Lighting the Way
Two retrospectives highlight the role of engineers in creating a century of global progress.
The World’s Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893
By Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing
University of Illinois Press, 1992. 166 pages.
The Fair Women
By Jeanne Madeline Weimann
Academy Chicago, 1981. 611 pages.
When soliciting contest entries for a creation to distinguish the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—and to supplant Paris’s 1889 World’s Fair wonder, the Eiffel Tower—chief of construction Daniel Burnham declared that “mere bigness” was not enough. Instead, “something novel, original, daring, and unique must be designed and built if American engineers are to retain their prestige and standing.” The winning entry— George Ferris’s massive rotating wheel—remains an emblem of early U.S. engineering ingenuity and ambition, inextricably linked to the founding of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, ASEE’s precursor, at the very same world’s fair.
The portrayal of U.S. technology and innovation in 1893, a period of intense industrialism and imperialism that ushered in the beginnings of greater professionalism in the field of engineering, makes these two books well worth revisiting. One offers a sweeping tour while the other focuses specifically on the Women’s Building. When read with an engineering lens, both offer fascinating details about the fair’s exhibits, participants, and technological achievements.
In World’s Columbian Exposition, we learn of memorable displays in the Machinery Hall, the Mines and Mining Building, the Transportation Building, and the Electricity Building. Exhibits were sponsored by railway, machinery, electrical, and telegraph and telephone companies; universities; all 44 states; and several foreign countries. Thomas Edison showed off an 82-foot tower “strung with lights” as well as his recent invention, the kinetoscope, forerunner of the movie camera. Japanese visitors were drawn to the Earthquake Laboratory, while the Yerkes 40-inch telescope was hailed for its unprecedented size and cost: $500,000 at the time. Beyond the exhibits, construction of the fair itself still stands out as a staggering undertaking. Some 700 acres of vacant land were elaborately contoured by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead to produce intertwining, navigable canals and lagoons, with viaducts, fountains, islands, and a waterfront pier to receive visitors. A rail station, 14 “Great Buildings,” huge observation deck, moving sidewalk, elevators, and buildings for each U.S. state and territory were among the structures created for the “White City.” Several photographs accompanying Bolotin and Laing’s text help relate the fair’s vastness, including its largest building, Manufactures and Liberal Arts, which measured a staggering 31.5 acres and took 10 specially devised electric paint machines to cover its interior walls. The fair also was “the most electrified world affair ever held, requiring three times the electricity used to power Chicago on a daily basis.” Still, this was America at the brink of mechanization: “Men with picks and shovels” far outnumbered the machines, with more than 40,000 skilled laborers engaged at the height of construction.
The Fair Women’s dominant narrative, by contrast, is of late 19th-century gender politics. The “lady managers” of the Women’s Building struggled to receive construction materials and equitable treatment by fair organizers. Many female inventors and professionals couldn’t cover the costs of shipping their devices and even themselves to Chicago. The building did, however, showcase the work of Maria Mitchell, director of the Vassar College Observatory; Anna Botsford Comstock, an illustrator of scientific textbooks and Cornell University’s first female professor; and Martha Costen, an engineer’s widow who had developed nautical night signals hailed by the U.S. Navy for their “precision, fullness, and plainness.”
The building’s exhibits also reveal varying attitudes about mechanization. Several European countries sent examples of elaborate and delicate handiwork, such as embroidery and weaving. Americans admired the skill and traditions, Weimann writes, but not the drudgery on display.
Both books rely on primary sources to carefully reconstruct the planning, construction, politics, and events of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition. As research material, they offer helpful references for engineering academics whose work will shape tomorrow’s world.
Review by Robin Tatu
Robin Tatu is Prism‘s book editor.
Image Courtesy of Amazon