Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, withdraw money from an ATM, lick an ice-cream cone, switch on a computer, ride an escalator, play a DVR, watch a movie about dinosaurs, or pop a tranquilizer, you’re doing something that originated or was popularized at a trade fair or world’s fair.
In fact, each new technology and every novel product that rocked America and rolled the world, from the Colt revolver and the Corvette to fax machines and flush toilets, started at trade fairs, a $100 billion industry that includes world expos, trade shows, and state fairs.
To many, they’re as invisible as the oxygen in the air around us. But like an atmosphere, they surround and fill and permeate everything you know without you knowing it. More than just promoting material things, however, trade fairs evangelized every social movement and cultural concept, too, including Manifest Destiny, the closing of the frontier, Nazism, Fascism, eugenics, female suffrage, nudism, temperance, and technocracy. For every product and each dogma that blasted into mass popularity, its launch pad was a trade fair.
For hundreds of years, trade shows were as boring as the livestock, cloth, or herring they displayed on a rickety table or a reeking donkey cart. One of the earliest—if not the earliest—recorded mentions of trade shows is in the King James version of the Bible, specifically Ezekiel 27:27, which dates back to around the sixth century BCE (“Thy riches and thy fairs, thy merchandise . . .”). Archaeological traces go back just as long: King Herod constructed a 3,200-square-foot exhibit hall near Jerusalem.
Things perked up in the twelfth century when the Crusades, needing infusions of money, tapped newly created town governments to fund their furious expeditions to the Holy Land. The Crusades’ ROI of silks, spices, and other goods fueled an increasing demand for these products, which businessmen in the fledgling governments supplied by setting up local marketplaces. With guarantees of safe passage from cooperating—and sometimes even warring—royalty, these medieval merchants traveled along a trajectory of French cities that included Provins, Lagny, and Troyes to show their wares in the marketplaces at outdoor fairs.
This fair system rapidly expanded to Ireland (at the Donnybrook Fair, exhibitors and attendees brawled so fiercely that the show became a byword for a fest of flying fists), Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, where the shows convened, usually annually, near churches, and often on religious occasions, which guaranteed a ready-made audience. There the shows absorbed the Teutonic words for “fair” which comes from the Latin word “feria,” meaning a religious festival, and “messe,” which refers to the Latin term “Missa,” for religious services (which the Germans still use to name their trade shows). At these messe, merchants swapped or sold goods and even hired out servants. Fairs often specialized in one particular type of merchandise such as cloth, horses, or cattle, much as the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) focuses on electronics and the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show emphasizes homeware, centuries later.
It was a model that worked until it didn’t. By the nineteenth century, industrialization had created an ever-expanding circle of markets whose material wants demanded satisfaction. It also saw the rise of B2B—businessmen began trekking to trade fairs not just to sell to consumers but also to offer samples to other businessmen, who came from faraway markets not by horse but by continent-traveling train and ocean-crossing ships. Show sponsorship passed from civil authorities to private ventures. The ability to mass-produce products put more emphasis on exhibiting “new and improved” goods, which in turn forced exhibitors to find new ways of displaying and demonstrating those very goods. To draw more customers, the shows attracted more exhibitors, who needed more time to hawk more products . . . to draw more customers.
The old system passed into history in 1851 at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations that ran in London from May to October. The first of the world’s fairs, it was conceived by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and its crown jewel was the Crystal Palace. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, the glass-and-iron exhibit hall ran over a third of a mile long and stretched more than one-and-a-third football fields wide, with a ceiling two-and-a-half times as high as the one in Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. From that moment on, world’s fairs became temporary fulcrums on which, for a few months at a time, the world teetered. Countries and cities alike used them as debutante parties to announce their arrival as superpowers or to vindicate their persistence as empires. For fairgoers, from London in 1851 to Shanghai in 2010, it was the political version of seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium. Each of those expos was an alpha-male display of its host city’s cultural muscle and sponsoring country’s economic potency. Each offered a vision of the future that was always deeply seductive and sometimes dangerously skewed. In all cases, the backing city and sponsoring country became masters of all they surveyed. They sold the gateway drug of products and technologies—phonographs, elevators, movies, TVs, PCs, ad infinitum—that would quickly go from being exclusive to being commonplace. The world’s fairs became a master plan, a mega-blueprint followed by every subsequent world’s fair and trade show.
From the New York Public Library
It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes—or even Inspector Clouseau—to deduce why countries and companies chose these fairs to debut new wares and novel ideas. The reason was simple math: Millions of attendees meant millions in sales or millions of followers. Before television and the Internet could introduce products to the masses in one fell swoop, trade fairs constituted the greatest concentration of consumers in one space at any one time. Indeed, the ten million attendees at Philadelphia’s International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine (aka Centennial International Exhibition) in 1876 represented almost 20 percent of the total population of the United States.
Additionally, the twenty-seven million who showed up for Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 were the equivalent of about 43 percent of the country’s head count. At the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, forty-five million attended, equaling nearly 34 percent of the country’s residents. Expo ’67 in Montreal drew fifty million—2.5 times Canada’s entire population. Even in this century, with a slew of ADD-inducing diversions, entertainments, and brand experiences, fairs are still people magnets: Expo 2010 in Shanghai drew nearly seventy-five million visitors, and Expo 2015 in Milan attracted more than twenty million.
Similarly, the 13,000-plus trade shows in North America account for more than 107 million attendees. If those shows’ visitors formed a country, they’d constitute the 12th-most-populated one in the world, larger than Germany, Turkey, or the Philippines. Quantity has its own quality, and the magnitude of audiences at fairs of all stripes means ideas and products can reach tipping points that would straighten Malcolm Gladwell’s hair: The perennial children’s favorite, Barbie; the everyday staple, Miracle Whip; the pioneering tranquilizer, Miltown; the trailblazing sports car, Corvette; the first sugar substitute, Sucaryl; the groundbreaking Nintendo 64 video-game console. Saying these examples represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the universe of fairs is like Marie Antoinette mentioning the guillotine stung a bit. All of this only captures a sliver of the whole mosaic of fairs and trade shows, past and present, that I have seen writing for Exhibitor magazine—a mosaic that can make the glitziest Las Vegas spectacle look like an Amish barn-raising.
Take Zebracon, for example. Named for the call sign of Starsky and Hutch’s police car, not the striped ungulate, this show drew in people who wrote “slash” fiction, which imagines romantic pairings between famous duos in popular culture, such as the two cops, or Kirk and Spock of Star Trek fame. With a higher hemoglobin count than an episode of Dexter, the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts Conference brings together the world’s leading experts in “CSI”-type science who learn how to solve crimes through the splatter left behind. If money makes the world go ’round, it was spinning like a wind turbine at the Moscow Millionaire Fair, where attendees buy car wheels glittered with Swarovski crystals, cell phones dressed up in diamonds and gold, and mattress sets made of silk, cashmere, and gold thread. With more latex than a surgical-glove factory, the annual Fetish Con for alternative passions has featured exhibitors such as Canes4Pain.com, and educational sessions that included Pony Play Fun & Games. At BodyHacking Con, “You are not an inkjet printer” was the title of a keynote address, and its fashion show opened with an interpretive dance by a cyborg who senses earthquakes through an implant in her arm. The highlight of one of the China Reproductive Health New Technologies & Products Expos was a fashion show, where models sashayed through clouds of floating soap bubbles clad in wedding gowns, bikinis, hats, and evening wear, all made entirely of prophylactics.
For every niche imaginable, from fishing to finance, drones to data, mining to museums, insurance to the Internet, there is a trade show that fills it. And the shows’ names are often bacon bits in the salad bowl of marketing: PAINWeek . . . World Championships of Hairdressing . . . Mock Prison Riot . . . Paris Cookbook Fair . . . International Clown Convention . . . Dude Ranchers Association Convention . . . Rubber Doll World . . . National Single Cougars Convention . . . Gaylaxicon . . . Wrath of Con . . . TarotCon … Society of Professional Obituary Writers Convention.
The stories I tell here are just a few carets on a diamond the size of the Crystal Palace.
They are part of a vast prism of exhibitions through which passes the light of every belief, idea, product, and service that has touched people in the last 175 years. If you want to know where the future goes to be seen, look here.