World's Columbian Exposition
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The World's Columbian Exposition (also called The Chicago World's Fair), a World's Fair, was held in Chicago in 1893, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the New World. Chicago bested New York City, Washington, D.C. and St. Louis, Missouri, for the honor of hosting the fair. The fair had a profound effect on architecture, the arts, Chicago's self image and American industrial optimism.
The Exposition covered more than 600 acres, featuring nearly 200 new buildings of European architecture, canals and lagoons, and people and cultures from around the world. Over 27 million people (about half the U.S. population) attended the Exposition over the six months it was open. Its scale and grandeur far exceeded the other world fairs of the time, and became a symbol of then-emerging American Exceptionalism, much in the same way that the The Great Exhibition became a symbol of Victorian era England.
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[edit] Opening ceremony
Opening ceremonies for the fair were held on October 21, 1892 but the fairgrounds were not actually opened to the public until May 1, 1893. The fair continued until October 30, 1893. In addition to recognizing the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World, the fair also served to show the world that Chicago had risen from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire, which had destroyed much of the city in 1871.
[edit] Description
The exposition was located in Jackson Park and on the Midway Plaisance on 630 acres (2.5 km²) in the neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn. Charles H. Wacker was the Director of the Fair. The layout of the fairgrounds was created by Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Beaux-Arts architecture of the buildings was under the direction of Daniel Burnham, director of Works for the fair. The Director of the American Academy in Rome, Francis David Millet, directed the painted mural decorations. Indeed, it was a coming-of-age for the arts and architecture of the "American Renaissance". Most of the buildings were based on classical architecture, and the area taken up by the fair around the Court of Honor was known as "The White City". Louis Sullivan's polychrome proto-Modern Transportation Building was an outstanding exception, as Sullivan was of the opinion that the classical style of the "White City" had set back modern American architecture by forty years.
As detailed in Erik Larson's book The Devil in the White City, it required an extraordinary effort to accomplish the exposition, and indeed much of it was unfinished when its opening day arrived. The famous Ferris Wheel, which proved to be a major attendance draw and helped save the fair from bankruptcy, was not finished until June, because of waffling by the fair's board of directors the previous year, on whether to build the structure or not. Frequent debates and disagreements among the fair's developers added many delays. The spurning of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show proved a serious financial mistake, as Buffalo Bill set up his highly popular show next door to the fair, and brought in a great deal of revenue that he was not obligated to share with the fair's developers. Ultimately, though, construction and operation of the fair proved to be a windfall for Chicago workers, during a serious economic recession that was sweeping the country at the time.
Early in July, a Wellesley College English teacher named Katharine Lee Bates was a visitor at the fair, and was rather more impressed by it than was Sullivan. In her poem (later a song) America the Beautiful, the phrase, Thine alabaster cities gleam, was inspired by the "White City".[citation needed]
Some famous visitors to the fair included Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Scott Joplin, Annie Oakley, Eadweard Muybridge, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, Henry Blake Fuller, J.P. Morgan, Henry Adams, Andrew Carnegie, W.D. Howells, Hamlin Garland, Swami Vivekananda, Helen Keller, Octave Chanute, John J. Montgomery, Nikola Tesla, and President Grover Cleveland.
Of the more than 200 buildings erected for the fair, the only two which still stand in place are the Palace of Fine Arts and the World's Congress Auxiliary Building. From the time the fair closed until 1920, the Palace of Fine Arts housed the Field Columbian Museum (now the relocated Field Museum of Natural History). In 1931 the building re-opened as the Museum of Science and Industry. The cost of construction of the World's Congress Auxiliary Building was shared with the Art Institute of Chicago, which moved into the building (the museum's current home) after the close of the fair.
The only other significant building that survived the fair is the Norway pavilion, a building now preserved at a museum called "Little Norway" in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. The full scale replica of Columbus' flagship the Santa María rotted in the Jackson Park lagoon, and is now an island.
The other buildings at the fair were all intended to be temporary. Their facades were made not of stone, but of a mixture of plaster, cement and jute fiber called "staff", which was painted white, giving the buildings their "gleam". Architecture critics derided the structures as "decorated sheds". The "White City", however, so impressed everyone who saw it (at least before air pollution began to darken the façades) that plans were considered to refinish the exteriors in marble or some other material. These plans had to be abandoned in July 1894 when much of the fair grounds was destroyed in a fire. (The fire occurred at the height of the Pullman Strike; since the strikers set other fires that very week, it is possible the fire was set by disgruntled Pullman employees.)
The fair itself ended on a shocking sour note, as popular mayor Carter Harrison, Sr. was assassinated two days before the fair's closing date. Closing ceremonies were cancelled in favor of a public memorial service. The fair's developers kidded about a controlled burning or dynamiting of the fair buildings, rather than letting them deteriorate in place, but as noted, an arsonist usurped their plans.
Jackson Park was eventually returned to its status as a public park, albeit in much better shape than its original swampy texture, and the lagoon was reshaped to give it a more natural appearance, except for the straight-line northern end where it still laps up against the steps on the south side of the Palace of Fine Arts/Museum of Science & Industry building. The Midway Plaisance, a park-like boulevard which extends west from Jackson Park, once formed the southern boundary of the University of Chicago, which was being built as the fair was closing. (The University has since developed south of the Midway.) The university's football team, the Maroons, were the original "Monsters of the Midway". The Exposition is mentioned in the university's alma mater: "The City White hath fled the earth,/But where the azure waters lie,/A nobler city hath its birth,/The City Gray that ne'er shall die."
The north side of the Museum of Science and Industry was fronted by a paved parking lot for many years. In the 1990s, an ambitious project was undertaken to build an underground garage surfaced by natural grass, thus extending the park completely around the building.
McKim, Mead and White designed the Agriculture building. Sophia Hayden designed the Women's Building.
[edit] Electricity at the fair
The International Exposition was held in a building which for the first time was devoted to electrical exhibits. It was a historical moment and the beginning of a revolution, as Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced the public to electrical power by providing alternating current to illuminate the Exposition. The general public observed firsthand the qualities and abilities of alternating current power. All the exhibits were from commercial enterprises. Thomas Edison, Brush, Western Electric, and Westinghouse had exhibits.
General Electric Company (backed by Edison and J.P. Morgan) had proposed to power the electric exhibits with direct current at the cost of one million dollars. However, Westinghouse, armed with Tesla's alternating current system, proposed to illuminate the Columbian Exposition in Chicago for half that price, and Westinghouse won the bid, using A/C current.
Tesla's high-frequency high-voltage lighting produced more efficient light with quantitatively less heat. A two-phase induction motor was driven by current from the main generators to power the system. Edison tried to prevent the use of his light bulbs in Tesla's works. Westinghouse's proposal was chosen over the less efficient (but safer) direct-current system to power the fair. General Electric banned the use of Edison's lamps in Westinghouse's plan, in retaliation for losing the bid. Westinghouse's company quickly designed a double-stopper lightbulb (sidestepping Edison's patents) and was able to light the fair.
The Westinghouse Company displayed several polyphase systems. The exhibits included a switchboard, polyphase generators, step-up transformers, transmission line, step-down transformers, commercial size induction motors and synchronous motors, and rotary direct current converters (including an operational railway motor). The working scaled system allowed the public a view of a system of polyphase power which could be transmitted over long distances, and be utilized, including the supply of direct current. Meters and other auxiliary devices were also present.
Tesla displayed his phosphorescent lighting, powered without wires by high-frequency fields. Tesla displayed the first practical phosphorescent lamps (a precursor to fluorescent lamps). Tesla's lighting inventions exposed to high-frequency currents would bring the gases to incandescence. Tesla also displayed the first neon lights. His innovations in this type of light emission were not regularly patented.
Also among the exhibits was Tesla's demonstration, most notably the "Egg of Columbus". This device explains the principles of the rotating magnetic field and his induction motor. The Egg of Columbus consisted of a polyphase field coil underneath a plate with a copper egg positioned over the top. When the sequence of coils were energized, the magnetic field arrangement inductively created a rotation on the egg and made it stand up on end (appearing to resist gravity). On August 25, Elisha Gray introduced Tesla for a delivery of a lecture on mechanical and electrical oscillators. Tesla explained his work for efficiently increasing the work at high frequency of reciprocation. As Electrical Congress members listened, Tesla delineated mechanisms which could produce oscillations of constant periods irrespective of the pressure applied and irrespective of frictional losses and loads. He continued to explain the working mean of the production of constant period electric currents (not resorting to spark gaps or breaks), and how to produce these with mechanisms which are reliable.
The successful demonstration of alternating current lighting at the Exposition dispelled doubts about the usefulness of the polyphase alternating current system developed by Westinghouse and Tesla.
[edit] Other notable attractions
The World's Columbian Exposition was the first world's fair with an area for amusements that was strictly separated from the exhibition halls. This area developed by a young music promoter, Sol Bloom, concentrated on Midway Plaisance, included carnival rides — among them the first Ferris Wheel, built by George Ferris. This wheel was 250 feet high and had 36 cars, each of which could accommodate 60 people. One of the cars carried a band which played whenever the wheel was in motion.
Nearby, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show performed. Buffalo Bill had asked to perform at the fair, but was turned down, because too many people thought he was too western, and would not fit in with the other attractions. He decided that he would come to Chicago anyway, where he set up his show just outside the very outer edge of the exposition. At the same time, historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave academic lectures reflecting on the end of the same frontier. Another popular Midway attraction was the "Street in Cairo", which included the popular exotic dancer known as Little Egypt, who introduced America to the suggestive version of the belly dance known as the "hootchy-kootchy", to a tune improvised by Bloom (and now more commonly associated with snake charmers). The Midway Plaisance introduced the term "midway" to American English, to describe a sideshow.
The Electrotachyscope of Ottomar Anschütz, which used a Geissler Tube to project the illusion of moving images was demonstrated.
Louis Comfort Tiffany made his reputation with a stunning chapel he designed and built for the Exposition. This chapel has been carefully reconstructed in recent years, and can now be seen in excellent condition at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art.
Architect Kirtland Cutter's Idaho Building, a rustic design log construction, was a popular favorite [1], visited by an estimated 18 million people. [2] The building's design and interior furnishings were a major precursor of the Arts and Crafts movement.
The John Bull, the steam locomotive that would become the oldest surviving operable steam locomotive in the world when it ran under its own power again in 1981, was also displayed. At the time of the exposition, the locomotive was only 62 years old, having been built in 1831. However, it had already by this time become notable as the first locomotive acquisition by the Smithsonian Institution. The locomotive ran under its own power from Washington, DC, to Chicago to participate, and returned to Washington under its own power again when the exposition closed.
Also on display in Chicago was an original frog switch and portion of the superstructure of the famous 1826 Granite Railway in Massachusetts, which was the first commercial railroad in the United States to evolve into a common carrier without an intervening closure. The railway brought granite stones from a rock quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts so that the Bunker Hill Monument could be erected in Boston to commemorate that important battle during the American Revolution. The frog switch is now on public view in East Milton Square, MA, on the original right-of-way of the Granite Railway.
The 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, which ran from September 11 to September 27, marked the first formal gathering of representatives of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions from around the world.
Forty-six nations participated in the fair, including Haiti, which selected Frederick Douglass to be its coordinator. The Exposition drew nearly 26 million visitors, and left a remembered vision that can be recognized even in the Emerald City of L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz and in Walt Disney's majestic theme parks Disneyland and Walt Disney World (his father Elias had been a construction worker on some of the buildings).
Norway participated with a replica of a Viking ship, a replica of the Gokstad ship, being built in Norway and sailed across the Atlantic by 92 men, led by their helmsman Magnus Andersen. In 1919 this ship was moved to the Lincoln Park Zoo, and was recently taken to Good Templar Park in Geneva, Illinois, where it awaits renovation[3].
Two days before the fair was scheduled to close, Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, Sr. was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker, Eugene Patrick Prendergast. A massive closing ceremony was planned, but was canceled due to the assassination. The closing ceremony was expected to break the record the fair had already set on Chicago Day for the most single-day attendance of a major event.
[edit] Famous firsts at the fair
- Aunt Jemima pancake mix
- Cracker Jack
- Cream of Wheat
- Quaker Oats
- Congress of Mathematicians, precursor to International Congress of Mathematicians
- Elongated coins
- The Frontier thesis was first promulgated by Frederick Jackson Turner.
- Ferris Wheel
- Juicy Fruit gum
- Shredded Wheat
- The hamburger was introduced to the United States (others say it was invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis).
- Milton Hershey bought a European exhibitor's chocolate manufacturing equipment and added chocolate products to his caramel manufacturing business.
- The United States Postal Service produced its first:
- Picture postcards.
- Commemorative stamp set.
- United States Mint offered its first commemorative coins: a quarter and half dollar.
- The term "midway" came into common use to define an area where park rides, entertainment and fast food booths are concentrated at parks and fairs, after the area of that type located on Chicago's Midway Plaisance at the World Columbian Exposition.
- There is some debate surrounding the origin of Chicago's nickname, the "windy city". Some argue it was Charles Anderson Dana of the New York Sun who coined the term in regard to the hype of the city's promoters during the considerations as to where the Exposition would be held. Other evidence, however, suggests that this term was used as early as 1881 in relation to either Chicago's "windbag" politicians or to its weather. See windy city.
- Pabst beer won a blue ribbon at the fair.
- Appearance of Bai Ganio, a famous anti-hero in Bulgarian literature (Neuberger, 2006)
[edit] Image gallery
 The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, seen from the southwest. |
 Horticultural Building, with Illinois Building in the background. |
 A view toward the Peristyle from Machinery Hall. |
 The Administration Building, seen from the Agricultural Building. |
 Midway Plaisance |
[edit] Bibliography
- Neuberger, Mary. 2006. "To Chicago and Back: Alecko Konstantinov, Rose Oil, and the Smell of Modernity" in Slavic Review, Fall 2006.
[edit] See also
- The Municipal Flag of Chicago, upon which the Fair is commemorated as the third red star.
- Pan-American Exposition
- Herman Webster Mudgett
- The Devil in the White City, a narrative history of the 1893 Exposition, intertwined with a subplot about one of America's earliest known serial killers.
- Illinois (album) by Sufjan Stevens
- Against the Day, a novel by Thomas Pynchon
- Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth a graphic novel by Chris Ware
- Wonder of the Worlds an adventure novel by Sesh Heri
[edit] Further reading
- Secondary Sources
- Appelbaum, Stanley (1980). The Chicago World's Fair of 1893. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. ISBN 0-486-23990-X
- Buel, James William. The Magic City. New York: Arno Press, 1974. ISBN 0-405-06364-4
- Burg, David F. Chicago's White City of 1893. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976. ISBN 0-8131-0140-9
- Larson, Erik. Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. New York: Crown, 2003. ISBN 0-375-72560-1.
- Reed, Christopher Robert. "All the World Is Here!" The Black Presence at White City. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-253-21535-8
- Rydell, Robert, and Carolyn Kinder Carr, eds. Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World's Fair. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993. ISBN 0-937311-02-2
- Primary Sources
- Arnold, C.D. Portfolio of Views: The World's Columbian Exposition. National Chemigraph Company, Chicago & St. Louis, 1893.
- Bancroft, Hubert Howe. The Book of the Fair: An Historical and Descriptive Presentation of the World's Science, Art and Industry, As Viewed through the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. New York: Bounty, 1894.
- Photographs of the World's Fair: an elaborate collection of photographs of the buildings, grounds and exhibits of the World's Columbian Exposition with a special description of The Famous Midway Plaisance. Chicago: Werner, 1894.
- Wells, Ida B. "The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature." Originally published 1893. Reprint ed., edited by Robert W. Rydell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. ISBN 0-252-06784-3
- Research Guides
- Bertuca, David, ed. "World's Columbian Exposition: A Centennial Bibliographic Guide". Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. ISBN 0-313-26644-1
- Dybwad, G. L., and Joy V. Bliss, "Annotated Bibliography: World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893." Book Stops Here, 1992. ISBN 0-9631612-0-2
[edit] External links
- Interactive Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition
- 1893 World's Fair
- The Exposition in American culture.
- Photographs of the 1893 Columbian Exposition
- Photographs of the 1893 Columbian Exposition from Illinois Institute of Technology
- Interactive map of Columbian Exposition
- Congress of Mathematicians
- Fabulous Imperialism!: The 1893 Columbian Exposition - a Pinky Show online video
- "Expo: Magic of the White City," a documentary about the World's Columbian Exposition narrated by Gene Wilder
| Preceded by Exposition Universelle (1889) |
World Expositions 1893 |
Succeeded by Brussels International |
