French vs. American Style: the du Pont Estates in Delaware

Nemours dining room, photo by Charles Brown

                

                 Delaware is home to two famous du Pont estates that reflect the distinctive aesthetics of their owners. In 1907, Alfred I du Pont built an 18th-century style chateau on 3,000 acres hat he named Nemours for the French town of his great-great grandfather. Winterthur, on the other hand, evolved from a 12 room house buit in 1841 to a 175-room mansion that Henry Francis du Pont intended to house his collection of American antiques and to serve as museum and resource for American style.

On the American side

This rivalry between French and American style is one of the  themes of the exhibit currently on view at the Winterthur Museum: Jacqueline Kennedy and H. F. du Pont: From Winterthur to the White House. When Jacquelin Kennedy undertook a project to restore the White House to the glory it lacked at the time, she enlisted the help of the H.F. du Pont. He steered her toward American style over French -- the style she had personally preferred

 

He also steered her toward authenticity even at greater experience. The strongest example of that was his advice to spend $12,500 to obtain the actual Zuber wallpaper for the White House Reception Room rather than to commission a copy for a fraction of the cost. Incidentally, the man who sold the committee the wallpaper --Peter Hill -- had purchased it for a mere $50, though he had to take it down himself  before the house in Maryland that had it on the walls was demolished.

Winterthur, photo by Ariella Brown

View of the back of the house from the Reflecting Pool area, photo by Ariella Brown

H.F. du Pont had a great passion for American artifacts, history, and gardening. The Winterthur Museum and Garden (there's also a library, though it was closed to the public when I visited) are all a testament to that. For the cost of general admission of $22, you'd gain a two-day pass that entitles you to museum admission (not in the house itself) with the option for a tour, a house tour (where you only get to see about a dozen out of the 175 rooms) and garden tour that covers a small part of the 60 acres of gardens plus as much walking around the 1,000 acres of the estate as you're up for. 

Most of the ceilings at Winterthur have a perforated coverto allow electricity to get through. I have to say that I find it really detracts from the effect of the rooms so carefully set up to reflect a set period.

      Half of one of the symmetrical rooms in Winterthur, photo by Ariella Brown

                                View on the estate, photo by Ariella Brown

Spring seems to be the ideal season to come to see the millions (yes, that many) of bulbs come into bloom that change over the colors you'll see no less than three time in the space of a month, according to our guide. Another garden highlight are the thousands of azalea bushes that would be at their peak in April and May. But no matter what time of year you visit, you can delight in the Enchanted Woods See photos below:

   Child's playhouse with thatched roof, furnished table, benches, chairs, and a working fireplace in the Enchanted Woods  

You can also indulge your whimsical side at Winterthur by stopping in to see  the Campbell Collection of Soup Tureens right next to the museum building. The designs to range form the subline to the ridiculous with some that would look like what you might find in your grandmother's collection, while others would make you wonder: "What were they thinking?"

                             What else would you serve turtle soup in but a silver tureen shaped like a turtle?

                 .
On the French side

While Nemours doesn't boast a museum or the particular delights of a child's garden, the architecture of the house and the view of the splendidly appointed rooms, plus the exquisite layout of the formal gardens adorned by fountains that all seemed to work (unlike the ones in Kykuit) and a collection of gnomes beyond the standard bearded men, scattered around the place are  well-worth the cost of $20 for the day-pass  for access to the house and grounds. Both estates offer shuttles to carry you from one point of interest to another if you tire of walking. 

Nemours Estate: all Nemours photos here by Charles Brown

  

                                                   Nemours conservatory

Four things you get to see in Nemours that are  not on public view at Winterthur: bedrooms, a bathroom made for the house, a laundry building, and a garage with beautiful  vintage cars..

                                         

                                       Laundry required using a washboard in large sinks

As you may have observed, I was able to post a lot of pictures here. That's because there are absolutely no restrictions on photography in these du Pont estates -- only a bar on using flash indoors. In contrast, Kykuit prohibits any photography inside -- even in the garage that houses the cars. It also does not allow visitors to roam the grounds freely at their own pace. Consequently, I would say that the Delaware estates are both a better value and friendlier as attractions. Just they are quite a distance to travel from New York. 

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A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering
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A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering

Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his short story, “The Rich Boy." “They are different from you and me.”

Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum entrance. It leads into what was originally the kitchen. 

by Ariella Brown

Those of us who are not rich and wonder at just how different their lives were than our own, can catch glimpses of it in tours of elaborate mansions that were once the homes of the wealthy elite. Certainly, that’s a big draw for tourists to Newport, Rhode Island. It was the place to summer in for the super rich and fashionable during the Gilded Age. But before there was one area designated by fashionable society, the rich may have chosen any area, and one man chose his own birthplace for the most well-appointed summer home ever built in the United States at the time. 

                       Interior view of conservatory (photo by Ariella Brown)

    Exterior view of conservatory (photo by Ariella Brown)

Grand plans

LeGrande Lockwood, one of only a handful of millionaires in the country at the start of the Civil War, and the first millionaire native of Norwalk, Connecticut, opted for his birthplace as the neighborhood in which he would build his summer home. It still stands there, though, not quite in its full glory, as a registered historic landmark called the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum.

The interior can be seen through a docent-led tour, which is limited to the first floor during the colder months due to the difficulty of heating the entire structure. The tour reveals interesting facets of the history of the house and its occupants, as well as details of its construction and design.

You can experience a kind of virtual mini-tour through this video:

The house’s appearance was largely inspired by the French chateaus that Lockwood had seen and admired on his trips to Europe to raise funds for the American Civil War. In fact, the mansion is considered one of the earliest examples of French Empire Style architecture in the United States.

Detail of the ceiling and French wallpaper. a roll
was found in  the house, which enabled
reproductions and restoration and restoration.

While the architectural style was rooted in tradition, the features and comforts utilized the very latest in technology for the times. This house was equipped things you may expect from that time period, like gas lighting, plumbing that allows for both hot and cold water, flush toilets, and central heating powered by coal. But it also includes some things you may not have anticipated.

Even when electricity was not set up for lighting, it was used for a burglar alarm. Most surprisingly -- and, possibly, the most important feature for a summer house -- this house had central air-conditioning, though it didn’t run on electricity.

To check on times for tours, see lockwoodmathewsmansion.com/your-visit/

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How many times did Edison fail in attempting to invent the lightbulb?

Thomas Edison holding a replica of his 1880 lightbulb design in 1925

The answer is not around number like 1,000 or 10,000 times that some people like to claim. It took 2,774 attempts to arrive at the bamboo filament that made Edison's lightbulb a commercial success, though he was not the one who invented the electric light.

Electric lights  in England

Various inventors dabbled in channeling electricity for light many decades before Edison did. Credit for the first electric light goes to the British chemist Humphry Davy who invented the Electric Arc lamp in the first decade of the 19th century,  though is more famous for the lamp that bears his name invented in 1815.

Another English chemist, Warren de la Rue offered a design in 1840 that relied on a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube. Thought it worked quite well, the high cost of platinum rendered the bulb too expensive for mass production.

In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan used carbonized paper filaments for his bulb design.  It took yet another decade to make a working prototype, though it was still  not viable as a commercial product. It took him until 1878 to developed a bulb  that relied on treated cotton thread, which both increased longevity and removed the problem of early bulb blackening.

A light across the Atlantic 

In the interim, on the other side of the Atlantic, a patent for the Woodward and Evan’s Light was filed in Canada on July 28, 1874.They used carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. While the product worked, Canada is not really recognized as the cradle of electric bulbs. 

That's because even though Woodward obtained an American patent in 1876, he wasn't able to launch his bulbs in the U.S.  In 1879 Thomas Edison bought out the patents from Woodward and his Canadian partners. Then in 1885 Woodward sold a share of his Canadian patent to Edison, as well. But that doesn't mean that Edison merely capitalized on the work of others. 

Edison's own advancement

Edison did make a significant advance in lightbulb design in developing a filament was made from carbonized bamboo, which allowed it to burn for over 1200 hours. It was that design that was put into mass production.

Remember Swan over in England? According to "Who Invented the Light Bulb?"  Edison's own lightbulb design was to close too that of Joseph Swan's to be  awarded its own patent. But in the spirit of "if you can't lick 'em join 'em," Swan and Edison partnered up in 1880 to develop a viable lightbulb. Edison's patent was awarded on January 27, 1880.

 Exactly how many attempts did it take to get the right filament for  Edison lightbulb?

While we there was no actual tabulation of all the steps along the way, there is a very precise number connected to the experiments surrounding the bamboo filament -- 2,774. 

It's cited in a Rutgers newsletter on the Thomas Edison papers here:

No one, including Edison, ever counted the number of experimental lamps that they made. There were hundreds of experiments before he developed the bamboo lamp. And many additional experiments before the lamps were adequate for commercial production. In a letter to Edison in spring 1884, Francis Upton noted that the lamp factory had conducted 2,774 experiments (presumably since it had started operations in October 1881).

The link in the paragraph above take you to a digital image of a handwritten note on the bamboo lamp. 

What about the inspiration of not giving through thousands of failures? 

What to make of the famous quote about Edison claiming not to have failed 10,000 times but to have

Inside Edison's lab. Photo by Ariella Brown

 found 10,000 ways that did not work?

There's no record of that quote with respect to the electric bulb, though he did say something like that about  his experience with the battery. The Rutgers newsletter dug up a quote that comes pretty closed in Edison: His Life and Inventions. an authorized biography by Frank Dyer and T. C. Martin, first published in 1910. Edison's friend and associate, Walter S. Mallory, offers this account:

This [the research] had been going on more than five months, seven days a week, when I was called down to the laboratory to see him [Edison]. I found him at a bench about three feet wide and twelve feet long, on which there were hundreds of little test cells that had been made up by his corps of chemists and experimenters. I then learned that he had thus made over nine thousand experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment, and I said: 'Isn't it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven't been able to get any results?' Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: 'Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won't work!'

There you have it, not exactly in the words you find on quotes sites, but the same idea. The point is that Edison had to go through a great deal of trial-and-error to discover what would make the bulb work well. That required more persistence than flashes of insight, which is why Edison is associated with another quote: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration" Spoken statement c. 1903 that was published in Harper's Monthly in September 1932.

[Note: this blog has been updated multiple times since it was first published with references to events that occurred after 2015. I talk about that in this What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO.]

Shedding some light on Latimer

I'm adding in another note on the development of the lightbulb to clarify some confusion stirred up by Joe Biden's declaration in Kenosha on September 3, 2020, "A black man invented the light bulb. not a white guy named Edison. Okay?"

One thing Biden got right is that a black man named Lewis Howard Latimer did advance light bulb

designs. Latimer was a remarkable inventor, electrical engineer, and patent expert who advanced light bulb design. He did work for Hiram Maxim, as well as Edison.

Lewis Howard Latimer

While  working as a draftsman for Hiram Maxim, founder of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, he along with Joseph Nichols, registered a patent for a light bulb with a carbon filament that burned better than than the bamboo one in 1881. He also got the patent on or ‘the process of manufacturing carbons’ which was an improvement on the method for the production of the carbon filaments in light bulbs.

Latimer only started working for the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884 and remained at that New York City location until 1896; he never worked alongside Edison as a "mucker" in the Menlo Park Lab.  As chief draftsman and patent expert in the legal department of Edison Electric Light Company. Among his duties was conducting patent searches (not so easy in the days when everything was on paper files)  and testifying on Edison’s behalf in court cases surrounding patents. Latimer was also the author of Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System, which was published in 1890.

The researchers for the historical authenticity messed up on this in their attempt to reference Latimer's contribution to the lightbulb  in the seventh episode of  the HBO period drama The Gilded Age. As the events of the first season take place in 1882 -- when Latimer was still working for his competitor -- it would have been impossible for Edison to  invite Latimer to take credit, as the characters joke, at that time.   

In person and virtual option to learn more

Photo by Ariella Brown

If you're interested in learning more about Edison and his experiments, including the invention he did consider a failure (talking dolls),  take the time to visit Edison's lab in Menlo Park, NJ (pictured above).  It's held by the National Park Service. Find information on exhibits, hours, fees, etc., here. 

If you time it right, you can go over to see Edison's home, Glenmont, pictured here on the same day. You can also take a virtual tour.

The Lewis Latimer house is located at 34-41 137th St. Flushing, NY 11354. It is open to the public Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays 11-5. You can enter free for a self-guided tour, though getting a guided one now costs $15 for adults. It's free for children under 12 and caregivers. It's $8 for all other categories. The museum has its own free parking lot for visitors.

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