Mutton dressed as lamb

 AND GREASY AS A BUTCHERS DICK

The Widener family fortune was generated by electricity. Patriarch Peter Arrell Browne Widener may have started his career as a Philadelphia butcher who happened to receive a commission to supply mutton to all of the Union troops stationed within ten miles of Center City, but by diversifying his wealth into electric trolley lines, he had, by 1883, ensured that when he died thirty-two years later his estate would be worth around $32 million (counting philanthropy and assets, that figure reaches the billions). Like other robber barons of the Gilded Age, Widener took full advantage of the technological fruits of industrial capitalism, a founder of and an investor in not just his own Philadelphia Traction Company but also US Steel and the International Mercantile Marine Company, which manufactured large trade ships. For all of its wealth disparity, the nineteenth century was an era of miracles as well. Consider Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s alchemy of silver-platted copper and mercury vapor on which a living image could be preserved forever or Alexander Graham Bell’s voices through the wire. There were also Guglielmo Marconi’s mysterious radio waves in the ether and Thomas Edison’s luminescent filaments cradled in glass bulbs (not to mention his wax cylinders of recorded music and his moving picture machines). 

The Wideners’ Lynnewood Hall—a palatial, neo-classical mansion in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania—was a testament to the faith in science and technology that had produced their wealth, featuring not just paintings by Rembrandt, Raphael, van Dyck, Vermeer, and Bellini but also a modern central vacuuming system and complete electrification in all of its 110 rooms. “For knowledge itself is power,” wrote Francis Bacon in his 1597 Essays, the first full-throated formulation of a positivist scientism that envisioned empirical knowledge leading an ever-upward movement of human progress. Peter’s grandson Harry Elkins Widener was, in addition to being a prodigious book collector, an avid reader of Bacon. While on a European collecting trip in 1912, Harry purchased a 1598 edition of the Essays from a London antiquarian for £260, later boarding a New York-bound ship in Cherbourg, France, with his treasure. Another technological marvel, the ship had a five-kilowatt-motor-generator for transmitting Morse code, ten-thousand lightbulb-illuminated lamps, a system of massive reciprocating steam engines, synchronized clocks, and even four elevators. The ship was the Titanic, soon to go down in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, taking Widener and what he called his “little Bacon” with her.