modern answering machine, turning the breathy and fleeting nature of a few brief moments of unrehearsed talking—its inherent nature of evanescence—into something of permanence. Everything melts into air, except that most fleeting of things, as far as Edison was concerned, human speech. That Edison made permanent.

  As further proof that Edison liked to conflate the mechanical with the human, he affectionately referred to his talking machine as “Baby.” To reinforce the idea that he had created a “Baby,” the first words he recorded on the machine he took from the beginning of the most well-known nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He chose his term of endearment “Baby” well, for over the course of his career inventing things, he wanted desperately to create a lifelike talking doll and set an astonishing 250 people to working on each little creature. In another part of the factory, he had another eighteen young girls reciting nursery rhymes into phonographs. His project fit well into the tradition of the wax effigy and the automaton and Freud’s notion of the “uncanny.” In what amounted to an almost Doctor Frankensteinian fever pitch, Edison hope to bring to market an estimated one hundred thousand dolls a year. How many he made, no one knows, and none of the dolls has, evidently, survived.

  In an interview with Scientific American magazine early on in his career, he referred to the human brain as a “piece of meat mechanism,”10 nothing more than a machine that would eventually fall into decay. The real power lay with the mechanical, and someday someone, he believed, would build a mechanical brain that would outperform the human version. But in his later years, America’s most prolific inventor—he and his assistants get credit for some 1,093 patents—underwent a radical change of heart. He could find no ghost in the machine, no soul in the mechanical.

  The same kind of fervor he had used for inventions he now turned on the spiritualism movement and in particular Madame Blavatsky and her ideas of theosophy. He decided that personalities were just too powerful to ever disappear just
because the body had decayed, and so they must attain their own immortality. He thus decided to design a high-powered electrical device that could record voices from the other side to quiet the skeptics. “We can evolve an instrument,” he said, “so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated by, our personality as it survives in the next life; such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.”11 Alas, even though he experimented with variations on the device at séances, and even with the encouragement of Houdini—who was a skeptic about the paranormal—he could not make contact with the other side.

  From the seventies through to the end of the century, Edison contributed to making the nature of life certainly miraculous but at the same time also fairly odd. Machines talked, railroad cars moved great distances across steel tracks at high speeds, and people—or at least facsimiles of people—moved across movie screens. On February 14, 1876—perhaps in honor of Valentine’s Day—both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed papers with the United States Patent Office to register their competing designs for the telephone. Bell got the patent. His telephone device allowed two people, physically removed from each other by fairly great distances, to carry on a conversation—perhaps about matters of the heart. Meanwhile, Edison’s incandescent lighting was working its own miracle by pushing daylight further and further into the night. Edison received his patent for the light bulb in 1880.

  In another competition, this one to see who could transport the human voice great distances at cheap prices, Western Union opened for business in 1851, in Rochester, New York, near the Eastman Kodak building. The company began transmitting messages by Morse code over wire, hand-delivering the copy by courier to its final destination. After only ten years in business, by 1861, the company had completed the first transcontinental telegraph line, which immediately put the Pony Express out of business, since Western Union could now get a message across the country in less than one day. (The Pony Express took ten days, a case of technology winning out over literal horsepower.)