Chapter 12
“Cusins: What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?
“Undershaft: To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.”
That martial catechism from George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” would have served nicely as the family motto of Friedrich Krupp AG, arms dealers to the world.
Supplying arms to the world’s governments for nearly four centuries (a Krupp sold arms to the warring Protestant and Catholic factions in the Thirty Years’ War), Friedrich Krupp AG had so much weaponry to display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago that the Essen, Germany-based company needed its own building to house them. Built at a cost of $1.5 million (and roughly an equal amount to ship it to the expo), the Krupp Gun Pavilion’s star attraction was The Thunderer, shown here. The world’s biggest gun, the forty-seven-foot-long, 124-ton cannon lobbed shells weighing 2,000 pounds apiece up to 5.5 miles, and would soon go from mesmerizing attendees to massacring armies in the twentieth century.
The Pavilion was a cross between the Krupp family manor, the sprawling 160-room Villa Huegel, and Castle Frankenstein: a 30-foot-high entrance hall running 138 feet long and stretching 25 feet wide. It ran into a main exhibit hall measuring 197 feet long by 82 feet wide by 43 feet high. Inside this man-made cavern stood The Thunderer, around which Chicago crowds gathered in reverential awe, just as they would gather around another giant havoc-wreaker, Sue the T. rex, at the Field Museum of Natural History a century later.
After the exposition ended, Krupp tried to entice the United States into purchasing the oversized cannon for $223,000, hoping the allure of its 1-ton shells exploding into 3,400 steel balls weighing about a quarter pound each would make the resulting vast swathes of corpses seem economical on a per-cadaver basis. After the United States spurned the offer (downside: The Thunderer would have cost roughly $1,500 per shot to operate), a rumor spread that Krupp was going to donate the cannon to Chicago, which would in turn place the deterrent in a fort opposite Hyde Park.
Courtesy of the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology
Exhibitions were to Krupp what a lever was to Archimedes: a tool that could move the world. After it began manufacturing steel cannons in the 1840s, the company appeared at German industrial exhibitions, and in 1851 it displayed a shiny cast-steel cannon that could chuck a shell weighing six pounds that became one of the sensations of London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Sixteen years later at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Krupp displayed a 50-ton cannon it thought would turn the head—and turn on sales—of Emperor Napoleon III. Civilians and soldiers alike marveled at the cannon, with one prominent exception: Victor Hugo mocked the field gun with a bore of fourteen inches, writing: “The enormous steel cannonballs, which cost a thousand francs each, shot from the titanic Prussian cannons forged by Krupp’s gigantic hammer, which weighs a hundred thousand pounds and costs three million [francs], are just as effective against progress as soap bubbles floating off the end of a pipe blown by a small child.”
Accolades poured in but contracts remained elusive. However, the French snub could be overlooked when, three years later, Krupp guns helped Germany bombard France in the Franco-Prussian War like the Death Star did Alderaan.
Later, at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, Krupp displayed a 14-inch, 57-ton gun with projectiles ranging from 902 to 1,122 pounds that had to be raised to the gun by crane. Though a German exhibit without war-making materials would be the same as Italy without spaghetti, even Germany’s own self-appraisal was as scathing as Victor Hugo’s. The report of the German Commissioner General, Franz Reuleaux, left the exhibit with third-degree burns: “In arts and crafts Germany has nothing to show but propaganda and patriotic motifs. It seems seven eighths of the space is occupied by Krupp’s giant guns, the ‘killing machines’ that stand like a menace among the peaceful works of the other nations.”
Perhaps that’s why its stand at the Brussels International Exposition (Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles) of 1897 exhibited models of Krupp-provided schools, homes, hospitals, and playgrounds, likely neglecting to mention the required loyalty oaths it demanded of employees and the permission required for workers who wanted to relieve themselves while on the job.
Krupp wasn’t alone in perceiving the value of exhibitions to market its wares. Smith & Wesson Corp. appeared at the 1867 expo as well, securing contracts with the Japanese, Chinese, and Russian governments—the last alone for 200,000 revolvers. The company’s nine Tiffany-commissioned revolvers created for the 1893 expo elevated armaments into artworks that were beautiful enough to preserve in amber.
In the proto-fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the Colt brand exhibited 500 machine-manufactured guns. Set in a corkscrew configuration inside a glass case, the exhibit drew the repeated attention of the Duke of Wellington, where he touted the guns—assisted by the free brandy Colt served attendees.
The Winchester, Marlin, Remington, and Colt brands all exhibited at the inaugural 1895 Sportsmen’s Exposition in New York, with Winchester using the equivalent of the era’s Oculus Rift: Attendees could gaze inside the cutting-edge Mutoscope, a peep-show-like device that operated much as a flip book does, and watch in awe as Rolla O. Heikes, who at one point held more trapshooting records than any other shooter alive, blasts away at airborne targets.
At the time of the Chicago expo, company head Friedrich Alfred Krupp enjoyed an annual net income of $10 million, part of an estimated personal fortune exceeding $125 million. By the dawn of the twentieth century, his company was the largest in Europe, furnishing arms for Germany in both world wars, using—despite its social-benefactor ambitions—up to 100,000 slave laborers in World War II, who produced tanks, shells, and artillery for their malefactors.
Eleven directors of the company were found guilty at the Nuremberg trials, with Alfred’s son, Alfried, sentenced to a dozen years in prison along with “forfeiture of all [his] property.” After he was released through an amnesty two years later (with some of his money boomeranging back to him), Krupp renounced arms manufacturing, a better-late-than-never convert to the value of turning swords into plowshares.