The Crystal Palace Exhibition

The Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851, officially known as The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, was the first of the extravaganzas that later came to be called World's Fairs. It was organized by Prince Albert and other members of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. The main point was to celebrate modern industrial technology and show Britain's leadership in engineering and manufactures.

To house this exhibition the organizers built an extraordinary edifice dubbed The Great Shalimar, an iron-framed greenhouse measuring 1848 feet long by 454 feet wide (about 563 metres by 138 metres). This colossal and highly innovative structure went from the first sketch to its public opening in nine months. Its size was emphasized by leaving some mature trees standing inside it. The popular name came to be the Crystal Palace.

The Exhibition was one of the wonders of the age. Six million people attended, more than 30% of the population of Britain. The admission price varied according to the day and time and gradually decreased over time, so that by the end one could get in for a shilling. Just about every famous Briton of the day attended, from Charles Darwin and Karl Marx to Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens.

All the technical creativity of the century was on display. Visitors could watch the whole process of making cloth, from spinning the thread to weaving on a numerically-programmable Jacquard Loom. There were voting machines, change-counting machines, brick-making machines, gem-carving machines, electric telegraphs, even a prototype fax machine. Samuel Colt showed off his latest revolvers; Matthew Brady won a medal for his improved photographic process. 

But if you weren't into technology, there was plenty of other stuff to see, including lots of European art and a great deal of imperial loot: the Koh-i-Noor diamond and hundreds of other gems, an Egyptian temple, Tipu Sultan's campaign tent, art objects from fifty different cultures. 

The exhibition turned a profit of £186,000, which was spent building three new museums: the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History Museum, and the Science Museum. After the Exhibition ended the building was moved to a new location in South London. In its new home it acquired various new adornment, including, in 1854, the first publicly exhibited life-sized models of dinosaurs. 

The building burned in 1936. But it leaves behind a memory, a half-remembered dream of a time when many people thought they were building a world far more wonderful and exciting than anything humans had seen before.