This Side Up: The Man Who Mailed Himself to the Midway in a Box

Despite having nearly 120,000 people enter the fairgrounds on Friday, July 28, this was the slowest day of the week at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The day before had been a busy one, with Commercial Travelers and German Turners pouring into the Chicago fair for their “special days.” Among the few events on Friday was the opening of an interesting package in the Woman’s Building. The box contained a gift from Empress Elisabeth of Austria to the Board of Lady Managers—a lovely picture album, bound in tortoise shell and clasped in silver. Just a few hundred feet away, an oddly shaped dry-goods box had arrived on the morning train from New York. It contained quite a different gift from Austria.

Thinking outside the box

The Adams Express Company delivered the box in the afternoon to Hagenbeck’s Animal Arena on the Midway. Unusual sounds emanating the shipping container greeted the managers there, who were expecting the delivery of some exotic animal for their zoological display. When the Adam’s Express agent noticed that it was a human inside the crate, he sent for the Columbian Guard. Captain Jamar arrived on the scene and struck the box with a hatchet. A tiny American flag popped out of the top. Then a latched door opened and out of the box crawled a plump little man with a big mustache. He smiled and bowed at the stunned audience. Dressed in a red-and-yellow checkered suit and wearing kid gloves, the stowaway waved his flag and shouted “Hurrah for Hagenbeck’s!”

Emerging from the wooden crate, like the Greek army spilling out of their Trojan horse, was an Austrian tailor who had just travelled more than 800 miles trapped inside of it. His name was Herman* Zeitung, and this was not his first time riding in a box.

* Many sources use the spelling Hermann for his first name.

Herman Zeitung’s sense of fun

The press described him as “a good natured, jolly looking little man” and “a cheerful Christmas pudding shaped little man.” More often he was referred to—using a term common at the time, though now considered pejorative by some—as a dwarf. Accounts vary as to his actual height, with reports describing the thirty-year-old man as being anywhere from “scarcely more than four feet tall” to “barely 5 ft high,” though usually closer to the shorter measurement. He was “almost as broad as he is long,” according to one description.

“His face was very red, his straw-colored hair and mustache stuck out in the most ferocious manner,” wrote one reporter, “but as the latter adornment was about seven sizes too big for the man the effect was ludicrous.” Another commentor more kindly noted that “when once he begins to talk, you lose the sense of the physical smallness and become aware of the courage and tenacity of the man and withal of his sense of fun in describing certain terrors experienced in the journey.”

“We are obliged to charge corpse rates”

Caught on the Midway at the great Chicago fair, Mr. Zeitung tearfully explained that it was his roommate back in New York, Mr. Franz Farke, who had come up with the idea for shipping him C.O.D. to the Columbian Exposition—even promising him $10 if he made it to the railway depot undetected. In fact, the scheme was his own, and the Austrian eventually confessed to having mailed himself around Europe numerous times.

In New York on Monday, July 24, Mr. Zeitung had requested that the Adams Express Company send a wagon to pick up a box of carpets from 246 West Sixteenth Street. The shipment was consigned to a fictitious “Dr. Franz Zerre, care Columbian Exposition Company,” with $7.15 to be collected on delivery. The pyramid-shaped cargo box was en route to Chicago by Tuesday.

The train ride to the Midwest metropolis proved less than comfortable. Upon arriving at the World’s Fair, he complained bitterly “about the pertinacity with which the baggagemen on the route stood him on his head whenever they got a chance.” Adding insult to injury, the Adam’s Express agent now demanded that Mr. Zeitung pay a shipping fee of $41 (around $1,377 in today’s dollar).

“Ach, gott in Himmel (“Oh, goodness in heaven”). I have not so much,” admitted the confused Austrian who spoke little English. “I was told in New York that $7.15 would the expense cover.”

“Yes, that was the rate on carpets,” replied the agent. “Now we are obliged to charge corpse rates. $41, please.” The Admissions Department of the World’s Fair, treating the arrival instead as a living visitor, felt entitled to their entrance fee of fifty cents. Herr Zeitung carried no money.

Authorities took the alleged swindler into custody and transported him to the nearby Woodlawn Police Station. Charged with disorderly conduct, Mr. Zeitung spent the night in jail reportedly chattering to his pants. This was not the warm World’s Fair welcome that the Austrian had been expecting.

Tailor-made travel plans

Born in Warsaw in 1862 and having moved—presumably not inside of a shipping container—to Vienna in his twenties, Herman Zeitung launched his travel-by-box scheme from the Austrian capital in January 1890 (although some stories from later years set his inaugural travel date to 1889, around the time of the Exposition Universelle in Paris). Despite being an able tailor and having invented a novel mechanical method for precisely cutting ladies’ riding dresses, he found himself facing dull trade and imminent bankruptcy in Vienna. Wanting to capitalize on his clothing invention, Mr. Zeitung sought a means of getting to Paris. His meager earnings “prevented him from traveling in the style appropriate to a man of genius.” Unable to afford even a third-class rail fare, the enterprising Austrian devised a novel mode of transportation—shipping himself as express cargo sent C.O.D.

The tailor assembled a large shipping box about five-feet long, one-and-a-half-feet deep, and two-and-a-half-feet wide at the bottom but narrower at the top. While this roughly pyramid shape should have been enough to prevent the shipping box from being placed upside down, he added some labels such as “TOP” and “BOTTOM” and “HANDLE WITH CARE” for added security.

Mr. Zeitung could sit down when inside the box, which he had lined with straw. He packed some provisions of local beer, bread, and succulent sausages for the rail journey. The freight list claimed that the box contained only a 180-pound wooden statue valued at 200 francs. Finally, a trustworthy friend and former employee of his wrote the shipping instructions on the crate—”keep until called for”—and nailed it shut to secure Mr. Zeitung inside. A window having an internal lock offered his only escape.

Purgatorial pains

Aboard the Orient Express, this human cargo traveled across Austria, Bavaria, Württemberg, and Alsace into France. During the nearly sixty-hour journey Mr. Zeitung suffered “purgatorial pains.” Unable to move, get a wink of sleep, or even drink, he could only occasionally squeeze a few pieces of bread and meat into his mouth. Sometimes, when being transferred between train cars, his crate would be thrown violently on hand cars by the porters. During part of the trip, he was buried beneath a pile of boxes that “threatened to crush his ribs or smash his skull at any moment.” (One newspaper noted that this treatment by ignorant railway baggage handlers threw an interesting light on how ordinary breakables were shipped on the Orient Express.) Unable to open his window, Mr. Zeitung kept his mouth and nose close to the widest cracks in the box. Still, the lack of sufficient air became unbearable. The tailor later reported that, had he remained in his box two hours longer, he would have suffocated and that he was “nearly dead” upon reaching Paris.

Following the “indescribable torture” of the train ride, he arrived at the Eastern Railway custom house at Gare de l’Est on the morning of January 16, 1890. Now he faced the difficulty of extricating himself from his wooden prison. A custodian, startled when a box in the warehouse started to dance, immediately alerted nearby customs agents. A sneeze and cough from inside the box confirmed their suspicions about the unclaimed parcel, and they pried off the top of the crate. Out popped the little Viennese tailor.

Customs agents muttered exclamations of surprise as they watched emerge from a cargo box a “stout, under-sized man, with a brown mustache, and clothes all covered with straw, salute them in a hang-dog manner and accost them in a language they did not understand.” Mr. Zeitung, in return, remained silent as they jabbered at him in French. When a German translator arrived, Herr Zeitung was able to explain his unusual shipping arrangement as freight. The rail company insisted that the human cargo owed them forty-nine francs and eighty centimes for the cost of passenger fare. With not a cent on him, Mr. Zeitung was taken away to the Paris Central Police Station. There, he “cooly remarked in German that he did not care about the consequences of his action, as he now was in Paris.”

Besieged by Barnums

About his unorthodox mode of travel, the London Observer commented:

“Herr Zeitung appears to have made only one mistake. The suggestion that presents itself that a man of the appropriate name of ZEITUNG might reasonably have claimed accommodation with his namesakes in the newspaper train is of course no better than an idle quibble.”

Feeling some sort of kinship to a brave Teutonic tailor named Zeitung (“newspaper” in German), Le Petit Journal took pity on him and paid the shipping balance due to the Eastern Railway Company in return for getting the first interview with “L’homme Colis.” Having averted him from jail, the newspaper also found Mr. Zeitung a job ironing hats in the shop of a fellow Polish-Austrian expat on Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais. The milliner, Monsieur Silver, reportedly had difficulty holding onto his new employee, who was “literally besieged by Barnums” looking to monetize the unique traveler.

Within days of arriving in Paris, the city adopted “The Man in a Trunk” as just another “humble hero of the hour in this city of queer characters.” As his fame grew, more profitable offers tempted him out of the tailor shop. One restauranteur offered to place the tailor in his establishment for publicity purposes. The idol of Paris accepted an engagement to quietly display himself with his box at the famed Folies-Bergères music hall. (Josephine Baker caused a sensation at the same club in 1926 when dancing in a banana skirt.) There he attracted considerable crowds that would drop coins onto his silver tray as he sat in silence. He later exhibited himself for fifty-cents-a-peep at a Japanese café on the Boulevard de Sebastopol. A portrait of Herman Zeitung, set into the handles of walking sticks modeled to resemble the famous box, could be seen carried by fashionable Parisians on boulevards all around the city. Being the sensation of the hour earned him quite a bit of money, according to one report because of “Parisian curiosity always ‘catching on’ to anything out of the ordinary and paying liberally for its entertainment.”

“Kept his nose to a crack”

In October 1890, Mr. Zeitung shipped himself again, this time on a stormy four-day trip from Germany to London, where he sought more music-hall engagements. Upon arriving, he pushed the barrel of a revolver through a hole at the top of the box and fired three times, then popped his head out and cried “Hip, Hip England!”

By June 1891, the “hero of the packing case” was back in France, featured with his box at the Fête de Neuilly. In September, Herman Zeitung made the journey from Paris to Amsterdam inside a cargo box, from which he jumped out and presented a card bearing the words “Souvenir de l’Homme Colis.” He shipped himself in similar fashion to Brussels in November, popping out of his wooden prison after two days of no food or drink shouting “Vive la Belgique!” He set up shop at the Cirque Royal music hall.

In February 1892, Herr Zeitung travelled from Antwerp inside of a box set on the deck of a steamship. During the four-day trip on the stormy North Sea, he “kept his nose to a crack in the boards, ate his sandwiches and kept well.” Arriving in Christiana (now Oslo), Norway, he worked for a month at the Tivoli theater. On a cargo trip by rail to Stockholm, he revealed himself to astonished railway staff by slowly sliding his business card through a gap in his box, before settling in for a run at Stockholm’s Alhambra theater. Emil Norlander of the Alhambra wrote a song about the “small, submissive, spirited fellow.” Such friendliness did not always greet Herman Zeitung in his travels. When arriving in St. Petersburg in 1893, he was mistaken for a dangerous anarchist by Russian authorities. They planned to send him to Siberia before the Austrian consul smoothed things over.

Despite several copycat fame-chasers trying to muscle in on his schtick by mailing themselves (or creating the appearance of having done so), the little tailor-cum-showman continued to attract publicity by shipping himself around Europe. Soon Mr. Zeitung had visited all the capitals there, while expanding his choice of shipping containers to include a barrel, a trunk, a bale of hay, and even a washing machine.

A harmless crank

By the summer of 1892, Herman Zeitung made a steady living “by traveling in trunks and then exhibiting himself in variety shows.” For years he had talked up the idea of shipping himself to America in a box. At some point, he even made a wager for 1,000 German guilders with some Vienna students that he could go around the world in a box. As the greatest show on earth went up in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, the attraction of shipping himself to the 1893 World’s Fair must have become irresistible.

The Austrian’s antics, however, seemed to be wearing thin. By 1893 he was being described as either a “harmless crank” or a “peripatetic nuisance.” Hoping to regain the lucrative popularity he had experienced after his inaugural shipment to Paris, Mr. Zeitung adopted a similar C.O.D. plan for shipping himself to the World’s Fair “to recompense him for the inconvenience and discomfort of his queer trip to Chicago.”

After the narrow escape in St. Petersburg, Mr. Zeitung shipped himself back to Paris in the first leg of his long route to the Exposition. He made it next to Halifax and then to Boston before arriving in New York. There, he resided with Franz Farske at 262 Cherry Street on the tip of Manhattan and began making arrangements to mail himself to the World’s Fair.

After his ignoble arrival on the Midway on July 28, nothing more about his time at the 1893 World’s Fair seems to have been recorded. Apparently, Mr. Zeitung spent the next four months in Chicago, though. It is hard to imagine him not spending some of that time on the Midway Plaisance with his countrymen in the Austrian Village. If so, he likely would have encountered a most interesting fellow “boxer.” [More about him in Part 2 of this article.]

Bruised and battered in Philadelphia

Several weeks after the close of the World’s Fair on October 30, 1893, Mr. Zeitung was back in the news for repeating his stunt. With the assistance of several men in Chicago, he mailed himself in a box on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Bruised and battered from the two-day journey, he arrived in Philadelphia on December 11. Workmen at the Adams Express Company warehouse near Broad Street Station packed his container between a crate of pythons and a box of whisky—both intended for a local snake charmer to use during his seances! Warehouse employees heard muffled cries of “Help!” coming from inside the dry-good box. As they roughly moved the container, the contents shouted “Here, vot are you fellers doing already?” The well-dressed packing-box traveler emerged and presented his card, on which was written with many flourishes the name “Herman Zeitung.”

Despite the box having an intentionally vague label of “C.O.D. $64. Philadelphia, Pa.,” the now-infamous traveler who emerged from it confessed to years of this stowaway stunt. He aspired to make it around the world in a box, going to San Francisco, thence to China, Russia, and back home to Vienna. The Philadelphia police put a temporary halt to his plan, charging Mr. Zeitung with trespassing. He was sent to jail after not being able to post the $1200 bail, half of which covered the cost of defrauding the railroad and express companies of their fare and the other half for intent to commit a felony. The damning evidence in the later charge was the fact that the box’s sliding door opened only from the inside.

After being discharged from Moyamensing Prison on December 18, “L’homme Colis” repeated his Parisian strategy and made his way, with his famous shipping container, into the Philadelphia entertainment scene. “The Man in the Box, Herman Zeitung, the Austrian Marvel” became a featured attraction at the 9th and Arch Dime Museum, located just blocks from the train depot where he arrived days earlier. (Stealing some attention from him there was another act allegedly affiliated with the 1893 World’s Fair, twelve “Royal Court Japanese dancing beauties.” The “graceful, sensational, and artistic” act—though “thoroughly qualified to participate in the diversified features of the Midway Plaisance”—reportedly had been banned from performing at the Exposition in Chicago by the Japanese consul.)

No blood on their hands

Herman Zeitung made the papers again the next summer after being shot eight times in the chest.

Chicagoan Henry Romanna (a.k.a Romanne, Romann, or Romana) stood only eighteen feet away from the diminutive target when he unloaded his 32-calibre Winchester rifle. Mr. Zeitung didn’t move a muscle when struck. He was unharmed because of the special clothing he wore for the demonstration at Seventh Regiment Armory in New York on July 26, 1894. His flexible and one-inch-thick garment was the first bullet-proof vest ever invented, asserted Herr Zeitung. Demonstrations just days earlier had proved a competing design to be a failure. He claimed to have first invented bullet-stopping clothing—made from asphaltum, pitch, tar, and sand—in his Vienna tailor shop, years earlier. Nonetheless, history seems not to have credited Herman Zeitung as the inventor of the first bullet-proof vest. (Although he failed to injure Mr. Zeitung that day, five years later Henry Romanna was briefly a suspect in the poisoning of the daughter of a wealthy coal merchant in Chicago!)

Return to sender

After cold receptions in Chicago and Philadelphia, where he was “generally taken for a train robber,” Mr. Zeitung “finally gave up the experiment and lost the bet” to make it around the world in a box. He soon returned home to Vienna.

Herman Zeitung was back in the box in 1895, shipping himself from Vienna to Madrid. After a train ride without incident, some rough treatment of the box at the receiving station left poor Mr. Zeitung “more dead than alive.” Nonetheless, he dragged out his old story about an around-the-world wager and used the publicity to promote a local exhibition where he was on the bill. The following year, he shipped himself from Basel to Rome, a six-day trip that landed him in the hospital. His box contained his usual provisions, but also clippings from English, German, and French newspapers touting his antics over the years. What he neglected to bring with him was a single penny.

Seven years after his inaugural trip in a box, Italian authorities found the stowaway on the Lloyd steamer Iris travelling from Venice to Triesta, where he joined the program at the café chantant Excelsior in Barcola exhibiting his crate and his bullet-stopping vest. Newspaper articles about his self-mailing stunts continued until at least 1901, but increasingly were simply recycled stories about his earlier trips.

“I thought of the people who had done this sort of thing before”

Despite having essentially invented the transportation mode of “human mail” [more about this in Part 2] and possibly the first bullet-proof vest, Herman Zeitung has been nearly forgotten. A feature article on him appeared in the September 1899 issue of The Scots Magazine, and in 1941 the widely syndicated “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” newspaper series featured him popping out of his box. In addition, his name appears in two quite interesting places.

Novelist Jules Verne mentioned the World’s Fair “boxer” in his 1894 romance novel Claudius Bombarnac (published in the U.S. as The Adventures of a Special Correspondent), when the title character states:

“I was thinking of my famous packing case, of the man it contained, and this very night I had resolved to enter into communication with him. I thought of the people who had done this sort of thing before. In 1889, 1891, and 1892, an Austrian tailor, Hermann Zeitung, had come from Vienna to Paris, from Amsterdam to Brussels, from Antwerp to Christiania in a box …”

Herman Zeitung comes up again in—of all places—Sigmund Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), when the psychoanalyst writes: “I also had some dim recollection of a certain Hermann Zeitung who had set out on his travels packed in a trunk.” Recognizing that the last name Zeitung translates as “newspaper,” Freud makes a connection to a pathological ambition for fame.

Was it fame? We can only imagine what drove Herman Zeitung to mail himself to the World’s Fair in a box.

“A brave attempt to achieve greatness”

“Herman Zeitung, if he lives, will doubtless achieve something remarkable,” stated a syndicated news story in 1890. “He has ingenuity and fertility.” Upon arriving at the 1893 World’s Fair in a box, Mr. Zeitung “made a brave attempt to achieve greatness,” wrote the Chicago Tribune.

While lasting fame seems to have eluded Herman Zeitung, perhaps he contemplated the greatness of his career as human cargo in the quiet life that followed. Let’s hope the unconventional tailor from Vienna was able to live his final years outside of the box!

[Continued in Part 2 “This Side Up: The Other Man Who Mailed Himself to the Midway in a Box”]

Anyone having additional information about Herman Zeitung or whatever happened to him is encouraged to post in the comments below or email us using the “Contact Us” link in the “About Us” tab at the top of the page.

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SOURCES

“Adventures” London Observer Jan. 19, 1890, p. 4.

“Around the World in a Box” Indianapolis Journal Dec. 15, 1893, p. 3.

“Le Boite du Pensionnaire Zeitung” Le Pèlerin Feb. 1, 1890, p. 60.

“The Box Tourist at Liberty” Philadelphia Record Dec. 19, 1893, p. 8.

“Bullets Stay in Zeitung’s Vest” Chicago Tribune Jul. 27, 1894, p. 7.

“Charged Corpse Rate” Lexington (KY) Leader Aug. 3, 1893, p. 5.

“Charged Him Full Corpse Rate” Chicago Herald Jul. 29, 1893, p. 4.

“A Dwarf’s Queer Ruse” Plymouth (MI) Mail Jun. 21, 1895, p. 3.

“Early this year …” Pall Mall Gazette Oct. 14, 1890, p. 4.

“Fun at the Fair” New Orleans (LA) Times-Democrat Aug. 1, 1893, p. 10.

“He Came in as Freight” Philadelphia Times Dec. 12, 1893, p. 1.

“He Travels in a Box” Fremont (NE) Daily Herald Mar. 8, 1893, p. 3.

“Herman Zeitung …” Omaha (NE) Evening World-Herald Jun. 7, 1892, p. 3.

“Hermann Zeitung …” Pall Mall Gazette Jan. 23, 1890, p. 6.

“Hermann Zeitung …” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (London) Oct. 5, 1890, pp. 8–9.

“Hermann Zeitung, the Little Tailor in a Packing Box” Fredagen (Goteborg, Sweden) Apr. 8, 1892, p. 1.

“Hero in a Parking Case” Philadelphia Inquirer Jun. 29, 1891, p. 1.

“Is Going Around the World” Altoona (PA) Tribune Dec. 12, 1893, p. 1.

“Journey from Paris to Amsterdam in a Trunk” Guernsey (UK) Star Nov. 29, 1891, p. 1.

“Man in Box Held for Trespass” Chicago Tribune Dec. 12, 1893, p. 4.

“A Man in a Packing Case” Cardiff (UK) Western Mail Nov. 28, 1891, p. 5.

“The Man Herman Zeitung …” Railway Official Gazette Dec. 1896, p. 182.

“The Man in a Trunk” Scranton (PA) Times-Tribune Jan. 28, 1897, p. 4.

“New Bullet Proof Shield” Honolulu Advertiser Aug. 18, 1894, p. 8.

“The New Mode of Travelling by Box” The Graphic (London) Feb. 15, 1890, p. 7.

“Ninth and Arch Museum” Philadelphia Inquirer Dec. 26, 1893, p. 2.

“Open Sunday” Boston Globe Jul. 29, 1893, p. 2.

“Out of One Box into Another” Scranton (PA) Republican Dec. 14, 1893, p. 1.

“Paris Day by Day” London Daily Telegraph Feb. 19, 1890, p. 5.

“A Piece of Live Freight” Topeka (KS) Daily Capital Feb. 21, 1890, p. 6.

“Proof to Bullets” San Francisco Chronicle Jul. 27, 1894, p. 2.

“A Queer Traveler” Pittsburgh (PA) Commercial Gazette Dec. 13, 1893, p. 1.

“Queer World’s Fair Visitor” Meriden (CT) Weekly Republican Apr. 6, 1893, p. 6.

“Resisted a Big Ball” New York Evening World Jul. 27, 1894, p. 8.

“Somewhat Strange” Freeland (PA) Tribune Nov. 27, 1890, p. 2.

“Stage Gossip” Philadelphia Inquirer Dec. 17, 1893, p. 10.

“A Strange Journey” Nottingham (UK) Evening Post Sep. 26, 1891, p. 2.

“Tailor-Made Journey” Buffalo (NY) Morning Express Feb. 15, 1890, p. 3.

“This Side Up” Buffalo (NY) Commercial Mar. 17, 1890, p. 5.

“The Vienna Tailor …” Hampshire (Southhampton) Advertiser Feb. 24, 1892, p. 3.

“Vienna Tailor’s Adventure” Dorking (UK) Advertiser Feb. 8, 1890, p. 5.

“Worked the Express Company” Omaha Daily Bee Jul. 29, 1893, p. 1.

“Zeitung is Held Under $1200 Bail” Chicago Tribune Dec. 14, 1893, p. 1.

“Zeitung’s Packing Case Trip” Chicago Tribune Jul. 29, 1893, p. 2.

“Zeitung’s Railroad Trip” Philadelphia Inquirer Dec. 14, 1893, p. 7.