| 1893Chicago | |
|---|---|
 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition andThe Republic statue and administration building in 1893 | |
| Overview | |
| BIE-class | Universal exposition |
| Category | Historical Expo |
| Name | World's Columbian Exposition |
| Area | 690 acres (280 hectares) |
| Visitors | 27,300,000 |
| Participant(s) | |
| Countries | 46 |
| Location | |
| Country | United States |
| City | Chicago |
| Venue | Jackson Park andMidway Plaisance inChicago |
| Coordinates | 41°47′24″N87°34′48″W / 41.79000°N 87.58000°W /41.79000; -87.58000 |
| Timeline | |
| Bidding | 1882 |
| Awarded | 1890 |
| Opening | May 1, 1893; 132 years ago (1893-05-01) |
| Closure | October 30, 1893 (1893-10-30) |
| Universal expositions | |
| Previous | Exposition Universelle (1889) inParis |
| Next | Brussels International (1897) inBrussels |
TheWorld's Columbian Exposition, also known as theChicago World's Fair, was aworld's fair held inChicago from May 5 to October 31, 1893, to celebrate the 400th anniversary ofChristopher Columbus's arrival in theNew World in 1492.[1] The centerpiece of the Fair, held inJackson Park, was a large water pool representing the voyage that Columbus took to the New World. Chicago won the right to host the fair over several competing cities, includingNew York City,Washington, D.C., andSt. Louis. The exposition was an influential social and cultural event and had a profound effect on Americanarchitecture, the arts, American industrial optimism, and Chicago's image.
The layout of the Chicago Columbian Exposition was predominantly designed byJohn Wellborn Root,Daniel Burnham,Frederick Law Olmsted, andCharles B. Atwood.[2][3] It was the prototype of what Burnham and his colleagues thought a city should be. It was designed to followBeaux-Arts principles of design, namelyneoclassical architecture principles based on symmetry, balance, and splendor. The color of the material generally used to cover the buildings' façades, whitestaff, gave the fairgrounds its nickname, the White City. Many prominent architects designed its 14 "great buildings". Artists and musicians were featured in exhibits and many also made depictions and works of art inspired by the exposition.
The exposition covered 690 acres (2.8 km2), featuring nearly 200 new but temporary buildings of predominantly neoclassical architecture,canals andlagoons, and people and cultures from 46 countries.[1] More than 27 million people attended the exposition during its six-month run. Its scale and grandeur far exceeded the otherworld's fairs, and it became a symbol of emergingAmerican exceptionalism, much in the same way that theGreat Exhibition became a symbol of theVictorian era United Kingdom.
Dedication ceremonies for the fair were held on October 21, 1892, but the fairgrounds were not 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 served to show the world that Chicago had risen from the ashes of theGreat Chicago Fire, which had destroyed much of the city in 1871.[1]
On October 9, 1893, the day designated as Chicago Day, the fair set a world record for outdoor event attendance, drawing 751,026 people. The debt for the fair was soon paid off with a check for $1.5 million (equivalent to $52.5 million in 2024).[4] Chicago has commemorated the fair with one of the stars on itsmunicipal flag.[5]
Many prominent civic, professional, and commercial leaders from around the United States helped finance, coordinate, and manage the Fair, including Chicago shoe company owner Charles H. Schwab,[6] Chicago railroad and manufacturing magnateJohn Whitfield Bunn, and Connecticut banking, insurance, and iron products magnateMilo Barnum Richardson, among many others.[7][8]
The fair was planned in the early 1890s during theGilded Age of rapid industrial growth, immigration, and class tension. World's fairs, such as London's 1851Crystal Palace Exhibition, had been successful in Europe as a way to bring together societies fragmented along class lines.
The first American attempt at aworld's fair in Philadelphia in 1876 drew crowds, but was a financial failure. Nonetheless, ideas about distinguishing the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing started in the late 1880s. Civic leaders in St. Louis, New York City, Washington DC, and Chicago expressed interest in hosting a fair to generate profits, boost real estate values, and promote their cities. Congress was called on to decide the location. New York financiersJ. P. Morgan,Cornelius Vanderbilt, andWilliam Waldorf Astor, among others, pledged $15 million to finance the fair if Congress awarded it to New York, while ChicagoansCharles T. Yerkes,Marshall Field,Philip Armour,Gustavus Swift, andCyrus McCormick, Jr., offered to finance a Chicago fair. What finally persuaded Congress was Chicago bankerLyman Gage, who raised several million additional dollars in a 24-hour period, over and above New York's final offer.[9]
Chicago representatives not only fought for the world's fair for monetary reasons, but also for reasons of practicality. In a Senate hearing held in January 1890, representativeThomas Barbour Bryan argued that the most important qualities for a world's fair were "abundant supplies of good air and pure water", "ample space, accommodations and transportation for all exhibits and visitors". He argued that New York had too many obstructions, and Chicago would be able to use large amounts of land around the city where there was "not a house to buy and not a rock to blast" and that it would be located so that "the artisan and the farmer and the shopkeeper and the man of humble means" would be able to easily access the fair. Bryan continued to say that the fair was of "vital interest" to the West, and that the West wanted the location to be Chicago. The city spokesmen would continue to stress the essentials of a successful exposition and that only Chicago was fit to fill these exposition requirements.[10]
The location of the fair was decided through several rounds of voting by the United States House of Representatives. The first ballot showed Chicago with a large lead over New York, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., but short of a majority. Chicago broke the 154-vote majority threshold on the eighth ballot, receiving 157 votes to New York's 107.[11]
The exposition corporation and national exposition commission settled onJackson Park and an area around it as the fair site.Daniel H. Burnham was selected as director of works, andGeorge R. Davis as director-general. Burnham emphasized architecture and sculpture as central to the fair and assembled the period's top talent to design the buildings and grounds includingFrederick Law Olmsted for the grounds.[1] The temporary buildings were designed in an ornateneoclassical style and painted white, resulting in the fair site being referred to as the "White City".[9]
The Exposition's offices set up shop in the upper floors of theRand McNally Building on Adams Street, the world's first all-steel-framed skyscraper. Davis' team organized the exhibits with the help ofG. Brown Goode of theSmithsonian. The Midway was inspired by the1889 Paris Universal Exposition, which included ethnological "villages".[12]
Civil rights leaders protested the refusal to include an African American exhibit.Frederick Douglass,Ida B. Wells,Irvine Garland Penn, andFerdinand Lee Barnet co-authored a pamphlet entitled "The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition – The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature" addressing the issue. Wells and Douglass argued, "when it is asked why we are excluded from the World's Columbian Exposition, the answer is Slavery."[13] Ten thousand copies of the pamphlet were circulated in the White City from the Haitian Embassy (where Douglass had been selected as its national representative), and the activists received responses from the delegations of England, Germany, France, Russia, and India.[13]
The exhibition did include a limited number of exhibits put on by African Americans, including exhibits by the sculptorEdmonia Lewis, a painting exhibit by scientistGeorge Washington Carver, and a statistical exhibit byJoan Imogen Howard. Black individuals were also featured in white exhibits, such asNancy Green's portrayal of the characterAunt Jemima for the R. T. Davis Milling Company.[14]
The fair opened in May and ran through October 30, 1893. Forty-six nations participated in the fair, which was the first world's fair to have national pavilions.[15] They constructed exhibits and pavilions and named national "delegates"; for example, Haiti selectedFrederick Douglass to be its delegate.[16] The Exposition drew over 27 million visitors.[17] The fair was originally meant to be closed on Sundays, but theChicago Woman's Club petitioned that it stay open.[18][19] The club felt that if the exposition was closed on Sunday, it would restrict those who could not take off work during the work-week from seeing it.[20]
The exposition was located inJackson Park and on theMidway Plaisance on 630 acres (2.5 km2) in the neighborhoods of South Shore, Jackson Park Highlands,Hyde Park, andWoodlawn.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. Renowned local architectHenry Ives Cobb designed several buildings for the exposition. The director of the American Academy in Rome,Francis Davis Millet, directed the painted mural decorations. Indeed, it was a coming-of-age for the arts and architecture of the "American Renaissance", and it showcased the burgeoning neoclassical andBeaux-Arts styles.
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The fair ended with the city in shock, as popular mayorCarter Harrison III was assassinated byPatrick Eugene Prendergast two days before the fair's closing.[21] Closing ceremonies were canceled in favor of a public memorial service.
Jackson Park was returned to its status as a public park, in much better shape than its original swampy form. 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. TheMidway Plaisance, a park-like boulevard which extends west from Jackson Park, once formed the southern boundary of theUniversity 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'salma 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."[22]
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The World's Columbian Exposition was the first world's fair with anarea for amusements that was strictly separated from the exhibition halls. This area, developed by a young music promoter,Sol Bloom, concentrated onMidway Plaisance and introduced the term "midway" to American English to describe the area of a carnival or fair wheresideshows are located.[23]
It included carnival rides, among them the originalFerris Wheel, built byGeorge Washington Gale Ferris Jr.[1] This wheel was 264 feet (80 m) high and had 36 cars, each of which could accommodate 40 people.[1][24] The importance of the Columbian Exposition is highlighted by the use ofrueda de Chicago ("Chicago wheel") in many Latin American countries such as Costa Rica and Chile in reference to theFerris wheel.[25] One attendee,George C. Tilyou, later credited the sights he saw on the Chicago midway for inspiring him to create America's first major amusement park,Steeplechase Park inConey Island, New York.
The fair included life-size reproductions of Christopher Columbus' three ships, theNiña (real nameSanta Clara), thePinta, and theSanta María. These were intended to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the Americas. The ships were constructed in Spain and then sailed to America for the exposition.[26] The celebration of Columbus was an intergovernmental project, coordinated by American special envoyWilliam Eleroy Curtis, theQueen Regent of Spain, andPope Leo XIII.[27] The ships were a very popular exhibit.[28][29]
Eadweard Muybridge gave a series of lectures on the Science of Animal Locomotion in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose on Midway Plaisance. He used hiszoopraxiscope to show hismoving pictures to a paying public. The hall was the first commercial movie theater.[30]
The "Street in Cairo" included the popular dancer known asLittle Egypt.[31] She introduced America to the suggestive version of thebelly dance known as the "hootchy-kootchy", to a tune said to have been improvised by Sol Bloom (and now more commonly associated with snake charmers) which he had composed when his dancers had no music to dance to.[3][32] Bloom did not copyright the song, putting it immediately in thepublic domain.
Also included was the firstmoving walkway or travelator, which was designed by architectJoseph Lyman Silsbee. It had two different divisions: one where passengers were seated, and one where riders could stand or walk. It ran in a loop down the length of a lakefront pier to a casino.
Although denied a spot at the fair,Buffalo Bill Cody decided to come to Chicago anyway, setting up hisBuffalo Bill's Wild West Show just outside the edge of the exposition. Nearby, historianFrederick Jackson Turner gave academic lectures reflecting on the end of the frontier which Buffalo Bill represented.
Theelectrotachyscope ofOttomar Anschütz was demonstrated, which used aGeissler tube to project theillusion ofmoving images.
Louis Comfort Tiffany made his reputation with a stunning chapel designed and built for the Exposition. After the Exposition theTiffany Chapel was sold several times, even going back to Tiffany's estate. It was eventually reconstructed and restored and in 1999 it was installed at theCharles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art.
ArchitectKirtland Cutter'sIdaho Building, a rustic log construction, was a popular favorite,[33] visited by an estimated 18 million people.[34] The building's design and interior furnishings were a major precursor of theArts and Crafts movement.
The event also held a notable "hoochie coochie" dance show which led to Bloom becoming one of the earliest people in U.S. history to make large sums of money off of shows which were reminiscent ofstripteases.[35][36]
There was an Anthropology Building at the World's Fair. Nearby, "The Cliff Dwellers" featured a rock and timber structure that was painted to recreate Battle Rock Mountain in Colorado, a stylized recreation of an American Indian cliff dwelling with pottery, weapons, and other relics on display.[37] There was also anEskimo display. There were also birch barkwigwams of thePenobscot tribe. Nearby was a working model Indian school, organized by the Office of Indian Affairs, that housed delegations of Native American students and their teachers from schools around the country for weeks at a time.[38]
TheJohn Bull locomotive was displayed. It was only 62 years old, having been built in 1831. It was the first locomotive acquisition by theSmithsonian Institution. The locomotive ran under its own power fromWashington, DC, to Chicago to participate, and returned to Washington under its own power again when the exposition closed. In 1981 it was the oldest surviving operablesteam locomotive in the world when it ran under its own power again.
ABaldwin2-4-2 locomotive was showcased at the exposition, and subsequently the2-4-2 type was known as theColumbia.
An originalfrog switch and portion of the superstructure of the famous 1826Granite Railway in Massachusetts could be viewed. This was the first commercial railroad in the United States to evolve into acommon carrier without an intervening closure. The railway brought granite stones from a rock quarry inQuincy, Massachusetts, so that theBunker Hill Monument could be erected in Boston. The frog switch is now on public view inEast Milton Square, Massachusetts, on the originalright-of-way of the Granite Railway.
Transportation by rail was the major mode of transportation. A 26-track train station was built at the southwest corner of the fair. While trains from around the country would unload there, there was a local train to shuttle tourists from the Chicago Grand Central Station to the fair. The newly builtChicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad also served passengers fromCongress Terminal to the fairgrounds atJackson Park. The line exists today as part of theCTAGreen Line.
Forty-six countries had pavilions at the exposition.[1]Norway participated by sending theViking, a replica of theGokstad ship. It was built in Norway and sailed across theAtlantic Ocean by 12 men, led by Captain Magnus Andersen. In 1919, this ship was moved toLincoln Park. It was relocated in 1996 to Good Templar Park inGeneva, Illinois, where it awaits renovation.[39][40]
Thirty-four U.S. states also had their own pavilions.[1] The work of noted feminist authorKate McPhelim Cleary was featured during the opening of the Nebraska Day ceremonies at the fair, which included a reading of her poem "Nebraska".[41] Among the state buildings present at the fair were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas; each was meant to be architecturally representative of the corresponding states.[42]
FourUnited States territories also had pavilions located in one building:Arizona,New Mexico,Oklahoma, andUtah.[1]
Visitors to the Louisiana Pavilion were each given a seedling of a cypress tree. This resulted in the spread of cypress trees to areas where they were not native. Cypress trees from those seedlings can be found in many areas of West Virginia, where they flourish in the climate.[43]
TheIllinois was a detailed, full-scale mockup of anIndiana-class battleship, constructed as a naval exhibit.
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The German firmKrupp had a pavilion of artillery, which apparently had cost one million dollars to stage,[44] including a coastal gun of 42 cm in bore (16.54 inches) and a length of 33 calibres (45.93 feet, 14 meters). A breech-loaded gun, it weighed 120.46long tons (122.4 metric tons). According to the company's marketing: "It carried a charge projectile weighing from 2,200 to 2,500 pounds which, when driven by 900 pounds ofbrown powder, was claimed to be able to penetrate at 2,200 yards a wrought-iron plate three feet thick if placed at right angles."[45]
Nicknamed "The Thunderer", the gun had an advertised range of 15 miles. On this occasionJohn Schofield declared Krupps' guns "the greatest peacemakers in the world".[44] This gun was later seen as a precursor of the company's World War IDicke Berta howitzers.[46]
The 1893Parliament 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. According toEric J. Sharpe,Tomoko Masuzawa, and others, the event was considered radical at the time, since it allowed non-Christian faiths to speak on their own behalf.[47] For example, it is recognized as the first public mention of theBaháʼí Faith in North America;[48] it was not taken seriously by European scholars until the 1960s.[47]
Along the banks of the lake, patrons on the way to the casino were taken on amoving walkway designed by architectJoseph Lyman Silsbee, the first of its kind open to the public,[49] calledThe Great Wharf, Moving Sidewalk, it allowed people to walk along or ride in seats.[50]
Horticultural exhibits at the Horticultural Hall includedcacti andorchids as well as other plants in agreenhouse.
Most of the buildings of the fair were designed in theneoclassical architecture style. The area at the Court of Honor was known asThe White City. Façades were made not of stone, but of a mixture of plaster, cement, and jute fiber calledstaff, which was painted white, giving the buildings their "gleam". Architecture critics derided the structures as "decorated sheds.” The buildings were clad in whitestucco, which, in comparison to thetenements of Chicago, seemed illuminated. It was also called the White City because of the extensive use of street lights, which made the boulevards and buildings usable at night.
In 1892, working under extremely tight deadlines to complete construction, director of works Daniel Burnham appointedFrancis Davis Millet to replace the fair's official director of color-design, William Pretyman. Pretyman had resigned following a dispute with Burnham. After experimenting, Millet settled on a mix of oil and white leadwhitewash that could be applied using compressed airspray painting to the buildings, taking considerably less time than traditional brush painting.[3] Joseph Binks, maintenance supervisor at Chicago'sMarshall Field's Wholesale Store, who had been using this method to apply whitewash to the subbasement walls of the store, got the job to paint the Exposition buildings.[51][52] Claims this was the first use of spray painting may be apocryphal since journals from that time note this form of painting had already been in use in the railroad industry from the early 1880s.[53]
Many of the buildings included sculptural details and, to meet the Exposition's opening deadline, chief architect Burnham sought the help ofChicago Art Institute instructorLorado Taft to help complete them. Taft's efforts included employing a group of talented women sculptors from the Institute known as "theWhite Rabbits" to finish some of the buildings, getting their name from Burnham's comment "Hire anyone, even white rabbits if they'll do the work."
The words "Thine alabaster cities gleam" from the song "America the Beautiful" were inspired by the White City.[54]
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The White City is largely credited for ushering in theCity Beautiful movement and planting the seeds of modern city planning. The highly integrated design of the landscapes, promenades, and structures provided a vision of what is possible when planners, landscape architects, and architects work together on a comprehensive design scheme.
The White City inspired cities to focus on the beautification of the components of the city in which municipal government had control; streets, municipal art, public buildings, and public spaces. The designs of the City Beautiful Movement (closely tied with the municipal art movement) are identifiable by their classical architecture, plan symmetry, picturesque views, and axial plans, as well as their magnificent scale. Where the municipal art movement focused on beautifying one feature in a city, the City Beautiful movement began to make improvements on the scale of the district. The White City of the World's Columbian Exposition inspired theMerchants Club of Chicago to commissionDaniel Burnham to create the Plan of Chicago in 1909.[55]
There were fourteen main "great buildings"[37]: 17 centered around a giant reflective pool called the Grand Basin.[56] Buildings included:
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Louis Sullivan's polychrome proto-Modern Transportation Building was an outstanding exception to the prevailing style, as he tried to develop an organic American form. Years later, in 1922, he wrote that the classical style of the White City had set back modern American architecture by forty years.[57]
As detailed inErik Larson's popular historyThe Devil in the White City, extraordinary effort was required to accomplish the exposition, and much of it was unfinished on opening day. The famousFerris 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 board of directors the previous year on whether to build it. Frequent debates and disagreements among the developers of the fair added many delays. The spurning ofBuffalo Bill's Wild West Show proved a serious financial mistake. Buffalo Bill set up his highly popular show next door to the fair and brought in a great deal of revenue that he did not have to share with the developers. Nonetheless, construction and operation of the fair proved to be a windfall for Chicago workers during the serious economic recession that was sweeping the country.[3]
Almost all of the fair's structures were designed to be temporary;[58] of the more than 200 buildings erected for the fair, the only two which still stand in place are thePalace of Fine Arts and theWorld's Congress Auxiliary Building. From the time the fair closed until 1920, the Palace of Fine Arts housed the Field Columbian Museum (now theField Museum of Natural History, since relocated); in 1933 (having been completely rebuilt in permanent materials), the Palace building re-opened as theMuseum of Science and Industry.[59] The second building, the World's Congress Building, was one of the few buildings not built in Jackson Park, instead it was built downtown inGrant Park. The cost of construction of the World's Congress Building was shared with theArt Institute of Chicago, which, as planned, moved into the building (the museum's current home) after the close of the fair.
The three other significant buildings that survived the fair represented Norway, the Netherlands, and the State of Maine. TheNorway Building was a recreation of a traditional woodenstave church. After the Fair it was relocated to Lake Geneva, and in 1935 was moved to a museum calledLittle Norway inBlue Mounds, Wisconsin. In 2015 it was dismantled and shipped back to Norway, where it was restored and reassembled.[60] The second is theMaine State Building, designed by Charles Sumner Frost, which was purchased by the Ricker family ofPoland Spring, Maine. They moved the building to their resort to serve as a library and art gallery. The Poland Spring Preservation Society now owns the building, which was listed on theNational Register of Historic Places in 1974. The third isThe Dutch House, which was moved toBrookline, Massachusetts.
The1893 Viking ship that was sailed to the Exposition from Norway by Captain Magnus Andersen is located inGeneva, Illinois. The ship is open to visitors on scheduled days April through October.[61]
The main altar atSt. John Cantius in Chicago, as well as its matching two side altars, are reputed to be from the Columbian Exposition.
Since many of the other buildings at the fair were intended to be temporary, they were removed after the fair. The White City so impressed visitors (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 were abandoned in July 1894, when much of the fair grounds was destroyed in a fire.
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Frank Lloyd Wright later wrote that "By this overwhelming rise of grandomania I was confirmed in my fear that a native architecture would be set back at least fifty years."[62]
According toUniversity of Notre Dame history professor Gail Bederman, the event symbolized a male-dominated and Eurocentrist society. In her 1995 textManliness and Civilization, she writes, "The White City, with its vision of future perfection and of the advanced racial power of manly commerce and technology, constructed civilization as an ideal of white male power."[13] According to Bederman, people of color were barred entirely from participating in the organization of the White City and were instead given access only to the Midway exhibit, "which specialized in spectacles of barbarous races – 'authentic' villages of Samoans, Egyptians, Dahomans, Turks, and other exotic peoples, populated by actual imported 'natives.'"[13]
Two small exhibits were included in the White City's "Woman's Building" which addressed women of color. One, entitled "Afro-American" was installed in a distant corner of the building.[13] The other, called "Woman's Work in Savagery," included baskets, weavings, and African, Polynesian, and Native American arts. Though they were produced by living women of color, the materials were represented as relics from the distant past, embodying "the work of white women's own distant evolutionary foremothers."[13]
Helen Keller, along with her mentorAnne Sullivan and Dr.Alexander Graham Bell, visited the fair in summer 1893. Keller described the fair in her autobiographyThe Story of My Life.[63] Early in July, aWellesley College English teacher namedKatharine Lee Bates visited the fair. The White City later inspired the reference to "alabaster cities" in her poem and lyrics "America the Beautiful".[64] The exposition was extensively reported by Chicago publisherWilliam D. Boyce's reporters and artists.[65] There is a very detailed and vivid description of all facets of this fair by thePersian traveler Mirza Mohammad Ali Mo'in ol-Saltaneh written inPersian. He departed fromPersia on April 20, 1892, especially for the purpose of visiting the World's Columbian Exposition.[66]
Pierre de Coubertin visited the fair with his friendsPaul Bourget andSamuel Jean de Pozzi. He devotes the first chapter of his bookSouvenirs d'Amérique et de Grèce (1897) to the visit.Swami Vivekananda visited the fair to attend theParliament of the World's Religions and delivered his famous speechSisters and Brothers of America!.[67]Kubota Beisen was an official delegate of Japan. As an artist, he sketched hundreds of scenes, some of which were later used to make woodblock print books about the Exhibition.[68] Serial killerH. H. Holmes attended the fair with two of his eventual victims, Annie and Minnie Williams.Bulgarian writerAleko Konstantinov visited the fair and wrote hisnonfiction bookTo Chicago and Back.
Examples of exposition souvenirs can be found in various American museum collections. One example, copyrighted in 1892 by John W. Green, is a foldinghand fan with detailed illustrations of landscapes and architecture.[69] Charles W Goldsmith produced a set of ten postcard designs, each in full colour, showing the buildings constructed for the exhibition.[70]Columbian Exposition coins were also minted for the event.
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The effort to power the Fair with electricity, which became a demonstration piece forWestinghouse Electric and thealternating current system they had been developing for many years, took place at the end of what has been called theWar of the currents between DC and AC.[71] Westinghouse initially did not put in a bid to power the Fair but agreed to be the contractor for a local Chicago company that put in a low bid of US$510,000 to supply an alternating current-based system.[72]
Edison General Electric, which at the time was merging with theThomson-Houston Electric Company to formGeneral Electric, put in a US$1.72 million bid to power the Fair and its planned 93,000 incandescent lamps withdirect current. After the Fair committee went over both proposals, Edison General Electric re-bid their costs at $554,000 but Westinghouse underbid them by 70 cents per lamp to get the contract.[72][73] Westinghouse could not use the Edison incandescent lamp since the patent belonged to General Electric and they had successfully sued to stop use of all patent infringing designs. Since Edison specified a sealed globe of glass in his design Westinghouse found a way to sidestep the Edison patent by quickly developing a lamp with a ground-glass stopper in one end, based on a Sawyer-Man "stopper" lamp patent they already had. The lamps worked well but were short-lived, requiring a small army of workmen to constantly replace them.[73]: 140
Westinghouse Electric had severely underbid the contract and struggled to supply all the equipment specified, including twelve 1,000-horsepower single-phase AC generators and all the lighting and other equipment required.[74] They also had to fend off a last-minute lawsuit by General Electric claiming the Westinghouse Sawyer-Man-based stopper lamp infringed on the Edison incandescent lamp patent.[73]: 142
The International Exposition was held in an Electricity Building which was devoted to electrical exhibits. A statue ofBenjamin Franklin was displayed at the entrance. The exposition featured interior and exterior light and displays as well as displays ofThomas Edison'skinetoscope,search lights, aseismograph, electricincubators for chicken eggs,[75] andMorse codetelegraph.[37]: 22
All the exhibits were from commercial enterprises. Participants included General Electric, Brush,Western Electric, and Westinghouse. The Westinghouse Company displayed severalpolyphase systems. The exhibits included aswitchboard, polyphase generators, step-uptransformers, transmission line, step-down transformers, commercial sizeinduction motors andsynchronous 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.
Part of the space occupied by the Westinghouse Company was devoted to demonstrations of electrical devices developed byNikola Tesla[76] includinginduction motors and thegenerators used to power the system.[77] Therotating magnetic field that drove these motors was explained through a series of demonstrations including anEgg of Columbus that used thetwo-phase coil in the induction motors to spin a copper egg making it stand on end.[78]
Tesla himself showed up for a week in August to attend theInternational Electrical Congress, being held at the fair's Agriculture Hall, and put on a series of demonstrations of his wireless lighting system in a specially set up darkened room at the Westinghouse exhibit.[79][80] These included demonstrations he had previously performed throughout America and Europe[81] including using a nearby coil to light a wirelessgas-discharge lamp held in his hand.[82][81]
Also at the Fair, theChicago Athletic Association Football team played one of the firstnight football games againstWest Point (the earliest being on September 28, 1892, betweenMansfield State Normal andWyoming Seminary). Chicago won the game, 14–0. The game lasted only 40 minutes, compared to the normal 90 minutes.[83]
There were many other black artists at the fair, ranging fromminstrel and early ragtime groups to more formalclassical ensembles to street buskers.
Japan's artistic contribution was mainly inporcelain,cloisonné enamel, metalwork and embroidery.[107] While 55 paintings and 24 sculptures came from Japan, 271 of the 290 exhibits in the Palace of Fine Arts were Japanese.[107] Artists represented includedMiyagawa Kozan,Yabu Meizan,Namikawa Sōsuke, and Suzuki Chokichi.[108]
The women artists at theWoman's Building includedAnna Lownes,[109] Viennese painterRosa Schweninger, and many others.[110] American composerAmy Cheney Beach was commissioned by theBoard of Lady Managers of the fair to compose a choral work (Festival Jubilate, op. 17) for the opening of the Woman's Building.[91] TheMrs Potts sad-iron system was on display.[111]Ami Mali Hicks' stencil design was selected to adorn thefrieze in the assembly room of the Women's Building.[112] Musicologist Anna Morsch and composerCharlotte Sporleder presented a program of German music.[94]
The Woman's Building included a Woman's Building Library Exhibit, which had 7,000 books – all by women. The Woman's Building Library was meant to show the cumulative contribution of the world's women to literature.[113]
A large Romanesque structure called "Greatest Refrigerator on Earth" stored thousands of pounds of the Exposition's food and held an ice-skating rink for patrons.[114] The large structure demonstrated artificial freezing, a recent development, and was planned by architectFranklin P. Burnham. The structure's floor space was 130 by 255 feet and its height reached almost 200 feet. On the evening of July 10, 1893, the "Greatest Refrigerator on Earth" caught fire. Two firemen entered, one sliding down a rope and another on a line of hose, and both were trapped in the burning refrigerator. A total of fifteen people died, twelve firefighters and three civilians, in front of a crowd of more than a thousand fairgoers.[115] The only artifact that survived the fire was a twelve-foot copper statue of Christopher Columbus, which was kept as a monument to the men who lost their lives and is kept by thefire museum of Chicago.[114]
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The exposition was one influence leading to the rise of theCity Beautiful movement.[128] Results included grand buildings and fountains built aroundOlmstedian parks, shallow pools of water on axis to central buildings, larger park systems, broad boulevards and parkways and, after the start of the 20th century, zoning laws and planned suburbs. Examples of the City Beautiful movement's works include the City of Chicago, theColumbia University campus, and theNational Mall in Washington, D.C.
After the fair closed, J.C. Rogers, a banker fromWamego, Kansas, purchased several pieces of art that had hung in the rotunda of the U.S. Government Building. He also purchased architectural elements, artifacts and buildings from the fair. He shipped his purchases to Wamego. Many of the items, including the artwork, were used to decorate his theater, now known asthe Columbian Theatre.
Memorabilia such as books, tokens, published photographs, and well-printed admission tickets saved by guests are popular among collectors.
TheGeorge Washington University maintains a small collection of exposition tickets for viewing and research purposes. The collection is currently cared for by GWU's Special Collections Research Center, located in the Estelle and MelvinGelman Library.[129]
When the exposition ended the Ferris Wheel was moved to Chicago's north side, next to an exclusive neighborhood. An unsuccessful Circuit Court action was filed against the owners of the wheel to have it moved. The wheel stayed there until it was moved toSt. Louis for the1904 World's Fair.[65]
The Columbian Exposition has celebrated many anniversaries since the fair in 1893. The Chicago Historical Society held an exhibition to commemorate the fair. The Grand Illusions exhibition was centered around the idea that the Columbian Exposition was made up of a series of illusions. The commemorative exhibition contained partial reconstructions, a video detailing the fair, and a catalogue similar to the one sold at the World's Fair of 1893.[130]
Henry Adams wrote in his 1907Education: “The Exposition denied philosophy ... [S]ince Noah’s Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill-jointed, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental out-cries... had ruffled the surface of the Lakes.”[131]: 128
Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that the academic aspect of the event was not very important, even though theHarvard Peabody Museum, theSmithsonian Institution, andFranz Boas made contributions.[131]: 128
...Der Schritt von einer kurze 42-cm-Kanone L/33 zu einer Haubitze mit geringerer Anfangsgeschwindigkeit und einem um etwa 1/5 geringeren Geschossgewicht war nich sehr gross.
It was known as the "Greatest Refrigerator on Earth," and was estimated to be 130 by 255 feet. The lower level provided cold storage for the thousands of pounds of food served every day at the fair; while the upper story featured an ice skating rink for fair patrons.
"In a funeral pyre … imprisoned by flames," read the headline of a front-page story of the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 11, 1893. A day earlier, 16 people, including 12 firefighters, had died in a blaze at one of the buildings in Jackson Park during the World's Columbian Exposition. It was the fair's first tragedy, and it was witnessed by thousands of fairgoers.
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