The date was April 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course the man in suite 63-65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it. What he did know was that his foot hurt badly, more than he had expected. He was sixty-five years old and had become a large man. His hair had turned gray, his mustache nearly white, but his eyes were as blue as ever, bluer at this instant by proximity to the sea. His foot had forced him to delay the voyage, and now it kept him anchored in his suite while the other first-class passengers, his wife among them, did what he would have loved to do, which was to explore the ship's more exotic precincts. The man loved the opulence of the ship, just as he loved Pullman Palace cars and giant fireplaces, but his foot problem tempered his enjoyment. He recognized that the systemic malaise that caused it was a consequence in part of his own refusal over the years to limit his courtship of the finest wines, foods, and cigars. The pain reminded him daily that his time on the planet was nearing its end. Just before the voyage he told a friend, “This prolonging of a man’s life doesn’t interest me when he’s done his work and has done it pretty well.”
The man was Daniel Hudson Burnham, and by now his name was familiar throughout the world. He was an architect and had done his work pretty well in Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Manila, and many other cities. He and his wife, Margaret, were sailing to Europe in the company of their daughter and her husband for a grand tour that was to continue through the summer. Burnham had chosen this ship, the R.M.S. Olympic of the White Star Line, because it was new and glamorous and big. At the time he booked passage the Olympic was the largest vessel in regular service, but just three days before his departure a sister ship—a slightly longer twin—had stolen that rank when it set off on its maiden voyage. The twin, Burnham knew, was at that moment carrying one of his closest friends, the painter Francis Millet, over the same ocean but in the opposite direction.
As the last sunlight of the day entered Burnham’s suite, he and Margaret set off for the first-class dining room on the deck below. They took the elevator to spare his foot the torment of the grand stairway, but he did so with reluctance, for he admired the artistry in the iron scrollwork of its balustrades and the immense dome of iron and glass that flushed the ship’s core with natural light. His sore foot had placed increasing limitations on his mobility. Only a week earlier he had found himself in the humiliating position of having to ride in a wheelchair through Union Station in Washington, D.C., the station he had designed.
The Burnhams dined by themselves in the Olympic’s first-class salon, then retired to their suite and there, for no particular reason, Burnham’s thoughts returned to Frank Millet. On impulse, he resolved to send Millet a midsea greeting via the Olympic’s powerful Marconi wireless.
Burnham signaled for a steward. A middle-aged man in knife-edge whites took his message up three decks to the Marconi room adjacent to the officer’s promenade. He returned a few moments later, the message still in his hand, and told Burnham the operator had refused to accept it.
Footsore and irritable, Burnham demanded that the steward return to the wireless room for an explanation.
Millet was never far from Burnham’s mind, nor was the event that had brought the two of them together: the great Chicago world’s fair of 1893. Millet had been one of Burnham’s closest allies in the long, bittersweet struggle to build the fair. Its official name was the World’s Columbian Exposition, its official purpose to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, but under Burnham, its chief builder, it had become something enchanting, known throughout the world as the White City.