The Fast Times of Albert Champion Page 2
As promised, Gauliard built Champion a unicycle.17 As the weather warmed, Champion practiced every day. He became adept performing on the sidewalk and the street in front of his boss’s bike shop. He learned how to draw onlookers and hold their attention. They encouraged his flair for showmanship. He experimented and added more stunts to his repertoire. Removing a foot from the pedal to push the top of the tire to propel him was always a crowd pleaser. Each day, Gauliard paid him some francs. Gauliard started lending him out to other proprietors to do exhibitions for their businesses. That summer he became a second Tellier.
Champion’s getting out and around brought him onto the Boulevard des Batignolles, a main thoroughfare extending east to Montmartre, the Eighteenth Arrondissement. He encountered a grocery store with a wine section run by a couple whose daughter Albert Champion would marry.
A reporter knew him around this time and said he kept his nose in the air like the Parisian he was. “This one-of-a-kind street urchin with a little face to go along with it, alert and lively as a monkey, seemed to have quicksilver coursing through his veins.”18
Champion had discovered the value of self-improvement. He would apply that principle again and again.
His family was living on rue Debarcadere,19 near the Avenue de la Grande Armée. The neighborhood of Batignolles is shaped like a croissant sitting on the Right Bank of the Seine, with a flank sprawled over the city’s northwestern edge and one corner under the Arc de Triomphe. Batignolles had been annexed into Paris in 1860. Unlike central Paris, with its straight, broad avenues conducive to flowing traffic of horse-drawn carriages, Batignolles was filigreed with crooked, narrow brick and stone lanes. Small vineyards defied the city’s expansion. Cheap rents and flower-bedecked picturesque houses with mansard roofs of slate contributed to a bohemian ambiance.
The locale was more than a coachman and washerwoman with Albert and three younger brothers could afford, but his parents worked in service for a family that provided lodging. No records remain about his parents’ employer. Champion’s nature was to plunge with formidable energy headlong into life and work, without pausing for introspection. Years later, as his business in the United States thrived and expanded to England and France, he reminisced with colleagues over dinners, wine and champagne, and cigars at trade shows, sales conferences, and in the Pullman restaurant cars of passenger trains swaying across the country. Yet he only provided topical sketches of his background. He was more intent on the future. Automobile Topics Illustrated, a New York–based trade publication, described him as “perpetually afire with new ideas and ever reaching for further achievements. If he was without patience, hot tempered, erratic at times, he was also versatile, amusing, brilliant, and delightfully companionable.”20
During his childhood, his father rose six mornings a week to heave into the uniform and boots of his livery and tramp out the door so early that the gaslights still illuminated the streets. Alexandre trudged back late, redolent of leather and straw and manure. He was a working-class native of central Paris,21 the First Arrondissement, the ancient Île de la Cité. Alexandre grew up in the squalid, congested area that Victor Hugo rendered in his novel Les Misérables.22 Alexandre was forced out among twenty-five thousand inhabitants displaced by the radical demolitions by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann to make way for the gracious public spaces and attractive metropolis we know today.23
Before the advent of electricity, washing clothes was outdoor labor as strenuous as tilling farm soil.24 Marie Champion’s morning began by pulling off the heavy wooden lid set at the end of the previous workday over the top of the well to keep out the rats. A wooden bucket holding three or four gallons attached to the end of a rope was dropped into the well, filled with water until it weighed twenty-five or thirty pounds, and hauled up, hand over hand, to the surface. Water buckets were lugged some fifty yards from the well to pour into a big vat suspended over a large roaring fire that heated the water to a boil. Before putting clothes and bedding into the vat, washerwomen bent over a washboard and scrubbed out dirt and stains, often grunting from the effort. The laundry tossed into the vat’s soapy water was stirred around with wooden poles like broom handles. Sopping-wet fabric was heavy. Stirring the poles strained backs, shoulders, and arms. Next, laundry had to be lifted from the vat and held up for long minutes, with the pole leveraged against the side of the vat, for most of the dirty water to drip away before the load was dropped into the rinsing tub. Then every piece of laundry had to be wrung by hand to squeeze out excess water. Finally the laundry was hung to dry on rope lines, creating alleys in which Albert ran and played.
Alexandre Champion and Marie Blanche Carpentier had met in Batignolles, likely when they were living in service at 16 rue de Tillsit, an upscale address near the Arc de Triomphe. They published their wedding banns on October 18, 1873.25 Alexandre and Blanche had some evenings and Sundays together. They explored local cafés and cabarets noisy with other classes laborieuses, poets, musicians, and artists drawn to districts where the rent was cheap. They married on January 17, 1874.26
In the year Albert learned to ride the unicycle, he was the big brother of Louis and Henri, named after French Kings, and Prosper, honoring Marie’s father and paternal grandfather.27 The family ate simple meals, mostly baked bread and herbs, supplemented with copious amounts of red onions, garlic, and sorrel. A seasonal dish included dandelion salad garnished with slices of hardboiled egg. It was typical to finish with a piece of cheese. They also would have indulged in the fare of the Paris poor: horsemeat.
He grew up when neighbors still seethed about the shelling of Paris by Prussian artillery in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War.28 At gatherings around dining tables and in cafés and cabarets people spewed passionate recollections about citizens who had grabbed picks and shovels and rushed to protect the Arc de Triomphe.29 Residents of Batignolles had filled tons of sandbags and stacked them up the monument’s height of 164 feet and breadth of 148 feet. The Arc de Triomphe escaped harm. However, the Prussian artillery siege cut off the supply of food for three months. Starving citizens resorted to eating all of the animals in the zoo, then dogs, cats, and crows, every horse, and—after consuming all options—people resorted to eating rats.30 France capitulated to Prussia and was forced to pay ruinous compensation, which set off a wave of business failures. Revolutionaries in the leftist Commune of Paris had set up a provisional government and fought a civil war on the streets. Sections of the city went up in flames. In May 1871, some twenty thousand citizens were massacred or court-martialed and summarily shot.31
When Champion came to possess a unicycle, Paris was hosting a world’s fair—the Exposition Universelle of 1889. Government officials and business leaders organized it to rejoice over the city’s recovery from the Franco-Prussian War, remember the centenary of the 1789 storming of the Bastille, and display France’s culture with the new painting movement called Impressionism.
The exposition’s symbol was bridge builder Gustave Eiffel’s tapering steel tower, soaring up 984 feet,32 an audacious icon. During two years of construction, his spectacle of 7,000 tons, held together with 2.5 million rivets, rose rudely above Paris’s ocean of slate roofs. Intellectuals expressed outrage. They gathered in the streets and grumbled that Eiffel’s structure violated the city profile; many circulated petitions and wrote letters of protest to newspapers. Yet supporters rallied in greater numbers, expressing pride that Paris now possessed the tallest building in the world, surpassing America’s Washington Monument, a marble obelisk 555 feet tall in Washington, DC.33 Adoring advocates boasted that the Eiffel Tower represented modern France. Champion, looking south from Batignolles across the city, could see the Eiffel Tower going up, higher and higher. This was among his cherished memories from childhood.
His father lived to see the Eiffel Tower completed, but he died of pneumonia at home three days after Christmas—December 28, 1889.34 He was forty-seven, about the average life expectancy for his generation. Aside from his wedding banns
and marriage, he left behind no records of paying taxes, voting, or serving in the military.35 (France had a compulsory two-year military conscription. If he had served, which is likely, he would have been a lowly enlisted man, a poilu, among the faceless undocumented.)
On top of Albert’s mother taking over all the family responsibilities, she likely realized she had scant chance of ever remarrying. Her sons became the center of her life.
The father Albert had was no longer going to offer guidance. He struggled with the gloom of le réveil mortel, the uncompromising reality of death, unaware he had lost his childhood innocence. Aunts and uncles and cousins on the Champion and Carpentier sides of his extended family provided whatever emotional support they could, but they were hard pressed to do much for Alexandre’s widow and sons. The experience formed Albert’s character. For the rest of his life, he threw himself into work, forever escaping into the task at hand, keeping busy, always planning new projects, in time building up a business with factories in three countries and offices of his own.
What little is known of Champion’s childhood can be gleaned from a lifetime of journal articles and an outpouring of hundreds of French and English obituaries with recollections from friends, fellow athletes, and auto executives on both sides of the Atlantic. He grew up in public as a celebrity, like today’s young rock stars. An itinerant bicycle racer competing on the pro circuit’s banked cycling tracks, called vélodromes, he enjoyed immense popularity and money by the fistful. The press corps flocked around him, keen to capture quotes or describe his actions. Before he immigrated to America, he already had been closely tracked in a steady cascade of articles. He was cited in books published in Paris. He kept a scrapbook of his racing career.
In the spring of 1890, Champion was working as a unicycle acrobat for Henri Gauliard. Champion commuted to work and back home, some six miles each way, on his unicycle. The ride would have been rough from the hard-rubber tire on his wheel. “I was earning my own living and part of my mother’s and brothers’ when I was twelve years old,”36 he later told the Detroit News. It may have been the only time he ever mentioned his siblings, although without naming Henri, Louis, or Prosper.
He was twelve when he ended formal schooling, common among kids from impoverished families. City boys flocked to factories, rural youths toiled on farms or in mines; girls and some boys found household domestic service, wearing servant uniforms. Their milieu required always acknowledging their place below the upper ranks of the social order. They lived under the protocol of being seen but not heard from unless spoken to directly by someone of higher authority. Any speaking out of turn or misbehaving put them at risk of getting a sharp slap on the ear or sacked outright.
Proud, Champion had no interest in service employment. Yet he lacked family or social connections that would allow him to enter a trade, like baking or printing. No opportunities beckoned where he could expect to support himself and improve conditions for his mother and brothers. His mother’s diligence and the sacrifices she made on behalf of him and his brothers weighed on him. His brothers looked up to him.
Self-reliant and a natural showman, he created an ambitious publicity stunt. Gauliard publicized the event and charged admission. On a Saturday in May, Champion would pedal his unicycle for ten hours around a high-school cinder running track and cover one hundred miles—the distance equivalent to what a carriage drawn by four horses would cover in two days. The audacity of the self-propelled, one-wheel venture filled the stands. He pedaled round and round the track from seven o’clock in the morning to 5 o’clock in the evening, crank arms spinning, hands waving to the crowd. Champion went 101 miles (162 kilometers),37 averaging a brisk 10 mph.
He earned more than five hundred francs—about as much as a school teacher was paid in three months—and burnished his local fame. Yet the future of unicycle riding was uncertain. Sooner or later the novelty would wear off and he would have to make a career choice—either move up as an acrobat performing in a circus act or try something else. He faced his predicament during the Belle Époque following the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Peacetime nurtured advances in technology, the arts, and literature. Mechanical innovations were raising the quality of daily life for many while creating new employment possibilities and greater productivity. Steam engines operated looms, threshing machines, power tools, and locomotives pulling passenger trains. Wind-powered, ocean-going ships were overtaken by faster, more reliable steamships. Thanks to Thomas Edison, light bulbs were replacing malodorous coal-oil lamps. After the introduction of electric elevators, hotel customers no longer had to climb flights of stairs. Technical advances bolstered international commerce. They generated additional revenue in national economies, broadened meritocracy, thawed class mobility, and prepared society for the coming of motorcars and airplanes.
Yet Champion lived outside of all this progress. He had no means to enter.
It took a locksmith to let him in.
MONSIEUR CLÉMENT ALWAYS HAD THE WELL-BEING OF HIS WORKERS IN MIND. THE FACTORY WAS SPACIOUS, WELL LIT, AND HEATED IN THE WINTER.
—CITATION FOR CHEVALIER DE LA LÉGION D’HONNEUR, APRIL 2, 18941
Adolphe Clément left his village in northern France at sixteen, right after the Franco-Prussian War, with 30 francs in his pocket and his possessions in a canvas backpack.2 He became a manufacturer in Paris, a man at the heart of the genius of the nation’s sweeping changes in transportation—pneumatic tires, bicycles, motorcycles, automobiles, and airplanes. From the introduction of each revolutionary advancement, Clément took an aggressive approach to funding its development and seeking creative new ways to promote advancement. Always restless, he hustled from one board of directors meeting to another, offering advice to a broadening circle of associates, sharing experiences, mentoring the next generation. He was known as a father to his workers when that trait was rare and respected.3 He created such prosperity in French industry that he was awarded the highest civilian honors, la Légion d’Honneur, by three presidents.4
One day in November 1890, before anyone beyond Paris ever heard of him, Clément was in north London’s Camden Town, attending the annual Stanley Show of Cycles in the spacious Royal Agricultural Hall.5 He ambled over the stone floor, which amplified the din of hundreds of people gathered under the high ceiling at the trade show. The convivial Frenchman renewed acquaintances, met new friends, and checked out exhibits of gleaming bicycles mounted on stands among the aisles and steel wheels, leather saddles, wool apparel, and additional merchandise heaped on tables. He stood a little over five feet in height. In his thirty-three years he had experience making and repairing locks, shoeing horses, fixing broken watches, operating every piece of machinery in his factory, driving a bargain for shipments at a specific delivery date, closing a contract for a new supplier, and passing judgment on a question of manufacturing or sales policy of his Clément Cycles Company. Within a decade his business grew to one hundred fifty workers.6 Photos captured a gleam in his eyes, as though excited about a new discovery, like the one he made at the Stanley Show.
Among the merchandise exhibits was the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company, Ltd., a start-up from Dublin, Ireland. William Harvey du Cros Sr., an accountant who served as president, and his adult son, Arthur, displayed Dunlop pneumatic tires on their table. Most in the crowd swarmed past them without casting a glance. A few paused long enough to take a cursory look at the Indian-rubber tread or to talk briefly with the elder du Cros about his product. But they soon snorted or guffawed and abruptly bolted away.7 “Actually, they made fun of us,” Arthur du Cros later reminded journalists.8
It was not that the Irishmen’s brogue or their manner had put anyone off. Harvey du Cros, as the senior du Cros was known, wore a bespoke suit and a fresh, crisp, white collar over his cravat. His nearly tamed mustache adorned a clean face under a high forehead. The faint lines on his dignified visage testified to a career of working indoors. Now in his fifties, he could still slip into the trunks he used to wear as Ir
eland’s lightweight boxing champion, and he retained the physical grace of a tournament fencer. Arthur looked like a twenty-something version of his father, with the exception of a broader mustache, its ends waxed into submission.
The skepticism came from hearing the tires were filled with air. They were inflated by a soccer-ball pump. The younger du Cros could pump quick strokes of air into the tube, making the tire swell (resembling contemporary mountain bike tires). However, anybody seeing his demonstration scoffed that the tire looked like a sausage and turned away before either du Cros could explain that pneumatic tires offered a smooth ride over rough roads. English businessmen from cycling manufacturing centers in Coventry, Birmingham, and Nottingham felt free to point a finger at the Dunlops and laugh out loud, mocking them, as if to call attention to a prank or a scam.
“The public in Ireland and the cycle trade in England were unbelievers,” Arthur du Cros wrote in his 1938 memoir Wheels of Fortune. “The ridicule and derision with which the tyre had been received was almost unanimous.”9
Existing tires on bicycles, wagon wheels, and everything else that rolled used a neat strip of solid rubber, about an inch wide and deep, glued to steel rims—still common on grocery carts and farm tractors. Cyclists bounced over urban streets of cobblestones, crisscrossed with train rails, or had their hands jerked from handlebars shaken by rutted rural dirt roads, but without giving any thought to discomfort. A London cycling magazine took a snarky view of Dunlop pneumatics and sniped that they “should last at least a season.”10
Clément took a longer perspective. He had traveled to the Stanley Show for a preview of innovations that had thrust England to the forefront of the flourishing bicycle industry. English engineers had improved steel—lighter, stronger, and more abundant than ever. New miracle steel enabled Eiffel to build his tower. Artisans in Coventry took advantage of recent steel to introduce early bicycles and unicycles, followed by tricycles with rack-and-pinion steering along with a novel gearing differential, which allowed wheels on the same axle to turn at different speeds around corners—technical breakthroughs that before long would prove indispensable for automobiles.