1876
The Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone at the fair as an unknown schoolteacher. Brazil’s emperor tried it and shouted, “My God, it talks!”
1851 — 1964
A brief history of the future
For about a century, the world’s great cities took turns building a temporary city to show everyone what was coming next. These are some of the things people saw there first.
London · 1851
The Great Exhibition
The first world’s fair, held inside a massive iron-and-glass hall in London’s Hyde Park. Six million people visited, and the profits paid for three museums that still stand.
Philadelphia · 1876
The Centennial Exhibition
America’s first world’s fair, held in Philadelphia for the country’s hundredth birthday. Nearly ten million people came, about one in five Americans at the time.
1876
Steam Power
The Corliss Engine stood 40 feet tall and powered every machine in Machinery Hall from a single boiler. For most of the ten million visitors, it was their first look at industrial power on this scale.
1876
The Statue of Liberty’s Arm
Before the Statue of Liberty existed, her torch-bearing arm stood alone at the fair. Visitors paid fifty cents to climb it, and the fees helped fund the pedestal.
Paris · 1889
Exposition Universelle
Paris marked a hundred years since the French Revolution with the fair that built the Eiffel Tower. Thirty-two million people visited.
1889
The Eiffel Tower
Built as a temporary entrance to the 1889 fair and widely hated by Parisian artists. It survived demolition only because it made a useful radio antenna.
Chicago · 1893
World's Columbian Exposition
Chicago built a 690-acre white city on a swamp in under three years. Twenty-seven million people visited, nearly half the U.S. population at the time.
1893
Alternating Current
Westinghouse and Tesla lit the entire fair with alternating current. Its flawless run before millions of visitors settled the question of how power grids would work.
1893
The Ferris Wheel
George Ferris built a 264-foot revolving wheel to rival the Eiffel Tower. It carried 2,000 riders at a time and more than a million over the course of the fair.
1893
Electric Light
Nearly 100,000 lamps lit the fairgrounds each night, at a time when almost no American home had a single electric bulb. Twenty-seven million people walked through an electrically lit city and went home to kerosene lamps.
1893
The City Beautiful
The fair’s gleaming neoclassical buildings launched the City Beautiful movement in American architecture. L. Frank Baum is often said to have based the Emerald City of Oz on what he saw here.
Paris · 1900
Exposition Universelle
Paris opened the new century with its largest fair yet: Art Nouveau buildings, a moving sidewalk, and the second modern Olympics. Forty-eight million people visited.
St. Louis · 1904
Louisiana Purchase Exposition
St. Louis built the largest fair yet for the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. It covered 1,200 acres, and its own guidebook warned that a single day wasn’t enough.
1904
The Ice Cream Cone
When an ice cream vendor ran out of dishes, a neighboring waffle stand rolled its wafers into cones. The fair also gave America its first iced tea and cotton candy.
San Francisco · 1915
Panama-Pacific International Exposition
Nine years after the earthquake, San Francisco hosted a fair to celebrate the Panama Canal and its own rebuilding. Nineteen million people came.
1915
Flight, Nightly
Stunt pilots looped over the fairgrounds each night, a dozen years after Kitty Hawk. For most of the nineteen million visitors, it was the first airplane they had ever seen.
1915
The Assembly Line
Henry Ford set up a working assembly line at the fair that finished a new Model T every ten minutes in front of grandstand crowds.
1915
A Voice Across the Continent
Visitors picked up a telephone at the San Francisco fairgrounds and heard the Atlantic Ocean surf through the new transcontinental line.
1915
The Palace of Fine Arts
Bernard Maybeck’s rotunda, reflected in its lagoon, was built as a temporary structure. San Franciscans refused to let it go, and it was later rebuilt in permanent concrete.
Chicago · 1933
A Century of Progress
Chicago held a fair in the middle of the Depression to celebrate its hundredth birthday. More than 48 million visits across two summers.
1933
The Home of Tomorrow
Twelve full-scale model homes in steel, glass, and prefabricated parts let millions of visitors walk through air-conditioned rooms for the first time.
New York · 1939
The World of Tomorrow
Built on a Queens ash dump, the 1939 fair introduced Americans to television, nylon, robots, and highways. Einstein and FDR opened it together, and forty-five million visits followed.
1939
Einstein Opens the Fair
Einstein served as the fair’s Science Advisor and opened it with a speech on cosmic rays. Ten captured rays, relayed from the Hayden Planetarium, switched on the fairground lights.
1939
The Robot
Westinghouse’s seven-foot robot Elektro could walk, count on its fingers, and speak 700 words. In the next pavilion, Bell Labs showed the Voder, the first electronic speech synthesizer.
1939
The Highway System
GM’s Futurama ride flew five million visitors over a detailed model of 1960 America, complete with superhighways. The exhibit helped build public support for the Interstate system.
1939
Television
RCA chose the fair to show television to the American public for the first time. FDR’s opening-day address became the first presidential speech ever televised.
Seattle · 1962
Century 21 Exposition
Seattle’s fair opened months after John Glenn orbited the Earth. Ten million visitors rode a new monorail past the Space Needle.
1962
The Monorail
Seattle built a working monorail in under a year to carry fairgoers downtown, and it still runs today.
1962
The Space Program
NASA’s pavilion put real spacecraft and satellites in front of ten million visitors, months after Glenn’s orbit. It was the space program’s first big public showcase.
New York · 1964
New York World's Fair
The fair’s centerpiece was a twelve-story steel globe called the Unisphere. Disney, Ford, IBM, and NASA all had pavilions, and fifty-one million people visited across two seasons.
1964
Walt Disney's City of Tomorrow
Disney used the fair as a testing ground. It’s a Small World, the Carousel of Progress, and an audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln all debuted here before moving to Disneyland.
1964
The Computer, Explained
Inside Eero Saarinen’s egg-shaped IBM pavilion, Charles and Ray Eames staged a nine-screen show called “Think” that taught millions of people how computers work.
1964
The Mustang
Ford unveiled the Mustang at the fair on April 17, 1964. Visitors rode Disney’s Magic Skyway in the new convertibles, and four hundred thousand sold in the first year.