For most people, the rule of thumb is to stick to what you’re good at. But there are those rare individuals who can’t seem to stick to anything and are good at everything. Joseph Paxton was one of those people, and although very few people know of him, millions of us appreciate the result of his prolific work. (Most of the details about Joseph Paxton have been taken from Bill Bryson’s excellent book, At Home.)
Joseph was born in 1803 as the seventh child of a poor farmer, and after a limited education began working as an apprentice gardener at the age of 14. In only six years he so distinguished himself that he was asked to run an experimental arboretum for the prestigious Royal Horticulture Society. While working there, he befriended the Duke of Devonshire, who being hard of hearing, probably appreciated the loud and clear voice of Joseph more than his gardening skills. Impulsively, the Duke, one of the wealthiest noblemen in Britain, who owned over 200,000 acres of English countryside, asked twenty-two-year-old Joseph to become the head gardener at Chatsworth, principal seat of the House of Devonshire.
Not being one to waste any time, Joseph showed up for work the next day at 4:30AM. He surveyed the entire sleeping estate, scaling walls when gates were still shut. He then put the gardeners to work on his new plans, and sat down for breakfast with the housekeeper’s family, where he met his future wife, the housekeeper’s niece Sarah Brown. By 9AM, he had already done a full day’s work, met his bashert, and was ready to start developing grand plans for the estate.
He installed the Emperor’s Fountain, a marvel of engineering that could shoot a plume of water 290 feet into the air, a feat that to this day has only been bested in all of Europe once. He built the largest rockery in the country, and even designed a new estate village, one that fit in with the landscape better than the previous one. Using efficient estate management techniques, he was able to save the Duke £1,000,000 at a time when the average field laborer made only £30 a year!
Chatsworth Estate with the Emperor’s Fountain in the foreground
Paxton quickly became the world’s leading expert on a variety of flowers and invented the modern greenhouse to encourage the growth of his exotic flowers. His water lilies grew to be over 12 feet wide, so big that his daughter could sit on them comfortably! His enormous tropical greenhouse, The Stove, was big enough that Queen Victoria could tour it in a horse drawn carriage in 1843.
But when you are so talented, why stop at gardening? With the Duke’s permission, Paxton launched two gardening magazines, and a national newspaper, the Daily News, which for a time was edited by Charles Dickens. He began investing in railroads, and did so well that he was asked to join the boards of three of the largest railroad companies of the time.
The Daily News, circa 1846
To get a feel for what he did next, all you need to do is head to Central Park in Manhattan, or any one of hundreds of other municipal parks all over the US including Belle Isle in Detroit, the Niagara Falls Parks, and the Emerald Necklace in Boston. Paxton didn’t design them, Frederick Law Olmsted did, but Paxton did design the world’s first municipal park in Birkenhead, near Liverpool. Instead of having miles of exotic flowers and manicured bushes which were expensive to maintain and inefficient, Paxton designed Birkenhead to have a very natural look, with native trees and gently sloping land that opened into natural looking meadows and parade grounds. It was this style that so impressed the visiting Olmsted that he studied it intently, then copied it all over the US and Canada on his return.
But his crowning achievement came in 1850. The British Government, in its desire to display its wealth to the world, decided to have a Great Exhibition. Tens of thousands of exhibitors from around the world would display their latest and greatest inventions for the millions of visitors, both national and international, that would surely flock to the Great Exhibition. The only problem was that the government began planning it only fifteen months before it was slated to open, and no one had any idea how to build the massive structure needed to house the exhibition.
The British created a public competition, and over 245 designs were submitted, all of which were rejected on the basis that they were unfeasible. When the public sector isn’t helping, the government does what the government does best, which is to create a committee. Of the four people on the committee tasked with building a structure big enough to host the Great Exhibition, only one was an architect, and even he had never built anything yet. At the time he was earning his living as a writer.
The structure they devised was a monolithic one story brick building that would just stretch on forever, with a damp, cold and gloomy interior. It would require the manufacture of over thirty million bricks, something prohibitively expensive and impossible to do in the short time frame needed for the May 1, 1851 opening date. And just as Great Britain began to despair, Joseph Paxton published his idea in newspapers around the country. Why not just build a giant greenhouse?
Sheet glass had recently been invented, which meant that you could manufacture large sheets of glass for a relatively inexpensive price. All you would need would be a strong metal framework, and the rest of the building could be glass. The glass and the iron would be of standard sizes, making the building process much easier. The building would be filled with light, it would be airy, and most of all, it would boggle the minds of all the spectators, this being something never done before anywhere in the world! The public was totally struck by the idea, and Joseph Paxton, an untrained gardener from Bedfordshire, was given the contract for the largest job the nation had ever attempted.
Joseph designed special mobile glass mounting platforms, upon which teams could lay 18,000 plates of glass a week, and with great rapidity the largest building in the world reared its head over Hyde Park, London. The building was completed in a very ungovernmental fashion; ahead of schedule and under budget. The whole edifice, which was 1,851 feet long (remember the year?), 408 feet across, and 110 feet high along its central hallway, was built in just thirty five weeks! Comprised of 293,655 panes of glass, 33,000 iron beams, and acres of wood flooring, the whole building cost a trifling £80,000. The people of the day had simply no words to describe this ethereal edifice until a reporter termed it The Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.
An aerial view of the Crystal Palace taken shortly before a fire destroyed it in 1936
What perhaps makes the story of Joseph Paxton so unique was his ability to think outside of the box. Never before had someone attempted to make a building out of glass and steel. Never before had anyone grown 12 foot wide water lilies. Never before had someone made a municipal park simply to benefit the common citizens of a city by giving them a clean and open place to relax, and never before had anyone built a park in a way that it looked natural and organic. Never before were buildings made of glass and steel, But “it’s never been done” never stopped Joseph Paxton. Had Joseph been an “it’s never been done before” man, he would have spent his life in obscurity, quietly gardening in Bedfordshire. Instead he dazzled the world.
We just finished the High Holidays, where surely most of us committed to changing our lives and becoming better people. But the problem is that we don’t really know what that looks like. We’ve never been the person we want to be, it’s never been done before. How do I rearrange my priorities? How do I learn new habits? How do I stop doing what I’ve done for decades and replace it with different action, ones that are more selfless, meaningful, and purposeful? How do I get out of the box that I’ve been living in, and become a new me?
Luckily, right after the High Holidays, we have the holiday of Succos, where we literally get out of the box we’ve been living in, and move into a different sort of existence! We move out of the physical comfort of our homes, and into a succah, a small dwelling place made of flimsy walls and an even flimsier roof. Yet we not only survive in the succah, we thrive!
We find incredible joy in pulling back from our phones and computers and spending more time with the family! We love singing songs of inspiration, serving each other festive meals, and sharing words of Torah and encouragement! We find again the joy of simply sitting with friends and chatting, face to face, with no distractions. The succah may be minimalist by design, but it maximizes our concept of self, and what we can do! Our life doesn’t need to be measured by the physical things we have, the big house, the new car, etc, but rather by the things we do, the mitzvos we perform, the family we build.
Succos is called Zman Simchaseinu, the Time of Our Joy. The word for joy in Hebrew, simcha, is very closely related to the word for growth, tzimcha. Rabbi Moshe Shapiro Shlita, a leading scholar in Jerusalem, explains that this because joy is the emotion we feel when our soul is growing and expanding. Succos is the Time of Our Joy because when we go out of the box, we are able to expand far beyond what we thought we could do. We are able to learn new habits and patterns, we are able to start our year off expanding our soul and doing things we never did before.
Let’s use this Succos to cultivate one new habit, let’s think out of the box, let’s do what has never been done before, let’s expand, let’s experience true joy in Time of Joy!
Exterior of the Crystal Palace
An artist’s rendering of the interior of the Crystal Palace
Today, buildings are commonly made of glass and metal, using Paxton’s system
