Chapter 1

Crystal Ball

The first true modern fair was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which took place in 1851 in London. Attended by 6.2 million people, its DNA has since been cloned by all world’s fairs and trade shows many times since then.

The Great Exhibition’s crown jewel was the “Crystal Palace,” whose nickname was bestowed by Punch magazine. After the committee that was formed to choose the anchor building for the fair summarily rejected the first 248 proposed designs, Sir Joseph Paxton—landscape gardener and hothouse architect—doodled a design on a piece of paper that was inspired by the gigantic leaves of the Victoria Amazonica water lily. The acceptance of Paxton’s proposal was as fast as its scale and ingenuity were unprecedented—the palace’s 1,000 iron columns and 900,000 square feet of glass were all prefabricated, its modularity allowing 2,000 workmen to install a blistering 8,000 panes of glass sheets per week, finishing it in only nine months. When it was done, it covered an area four times that of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Fables persist that the glass-and-iron exhibit hall, with 746,592 square feet of space, was so huge that management was forced to bring in hawks to control the rogue sparrow population. According to the urban legend of the time, the opportunistic sparrows flew in the Palace’s myriad entrances to scavenge the litter of free food left by its 6 million-plus visitors.

When Queen Victoria stepped onto the floor of the Crystal Palace, a vast assemblage of trumpets, organs, and a 600-voice choir singing the Hallelujah Chorus heralded her arrival in the bravura house of cast-iron and plate-glass. The monarch burned the equivalent of two full days at the expo, visiting repeatedly, marveling at advanced locks and Bowie knives, the latter of which she confided to her royal diary was an implement “made entirely for Americans, who never move without one.”

To assist stylish ladies in navigating their way to the Great Exhibition, one George Shove filed with the Office of the Registrar of Designs a prototype of a leather glove painted with a map of London landmarks. The glove was likely never mass-produced because the Crystal Palace was a North Star all of London could easily steer by. The streams of visitors who flowed into the transparent citadel goggled at 100,000 objects from over 14,000 contributors, the very copiousness suggesting an empire on which the sun never set and a true competitor never rose. The marvels included diving bells, steamships, tinned foods, folding pianos, a locomotive, and an envelope-folding machine. There was a stiletto, or “defensive,” umbrella, and an expanding hearse. Ostrich feathers competed with the jaw bones of sperm whales for attention. Jean Bernard Léon Foucault suspended a pendulum from the roof to reveal how the Earth rotated. The Koh-i-Noor diamond, a 186-carat “Mountain of Light” the British liberated from India, was displayed for all to see.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The impression the 1851 exhibition left was so deep it formed an iron template that fairs, from the G.I. Joe Convention to Expo 2017, have used without pause:

The Crystal Palace was moved and reconstructed in 1854 in the south of London and burned down in 1936. The Crystal Palace’s legacy, almost 170 years later, is that of biomimicry on par with Filippo Brunelleschi’s eggshell-inspired fifteenth-century dome in Florence, Swiss engineer George de Mestral’s burr-impersonating Velcro, and Japan’s pavilion, at Expo 2010 in Shanghai, whose flexible-membrane exterior turned the pavilion into a lavender insect of stadium size.

Not everyone somersaulted in glee over the Great Exhibition. Political conservatives fretted that the hordes of visitors would boil over into a revolutionary mob that would dismantle the monarchy instead of ogle the exhibits. They may have been right to worry. “This Crystal Palace is, in a way, like a pretty girl who is mean,” fumed Karl Marx. “The Crystal Palace is a pretty face on hard, cruel labor.”

And yet it was clear that the fair asserted England was where the future was happening. Even with 100,000 items on display, though, no attempt to sum up the human condition and its future can be comprehensive. Not exempt from this rule, the Great Exhibition had a blind spot the size of Buckingham Palace: The cognoscenti who organized the fair rejected displaying Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, the first mechanical computer, and the source of everything cybernetic today from Watson to the iPhone.

Originally recommended to be head of the exhibition’s Industrial Commission, Babbage’s nomination was vetoed by the British government, which was disillusioned after years of funding his proto-computer that was never quite built. Along with his appointment being swatted down, Babbage was also rebuffed from displaying the completed portion of his Difference Engine at the exhibition. Fuming at the snub, Babbage wrote a history of the exhibition with a pen dipped in arsenic, condemning the fair’s organizers for their smug and provincial view of science.

But the expo’s power endures no less than that of the stars themselves. From the debut of the Erector Set at the 1913 International Toy Fair to live Taser tests on attendees at the SHOT Show to Blade Runner booths at Comic-Con International, trade shows have followed the Great Exhibition’s blueprint of Barnumesque overkill, Woodstock-like crowding, and Star Trek–style optimism.