Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

(The character of Carl Denham in King Kong was cast from the mold that Hagenbeck first created.) Hagenbeck truly was an inveterate traveler, averaging more than thirty thousand miles in a year—the equivalent of ten flights across the Atlantic. In the age of trains and steamships, that was a staggering amount of time on the road. But Hagenbeck did almost none of the actual animal capture himself; instead, he ran a vertically integrated system that stretched from trappers in sub-Saharan Africa to the showrooms and expositions that Hagenbeck began establishing across Europe and the United States. Wild-animal trader has an undeniably buff ring to it as a job description, but in the end Hagenbeck’s success was largely due to his skills at supply chain management.