1851 — 1964
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 first world’s fair, held in Paxton’s Crystal Palace — a prefabricated cathedral of iron and glass. Opened May 1, 1851; welcomed six million visitors, a third of Britain’s population, and its profits founded the V&A, Science, and Natural History Museums.
Philadelphia · 1876
America’s first world’s fair celebrated the nation’s hundredth birthday. Opened May 10, 1876; nearly ten million came — roughly one in five Americans — to see what their young country could build.
1876
The telephone made its public debut at the fair: an unknown teacher named Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated it for the judges, and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil exclaimed, “My God — it talks!” The publicity that followed launched the telephone age.
1876
The Corliss Engine — 40 feet tall, 1,400 horsepower — ran every machine in Machinery Hall from a single boiler. Ten million Americans stood before industrial power made visible, most for the first time.
1876
Before there was a Statue of Liberty, her torch-bearing arm stood alone at the fair — visitors paid fifty cents to climb it, and the fees helped fund the pedestal she stands on today.
Paris · 1889
Paris marked the centenary of the French Revolution with the fair that built the Eiffel Tower. Opened May 6, 1889; thirty-two million visitors passed beneath the new tallest structure on Earth.
1889
Built as a temporary fair entrance and denounced by artists as an eyesore, the thousand-foot tower became the tallest structure on Earth — and the permanent symbol of Paris. It survived demolition only because it made a good radio mast.
Chicago · 1893
Chicago marked four centuries since Columbus by raising a 690-acre white city on a swamp in barely three years. Opened May 1, 1893; twenty-seven million visitors came — when the entire U.S. population was sixty-three million.
1893
Westinghouse and Tesla won the contract to light the fair with alternating current — and its flawless performance before millions effectively decided how the world’s power grids would run.
1893
Built to out-do the Eiffel Tower, George Ferris’s 264-foot revolving wheel carried 2,000 riders at once. Critics called it impossible; it carried more than a million, and every wheel turning on Earth descends from it.
1893
Nearly 100,000 lamps lit the fair each night — when almost no American home had a single bulb. Twenty-seven million people walked through an electrified city and went home understanding what was coming.
1893
The fair’s gleaming neoclassical facades launched the City Beautiful movement — the museums, libraries, and capitols of a generation carry its DNA, and L. Frank Baum is often said to have drawn on its towers for the Emerald City of Oz.
Paris · 1900
Paris greeted the new century with the largest fair yet staged — Art Nouveau palaces, a moving sidewalk, the second modern Olympics alongside. Opened April 15, 1900; forty-eight million visitors.
St. Louis · 1904
St. Louis marked the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase with the largest fair ever built — 1,200 acres, so vast its own guidebook warned a day could not do it justice. Opened April 30, 1904; nearly twenty million visitors.
1904
When an ice cream vendor ran out of dishes, a neighboring waffle stand rolled its wafers into cones — and the fair served America the ice cream cone, alongside its first iced tea and cotton candy.
San Francisco · 1915
Nine years after the earthquake, San Francisco celebrated the Panama Canal — and its own resurrection. Opened February 20, 1915; nineteen million visitors came to see a city announce, in light, that it was alive.
1915
A dozen years after Kitty Hawk, stunt fliers looped the fairgrounds nightly — Art Smith wrote in the sky with phosphorus trails. For most of nineteen million visitors, it was the first airplane they had ever seen.
1915
Henry Ford installed a working assembly line at the fair that built a Model T every ten minutes before grandstand crowds — mass production itself, exhibited as public spectacle, putting the automobile age on stage.
1915
Visitors could listen in on the brand-new transcontinental telephone line and hear the Atlantic surf from a San Francisco fairground — the moment distance audibly collapsed.
1915
Of all the dream-palaces of 1915, Maybeck’s rotunda mirrored in its lagoon was the one San Franciscans refused to let die — built to be temporary, recast in permanent concrete by public demand, and standing still.
Chicago · 1933
In the depths of the Depression, Chicago celebrated its centennial with a fair of streamlined Machine-Age optimism. Opened May 27, 1933; more than 48 million visits across two summers.
1933
Twelve full-scale model homes — steel, glass, prefabricated, air-conditioned — let millions walk through what would become the homes of tomorrow.
New York · 1939
Built on a Queens ash dump, the fair gave a nervous world a tour of the future — television, nylon, robots, highways. Opened April 30, 1939, with Einstein and FDR presiding; forty-five million visits across two seasons.
1939
As the fair’s official Science Advisor, Einstein opened it with a speech on cosmic rays — then ten captured rays, relayed from the Hayden Planetarium, switched on the fairground lights. Science itself was the opening act.
1939
Westinghouse’s seven-foot Elektro walked, counted on its fingers, and spoke 700 words — while Bell Labs’ Voder, the first electronic speech synthesizer, talked in the next pavilion. The public met the machine future face to face.
1939
GM’s Futurama flew five million visitors over a model America of 1960, its highways imagined twenty years early — a ride so persuasive it helped build public support for the Interstate Highway System.
1939
RCA chose the fair to introduce television to the American public, and FDR’s opening address became the first presidential speech ever televised — broadcasting’s future, premiered at a fair.
Seattle · 1962
The first space-age world’s fair, staged at the height of the space race months after John Glenn orbited the Earth. Opened April 21, 1962; ten million visitors rode a monorail into the future.
1962
Seattle built a working Alweg monorail in under a year to carry fairgoers downtown — it still runs today, the fair’s vision of urban transit in daily service six decades on.
1962
NASA’s pavilion put spacecraft and satellites before ten million visitors months after John Glenn orbited the Earth — the space program’s first great public showcase, building the constituency that paid for the Moon.
New York · 1964
“Peace Through Understanding,” told through the 12-story steel Unisphere. Opened April 22, 1964; fifty-one million visits across two seasons — the fair where Disney, Ford, IBM, and NASA showed America what came next.
1964
Walt Disney used the fair as his proving ground — It’s a Small World, the Carousel of Progress, and his audio-animatronic Lincoln debuted here before moving to Disneyland, and the fair’s city-of-tomorrow thinking seeded EPCOT.
1964
Inside Saarinen’s egg-shaped pavilion, Charles and Ray Eames staged “Think” — a nine-screen spectacle teaching millions how computers reason. The information age held its open house at a fair.
1964
Ford unveiled the Mustang to the world 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.