A Companion to Popular Culture by Burns Gary;

Author:Burns, Gary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2016-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

The first world’s fair, sponsored by Britain’s Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, occurred in London in 1851 with the Crystal Palace Exhibition and grew into an international phenomenon featuring international trade, innovation, and technology. Inspired by the 1844 French Exposition in Paris, the Crystal Palace Exhibition spawned interest in fairs that promoted manufactured goods on both sides of the Atlantic. London hosted another fair in 1862, Paris in 1855, 1867, 1878, and 1900, and Vienna in 1873. In 1853 New York publisher Horace Greeley and circus entertainer P.T. Barnum began producing their own extravaganza, only to have it shut down during altercations that eventually led to the Civil War. Although the war stalled world’s fairs in America, after it ended the tradition flourished, with America hosting twelve world’s fairs between Reconstruction and World War I (1876–1916), reflecting the modernization of the nation and its identity in the world marketplace. The first of these, the successful Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876, chose as its theme “the arts, manufactures, and products of soil and mine” (Nye 64) and introduced the telephone, typewriter, and air brakes. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, world’s fairs continued to exert influence on people’s lives, ideas, and images of themselves, as well as on the development of a diversity of popular entertainments, such as circuses, carnivals, and amusement parks, notably America’s first, Coney Island in New York (Rydell 1).

In a time before television, world’s fairs were heralded as great events. The World Columbian Exposition is a case in point. On Columbus Day 1892, grounds were dedicated in Chicago for the grand exhibition, which was a celebration of the discovery of the New World and, more importantly, four hundred years of progress. The upcoming fair was touted as “one of the glories of the nineteenth century” (Butterworth 783). In its anticipation, Hon. Benjamin Butterworth wrote, “In scope and plan it will be more elaborate, and in architectural design and beauty or ornamentation it will far surpass any previous exhibition” (781). Its theme was electricity. Five hundred thousand spectators looked on as President Grover Cleveland “pressed the electric button which set in motion miles of shafting, the innumerable engines and machines, and the labyrinth of belting and gearing which made up the machinery of the World’s Columbian Exposition” (Northrop 901). With white buildings magically aglow with thousands of lights, Chicago was dubbed “The White City,” and its adjoining fair delighted its audience with early Eadweard Muybridge photographs, exact replicas of Christopher Columbus’s Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, a U.S. Naval Department model of a full-sized battleship “equipped with guns, turrets, torpedo-tubes and nets, boats, anchors, cables, etc. and all the fittings of actual service” (Butterworth 817), three observation towers, a moving sidewalk, an elevated railway, the Machinery Hall housing the latest technological devices, the Electric Building paying tribute to Edison’s inventions and their many uses, and a grand fireworks display. Most striking, however, was a new invention designed by George Washington Gale Ferris to rival the 1878 Paris Exposition’s main attraction, the Eiffel Tower.

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