Today, America celebrates her coming of age. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The 1893 Chicago Columbian
Exposition was America's fourth major world's fair
(depending on just how one counts.) We were young
and strong -- at peace and feeling our oats. It was
time to honor four centuries since Columbus's
voyage.
England had begun the cycle of world's fairs with
her Crystal Palace in 1851. In 1876 we celebrated
our first hundred years as a nation with the
Philadelphia Fair. That one drew the largest gate
up to that time -- eight million people. But the
1889 Paris exhibition, with the Eiffel Tower as its
centerpiece, attracted 32 million. World fairs had
turned into a very big deal.
Now it was our turn to create the "fair to end all
fairs." Congress backed the idea and American
cities vied for the honor. In 1890, Congress
anointed Chicago as the city with the best rail
access, the most space, and the will to do the job.
The organizers went to landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of New York's
Central Park. He picked a swampy 600-acre tract
along Lake Michigan and set about to create a
system of canals and lagoons -- a midwestern
Venice.
The budget was around half a billion in today's
dollars. Add the exhibit money spent by 65,000
private, national, and international groups, and
the 1893 fair was a vast enterprise. Architects,
sculptors, and steelworkers converged on it. The
original Ferris wheel, whose size has yet to be
matched, rose alongside it.
Yet the old photos don't show the coming 20th
century. The architecture still looks like imperial
Europe. The electrical hall is filled with
telegraphs and telephones, electric railways,
elevators, and lighting. But there's no hint of
radio -- no realization that small portable
electric motors will soon change the American home
and workplace. The transportation building displays
bicycles, railways and steamships, but no
automobiles. The most popular exhibit is a display
of farm windmills. The fair summarizes our
condition in 1893. It doesn't predict the future.
The one real glimpse of the 20th century is almost
accidental. The women's building was designed by
21-year-old MIT graduate Sophia Hayden. It's filled
with women's accomplishments in science, health
care, literature, invention, and art. This exhibit
started out to showcase the women's clubs of
America. But it emerges instead as the very heart
of the now-unstoppable suffrage movement.
The fair drew 21 million people to the then-distant
city of Chicago. By displaying the diverse forces
that'd made us, it drew us together and helped
shape a national identity. It reminded us of what
we wanted to be. No wonder poet Katherine Lee Bates
visited the fair and then went home to write
America the Beautiful. The startling
thing about that was her phrase, "Thine alabaster
cities gleam." For that line described the
pavilions of the fair -- far more accurately than
any existing American city!
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Bolotin, N., and Laing, C., The Chicago World's
Fair of 1893: The World's Columbian
Exposition. Washington, DC: The Preservation
Press, 1992.
Website http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/WCE/title.html.
I am grateful to Tom McConn for providing the
source for this episode and for his ideas on how to
tell the story.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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