Today, we visit the Paris exhibition of 1889. 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 1889 Paris Exhibition
gave us the Eiffel Tower. Today we've forgotten a
much larger structure that was spread out below the
Eiffel Tower -- a building called the Gallery of
Machines.
In the early 1800s, France's technology lagged far
behind England's. But she'd gained ground since
then. By 1900, 13 other world fairs had followed
London's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. These
fairs, each grander than the last, were major
declarations of material progress. France hurled
herself into that game. Five of those thirteen
exhibits were put on in Paris.
Iron and steel were the specie of the 1889 exhibit.
The Eiffel Tower was the great symbol of it all,
but the content was to be found in the Gallery of
Machines. The Gallery had the largest open floor
area of any building ever made. It was a quarter
mile long and 460 feet wide. The three-hinged
arches that shaped it were the latest structural
innovation. Each one was formed of two huge iron
half-arches, hinged at the ground and hinged where
they met in the center, 143 feet above the floor.
Into this great building was poured the new heavy
power technology of the late 19th century: engines,
dynamos, transformers. It was all lit by the new
electric lights, now only seven years old. Huge
traveling walkways carried passengers overhead so
they could gaze down on all this. A 13-year-old boy
told about the ride, many years later:
I remember very clearly the hallucinatory [ride]
through the brightness of the nave above whirlpools
of reptilian belts, creakings, whistles, sirens,
and black caverns containing circles, pyramids, and
cubes.
The president of France in 1889 was Sadi
Carnot, Jr. His father was the Sadi Carnot who gave
us the second law of thermodynamics -- the scientific
law that limits how much power a machine will
produce. Before he became president, the younger
Carnot had been one of the planners of the
exhibition.
But if natural law limited power production, you
were not to learn about that in the Gallery of
Machines. You were here to see a modern world being
forged out of iron and smoke. The Gallery was
further expanded for the 1900 Paris Exhibition. It
was there that Henry Adams was moved to write his
famous essay on modern technology, The Dynamo
and the Virgin.
The Gallery finally came down in 1910 to make room
for other things. By then the three-hinged arch was
being used in the huge railway stations and
airplane hangars of the 20th century. Today, only
the Eiffel Tower remains as the symbol of modern
France. But it was the engines going forth from
that now-forgotten Gallery that helped to create
modern France.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
