Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

BANVARD'S FOLLY Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck

by PAUL COLLINS

The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and, most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the eternally constellated.

Paul Collins's Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skulduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck--or perhaps some combination of them all--leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity.

Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells.

Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvases (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three-Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day ... before he decided to go head-to-head with P. T. Barnum. Renè Blondlot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the n-ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard--until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers.

Collins's love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" gives his portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions--acts of excavation and reclamation--to people history may have forgotten, but whose claim on our imagination is now secure.

Published by: Picador (R) USA, New York, N.y.

Copyright 2001 by Paul Collins.

"No writer better articulates our interest in the confluence of hope, eccentricity, and the timelessness of the bold and strange than Paul Collins.

His style is clean and his tone unerring. This book, which is very straightforward about very odd things, is funny and very warm--and may even be inspirational." --Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

"Though the most profound question is "What is the meaning of life?"' the most human question is "Don't they know how special I am?"' Paul Collins knows. Thanks to these fascinating tales, his forgotten attention-seekers must be rolling over in their graves, if only to finally bask in the limelight."

--Sarah Vowell, author of Take the Cannoli

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Collins writes for McSweeney's, and his work has also appeared in eCompany Now and Lingua Franca. While writing this book, he lived in San Francisco, where he taught early American literature at Dominican University.

He recently moved with his family to rural Wales, where he is now completing his next book.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY

PREDECESSORS:

Van Wyck Brooks Isaac D'israeli Stewart Holbrook Edmund Pearson AND TO ANY PUBLISHER WHO WILL PUT THEIR WORKS BACK IN PRINT.

HAVE YOU HEARD THAT IT WAS GOOD

TO GAIN THE DAY? I ALSO SAY IT IS GOOD TO FALL,

BATTLES ARE LOST IN THE SAME SPIRIT IN WHICH THEY ARE

WON ....

VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL'D! AND TO THOSE WHOSE WAR-VESSELS SANK

IN THE SEA! AND TO THOSE THEMSELVES WHO SANK IN THE

SEA! AND TO ALL GENERALS THAT LOST

ENGAGEMENTS, AND ALL OVERCOME HEROES! AND THE NUMBERLESS UNKNOWN HEROES

EQUAL TO THE GREATEST HEROES KNOWN! --Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

CONTENTS

Preface

1. BANVARD'S FOLLY

2. THE CLEVER DULLARD

3. SYMMES HOLE

4. THE MAN WITH n-Ray EYES

5. IF ONLY GENIUSES KNEW HOW TO SCHEME

6. 22,000 SEEDLINGS

7. PSALMANAZAR

8. THE PNEUMATIC UNDERGROUND

9. HE BEING DEAD YET SPEAKETH NOT

10. A DEDICATED AMATEUR OF FASHION

11. A. J. PLEASONTON'S BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL

12. YOUR GLORIOUS DAY IS COMING

13. WALKING ON THE RINGS OF SATURN

Further Readings

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

Peruse the documents of any era-newspapers, bills of sale, wills--and you find nothing but forgotten names. A famous name brings an almost electric shock of recognition, that in these crowds of nobodies and once-were-somebodies is a person you can attach a face and a reputation to.

The collector and the historian value those rare documents. But I always find myself wondering about the other people. And buried in these footnotes of history are brilliant, fatally flawed thinkers who rose to dizzying heights of intellect and even fame, only to come crashing down into disaster, ridicule, or just the utter silence of oblivion.

Occasionally, I find others who share my predilection for the forgotten ephemera of genius. There's the Dead Media web site, devoted to "the numerous experiments that died on the barbed wire of technological advance. The Edison kinetophone. Gaumont's Chronophone. The synchronoscope. The movietone.

Phonofilm. The graphophonoscope. The vitaphone ..." There are fellow antiquarians like Edmund Pearson and Van Wyck Brooks, whose books I can scarcely open without feeling the need to give the secret handshake for the Universal Brotherhood of Collectors of Obscurity. And there's my old college roommate, Shawn Lani, now the senior exhibit designer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He contracted a collector's mania for household photos--anonymous black-and-white photographs from yard sales or old wire service archives, many lacking a date or even a name, but occasionally capturing a serendipitous genius in their composition. We are all curators at heart, I suppose, of items that we fear no one else will have time for.

Why write about such things?--you may ask.

And if it's not you, surely someone will ask this question. Despite our being a nation of moralists, the only real sin in America is that of failure. The man or woman of promise who has nothing but excuses and regrets to offer at the end of the day --these people we do worse than despise. We avert our gaze and excuse ourselves from their presence.

And why not? We are also a nation of successes. This, at least, is what every demagogue, advertiser, and con artist tells us. We want to believe that we are good people, and that opportunity is there for those with the spirit to achieve it. Yet we laud men and women who have no better quality than the possession of money, and who achieve their success on the backs of the swindled and disdained. We want to believe that there is something more to their success than mere greed and luck. Even more than a moral loser, we cannot bear the thought of an immoral success.

There are moral successes, of course. But for each person credited with a winning innovation, there are the losers who pursued a similar path to failure. Perhaps their timing was wrong. Maybe they lacked the ruthless force of personality that propels the winners of history. In the end, they might even have been undone by weaknesses in character that had little to do with the merits of their ideas.