PREFACE
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Alongside this fantastic speculation were displays of technological inno-
vations that would shape everyday life in the twentieth century. Nylon, 3D
movies and fluorescent light were all introduced at the Fair. Inside the
Carrier Corporation’s ‘Eskimo Igloo of Tomorrow’ many visitors had their
first experience of air conditioning. The Westinghouse pavilion, in addition
to their regular demonstrations of ‘Electro the Motor Man’, featured compe-
titions between ‘Ms. Drudge’ who washed dishes by hand the old-fashioned
way and ‘Ms. Modern’ who used the new modern convenience of the wash-
ing machine. President Franklin Roosevelt’s opening address was the first
mass event to be broadcast on television. ‘The eyes of the United States,’ he
told the world, ‘are fixed on the future.’
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This celebration of the future was intrinsic to the spirit of the Fair, which,
since its inception with the Great Exhibition of 1851 had always been a
festival of global modernity. In the beginning, at the end of the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, World Expositions were massive, momentous
events. In an era before television they were the most important of global
spectacles by far. The Exhibitions far overshadowed the Olympics, for
example, and in fact, both at the turn of the century in Paris and in St Louis
in 1904, the Olympics were just an auxiliary performance to the World Fair.
The Fair began as a giant trade show, initially designed to celebrate the
modern wonders of the world. Many of the greatest technological achieve-
ments including the steam engine, the elevator, the typewriter, telephones,
films and robots were first exhibited at Expo. Charlotte Bronte, after visiting
the Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, expressed
the widespread awe that visitors experienced:
Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things.
Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments
filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splen-
did carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and
velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and sil-
versmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth
hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a
bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could
have gathered this mass of wealth from the ends of the earth—as if none but super-
natural hands could have arranged it thus, with such a blaze and contrast of colours
and marvellous power of effect.
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For cities like London, Paris and New York, playing host to these events,
commonly considered the timekeepers of progress, was a crucial contribu-
tion as well as a pivotal rite of passage to their status as global cities.