Yet there was no need for war. The German economy, driven by steel and chemicals, was set to overtake Britain and dominate Europe.* It was only in Wilhelm’s strutting court that men oscillated bewilderingly between war fever and enervation, fearful of challenges from other nations and races – most urgently the Slavic Russians. In the great republic of America, Teddy Roosevelt believed that ‘No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war’ – that was how great statesmen were made. In Vienna, Constantinople and St Petersburg, leaders were convinced that only war could reinvigorate senescent dynasties; in Belgrade, Athens and Sofia, thrusting new nations were convinced war would deliver new empires; even in the democracies, men trained jovially in military brigades for a coming conflict. When it came it would destroy the dynasties it was designed to save and, out of blood, dynamite and mud, remould the family, in power, at work and at home.
In Berlin the crisis of masculinity was exacerbated by scandals at the apex of the kaiser’s macho war machine.
* Centuries of almost Habsburgian intermarriage had led to high infant mortality, spinal deformities and mandibular prognathism, though Meiji concealed his jaw under a beard. Meiji’s wife was childless, but of the fifteen children conceived with his concubines ten died young and his crown prince, Yoshihito (later Emperor Taisho), was an invalid. Yet Taisho married and fathered a healthy family, starting in 1901 with the birth of a son, Prince Miji, later known as Hirohito.
* ‘Farewell to thee, farewell to thee, / The charming one who dwells in the shaded bowers, / One fond embrace, / Ere I depart, / Until we meet again.’
* Guano was, for a short time, a valuable commodity: it was bird and bat excrement, used as fertilizer but also to manufacture gunpowder. Found on the coasts of Peru and Bolivia and on Pacific islands, it was in such great demand that wars were fought, fortunes made and lands annexed for it. The 1856 Guano Act allowed America to annex any islands where guano was found. In 1879, Chile defeated Bolivia and Peru, seizing Bolivia’s coastline, in the Guano War – the world’s only faecal conflict – just before new chemical methods of producing fertilizer and gunpowder made the droppings worthless.
* A new biography accuses him of murdering one of his competitors.
* Edison’s success drove one rival into a different business: killing. His rival in creating the light bulb was Hiram Maxim from Maine, a sufferer from bronchitis whose first invention was a puffer but whose installation of light bulbs in a building was just ahead of Edison. Yet Edison beat Maxim, registering his own patent and going public. Leaving America, Maxim settled in Britain and started to work on another invention, a machine that would revolutionize warfare: the machine gun. Edison later said, ‘I’m proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.’ Yet both were simply improving on the work of others.
* These electrical goods – telephones, fridges, radios – needed to be made in a substance that was light, mouldable, cheap and insulated from electric currents. It did not exist until 1907, when a Belgian physicist, Leo Baekeland, who had already made a fortune creating the first photographic paper, experimented with combinations of phenol and formaldehyde to create Bakelite, the first of what he called plastics from the Greek for mouldable –
* Another mechanical development changed daily life: in 1880, a sixteen-year-old Virginian schoolboy, James Bonsack, attracted by a prize offered by tobacco growers, left school and invented a machine that could roll 200 cigarettes a minute. He granted a monopoly to a North Carolinian cigarette maker, James Duke, who, forming British American Tobacco, launched a marketing campaign that made cigarettes fashionable: by the mid-twentieth century, much of the world was hooked on cigarettes (80 per cent of British males, 40 per cent of females) which caused lung cancer to increase twentyfold, a connection only fully proven in the 1950s. Heath warnings were only put on US cigarette packets in 1965 – the first country to do so. Even today, tobacco kills nine million annually.
