One day in 1876, on a flag-draped platform in Philadelphia, a white-bearded man in plug hat and frock coat stood towering over President Ulysses S. Grant. The visitor was Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, who had come north on the British liner Hevelius for the U.S.'s centennial exposition. When a technician explained to him that the newly invented Corliss steam engine in Machinery Hall made some 36 revolutions a minute, Dom Pedro cracked: "That is better than our Latin American republics!"
Americans liked the kindly, unassuming intellectual who was Brazil's Emperor...
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