Today in 1851, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations or The Great Exhibition, opened in London. It was the first in a series of World’s Fair exhibitions continuing to the present day.
Burton Benedict wrote in The Anthropology of World’s Fairs:
The Great exhibition, like the many international expositions or world’s fairs that followed it, was a phenomenon of industrial capitalism. Mass producers sought international mass markets for their goods, and world’s fairs provided display cases reaching millions of potential customers. But the fairs were not only selling goods, they were selling ideas: ideas about the relations between nations, the spread of education, the advancement of science, the form of cities, the nature of domestic life, the place of art in society. They were presenting an ordered world.
It was also a celebration of the mutual beneficial impact of science and engineering or of “experimental knowledge,” as opposed to theoretical knowledge. From the introduction to The Industry of Nations: As Exemplified in the Great Exhibition of 1851:
It has been found, that the interchange of facts between theoretical and practical men has been attended with a large degree of mutual improvement, and with many benefits both to labour and to knowledge.
In The Times of May 1, 1851, William Makepeace Thackeray published a poem on the exhibition which read in part:
A peaceful place it was but now,
And lo! within its shining streets
A multitude of nations meets;
A countless throng
I see beneath the crystal bow,
And Gaul and German, Russ and Turk,
Each with his native handiwork
And busy tongue.