World's Fairs

In 1851, Prince Albert started a trend when he instigated an exposition of technological and artistic accomplishments. The Great Exhibition was housed in a vast Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London.

It proved highly successful and New York followed in 1853 with the first of many world's fairs. It was a smaller version of the London 1851 building. Included in the Exhibition was a demonstration of the safety of passenger elevator by Elisha Graves Otis. It burned down in 1858.

This extract from Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian (1816 - 1860):

"Though the Crystal Palace of New York proved directly abortive, yet, strange as it may now seem, it did indirectly prove of benefit in stimulating the northward growth of New York much in the same manner as General Grant's funeral and burial­place aided in these days the development of the "West Side," by bringing millions of people to observe its advantages. Just in this fashion the Crystal Palace served the New York of forty years ago. Great crowds of visitors were attracted by it to what then was a remote, outward part of the city, and not only observed the opportunities for building, etc., there presented, but more important still, became familiarized with the notion of the mere possibility and practicability of travelling so far as Forty­second Street. In this way the World's Fair accelerated the uptown movement and added to the value of all land lying upon and about Murray Hill."

1867, two years after the US Civil war, was the year of Das Kapital, Little Women and the Blue Danube waltz. Ten million visitors attended the Paris International, the first exposition with prefabricated temporary buildings. For the first time each nation had their own pavilion. Oriental art was a theme at the exposition.