and founded Wagons-Lits
By Richard T. Gregg
Copyright ă International
Bond & Share Society 2001
Hero of the Battle of Gettysburg,
politician, investor, Federal revenue employee, newspaper publisher, inventor
and builder of railway coaches for luxury travel, founder of the Compagnie
Internationale de Wagons-Lits. William d’Alton Mann became a columnist at the
beginning of the twentieth century. His ‘Town Topics, the Journal of Society’
victimised New York’s, indeed the nation’s, upper ‘400’, who literally quaked
in terror at the thought of being exposed by Colonel Mann ! Those who
proffered loans (never repaid, naturally !) to the Colonel, to avoid their
private or scandalous activities being singled out in Mann’s column,
included :
E. Clarence Jones, $10,000
Russell Alger, Senator, $100,000 in
Alger-Sullivan Lumber Co. shares
William K. Vanderbilt, $25,000
Dr. Seward Webb, Vanderbilt’s brother-in-law, $14,000
William C. Whitney, $1,000
J. Pierpont Morgan, $2,500
George Gould, son of Jay Gould, $3,000
Howard Gould, son of Jay Gould, $2,500
Collis P. Huntington, $5,000
James R. Keene, $76,000 (+14,000 repaid !)
John ‘Bet-a-Million’ Gates, the barbed-wire
king, $20,000
Roswell Flower, broker & former governor of
New York, $3,000
Grant B. Schley, $1,500
Charles M. Schwab, $10,000
Thomas Fortune Ryan, $10,000
Perry Belmont, $4,000
In 1866 Mann was a ‘carpet-bagger’ in Mobile,
Alabama, who acquired a newspaper and became a publisher. In 1869 he invested $100,000
in a cottonseed oil refinery, and later that year was elected for Congress for
the First Alabama District. He subsequently invested in the iron mines of the
Birmingham area, building a railroad between Mobile and New Orleans in the
process. In 1872 he was granted a U.S. patent for what he called a ‘boudoir
car’. George Pullman had started in 1859 to introduce sleeping cars, so Mann
prudently removed his boudoir-car operations to Europe, with the first sleeping
car on the Continent being introduced on the Munich-Vienna run. By 1876, he had
58 ‘chemins de fer-wagons-boudoirs pour éviter la grande fatigue’ in service in
half a dozen European countries, all on a contractual lease basis.
Departing from Pullman’s double row of berths with a central aisle, Mann’s
units, styled like stage coaches, contained eight compartments extending most
of the width of the wagon. Later, the cars were equipped with primitive
air-conditioning, with filtered ducts forcing air over blocks of ice. The cars
were fitted out with gold-fringed upholstery, teak gaming-tables, Italian
Renaissance paintings, oriental carpets, crystal chandeliers, embossed
spittoons – amenities formerly available only to royalty and the like. In 1876,
in association with Georges Nagelmaeckers, of the Belgian banking family, he
formed the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, retaining 60% control,
valued at almost $750,000. In this venture they had the support of the Belgian
King Leopold II, an early railway ‘buff’ who, related to most of the crowned
heads of Europe, enjoyed travelling by train to visit them. That same year
Leopold II commissioned Mann to build a private ‘boudoir car’ for the King’s
personal use. Mann also introduced a rail wagon for transporting fresh meat
under refrigeration, which developed into a meat business throughout Europe.
In September 1883 the to-be-famous Orient
Express, running from Paris to Constantinople, was introduced by the Compagnie
Internationale des Wagons-Lits, but Mann, almost a year earlier, had sold his
interest to his Belgian associates. Returning to the United States in 1883, he
incorporated Mann’s Boudoir Car Company, capitalised at $1,000,000, producing
some 41 of his uncommon carriers, offered at a minimum of $18,000 each, with
exotic names such as Rigoletto and Il Trovatore. There was also a special
car for Miss Lily Langry, reputed to the most luxurious means of transport
since Cleopatra’s barge. But 41 cars were no match for Pullman, who had 1000
Pullman cars, each of which could transport 52 passengers in comfort, if not
extraordinary luxury. Mann, in 1887, added vestibules at the ends of his cars
plus a narrow interior corridor running the full length, which allowed
passengers to move easily from one car to the next without the necessity of
negotiating an outside running-board. An 1889 patent dispute with Pullman over
the vestibules was decided against Mann, and his company was finally taken over
by Pullman in 1889. His last venture was the controversial Town Topics, the Journal of Society, with which this story
commenced.
Copyright ă INTERNATIONAL BOND
& SHARE SOCIETY 2001
This text is copyright protected. If you wish
to use on the web or in print – for any purpose whatsoever – any part of this
text or any of the illustrations, you must obtain prior written permission from
the editor of the International Bond & Share Society
(editor@scripophily.org) and give written notification to the Centrum Voor
Scriptophilie (e.boone@glo.be). Infraction is not only morally totally
reprehensible towards the authors and publishers who invested much effort and time in their research and writing,
it will also be legally pursued.