The Eiffel Tower is as iconic of France as croissants and baguettes, and equally emblematic of Paris as Notre-Dame or the Arc de Triomphe.Yet, before completion for the 1889 World’s Fair - the project was treated by some as an industrialist “Tower of Babel” that was anti-ethical to French taste and culture.A month after construction of the Tower began in 1887, a group of prominent French artists published an open letter titled ‘Artists against the Eiffel Tower’ featured on the front page of Parisian Newspaper ‘Les Temps.’ It began: "We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, amateurs impassioned with the beauty, until now intact, of Paris, are coming to protest with all our might and all our indignation, in the name of unrecognized French taste, in the name of threatened French art & history, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower…"
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💉 'An Absurd Prejudice' - The New York Times, 1875
146 years ago The New York Times published an article lamenting anti-vaxxers, the piece began: "One might suppose that the popular prejudice against vaccination might have died out by this time, considering it has been practice for nearly a century." Today this statement is as amusing as it is painful, when considering anti-vaxxers remain a relevant movement. It rightly observed that “It seems useless to quote science, and a long and successful practice, against such dense stupidity as this. The ignoramus has a prejudice against the regular practitioner, and, with cruel kindness he kills his friend while trying to protect him against the art of a learned physician” going on to say “In spite of all our boasted progress curious revelations of popular ignorance and superstition are constantly showing us how little advance has been made." It finishes with a prediction “When knowledge is more evenly distributed there will be less of this fantastic and ignorant prejudice” - unfortunately, he was wrong.
Source: The New York Times, 1875 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1875/08/17/79089660.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
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✈️ 'The Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly' - The New York Times, October 9th, 1903
69 days before the Wright Brothers achieved manned flight The New York Times posited it could take between 1 and 10 million years to achieve. The piece chides those experimenting in the field and posits that human ingenuity will never achieve what evolution had done over millions of years. The piece ends implying it is a waste of time and money: "To the ordinary man, it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.”
'The Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly' - The New York Times, October 9th, 1903: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1903/10/09/102025405.pdf
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