The Devil in the White City

Inside this book –The Devil in the White City Book by Erik Larson – The news would come by telegraph from Washington. The Tribune would get it from one of its own reporters. Its editors, rewrite men, and typesetters would compose “extra” editions as firemen shoveled coal into the boilers of the paper’s steam- driven presses. A clerk would paste each incoming bulletin to a window, face out, for pedestrians to read. Shortly after four o’clock, Chicago standard railroad time, the Tribune received its first cable. Even Burnham could not say for sure who had been first to propose the idea. It had seemed to rise in many minds at once, the initial intent simply to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World by hosting a world’s fair. At first the idea gained little momentum. Consumed by the great drive toward wealth and power that had begun after the end of the Civil War, America seemed to have scant interest in celebrating its distant past. In 1889,