Technology at the Great Exhibition

Ordering the Exhibition

Over 100,000 exhibits were on display at the Great exhibition.  To achieve some semblance of order, a system of classification had to be devised.  After months of work, a thirty part system of classification was eventually adopted, divided into 4 main sections: raw materials, machinery, manufactures and fine arts.

Ground-floor plan of the Crystal Palace, Great Exhibition building, 1851, "copied by permission from the official plans". Lithographed by Day and Son.  Source: Manchester Metropolitan University - http://ibs001.colo.firstnet.net.uk/mmu/image.php?i=578&r=1&t=4&x=6

The Machinery Courts

The Machinery Courts at the Great Exhibition drew the largest crowds of people and Queen Victoria herself visited these more times than any other section of the Exhibition.  She wrote in her journal:

"Went to the machinery part where we remained two hours, and which is excessively interesting and instructive...what used to be done by hand and take months doing is now accomplished in a few minutes by  the most beautiful machinery...We came home at a 1/4 to 12, and I felt quite done and exhausted, mentally exhausted" [1].

The machinery exhibits similarly received the longest and most detailed descriptions and illustrations in the Official Catalogue for the Exhibition.  A good example is provided by the illustration below which appeared in the Official Catalogue with the commentary: "The Queen in the machine room examining the vertical printing machine invented by Applegarth for the Times newspaper. In the left-hand corner is a representation of Black's patent folding machine; while on the other side, we have a view of a carding machine, one of a series of instruments used in woolen manufacture"[2]. 

Illustration from the Official Catalogue.   Source University of Glasgow library - http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/teach/century/paris.html

Machinery in motion

A number of the machines displayed were actually in motion, powered by isolated pipes beneath the floor boards which connected to a small engine house at the north-west corner of the exhibition building.  The machines in this section of the building were partitioned from the rest to contain the noise and dust emitted by them.

The Great Exhibition: Moving Machinery; Louis Haghe c.1851-52.  Comissioned by Prince Albert in 1851 and still in the Royal Collection.  Prince Albert commissioned fifty watercolours of the Great Exhibition, to be reproduced by Dickinson Bros in chromolithography, a new mechanical colour-printing process in keeping with the aims of the exhibition itself.  The lettering of the lithograph points out that such machines could be used by untrained men to do work which formerly had to be carried out by skilled workmen at high wages. 

The cotton machinery of Hibbert, Platt & Sons were a highlight of this section: a series of 15 machines in one room demonstrating the cotton spinning process as cotton was "opened, carded, doubled, spun, warped and woven, all before the eyes of the visitors" who were kept away from the machinery by an iron railing.

Hibert, Platt & Son's cotton machines.  Illustrated London News, 23 August 1851.  

Another symbol of British industrial success was the Harrison Power Loom, also in the machinery in motion section of the Exhibition.  By the early nineteenth century, the spinning of yarn had been mechanised, but weaving remained largely a handicraft. In 1820, British cotton-spinning mills employed 110,000 workers, but over 250,000 handloom weavers still worked at home. [3] This was partly because devising a power-driven loom to handle dozens of warp threads without breakage proved difficult. As power looms became more common they led to great suffering among handloom workers. During downturns in business, manufacturers laid off independent hand-weavers, using them as a 'buffer' in order to keep the costly machines busy. For this reason the installation of new looms often met violent opposition from handloom weavers. However, by 1851 practical power looms had become widespread and hand-weaving, except for complex or specialised fabrics, was almost extinct. 

The Harrison Power Loom, displayed at the Great Exhibition as part of the section entitled "Machinery in Motion".  Source: Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library - http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/icons_of_invention/technology/1820-1880/IC.004/

Other machinery

Aside from machines in motion, there were many and varied examples of British industrial prowess: a printing machine that could churn out five thousand copies of the Illustrated London News an hour (shown below), a steam powered hydraulic lever used to raise the 1,500 iron ton tubes of Robert Stephenson's railway bridge over the Menai Straits and a revolutionary agricultural reaping machine from the United States.

Printing machine for the Illustrated London News from 'The Illustrated Exhibitor: guide to the Great Exhibition, 1851.  Source: British Libraryhttp://www.bl.uk/learning/images/victorian/illustratedexhibitor/large102701.html

All these machines were designed to exhibit the full extent of Britain's industrial might and ingenuity to the people of Britain and of the world. And appeal to them it did.  Henry Mayhew, English social commentator and founder of Punch, described how on shilling days, visitors pressed two and three deep to watch the machinery in motion. [4]

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Notes:

[1] de Mare, Eric, London 1851: The Year of the Great Exhibition; The Folio Press (1973) pg 54

[2] The illustrated exhibitor ... comprising sketches ... of the principal exhibits of the Great Exhibition of ... 1851 London, 185.  Taken from the University of Glasgow website: http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/teach/century/paris.html

[3] Making the Modern World website at the Science Museum of London: http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/icons_of_invention/technology/1820-1880/IC.004/

[4] Auerbach, Jeffrey, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display; Yale University Press (1999) pg 106

Crystal Palace

The iconic image of the Great Exhibition is of the Crystal Palace, a vast, glasshouse-like structure in 20 acres of central London's Hyde Park.  It proved central to the Exhibition's success, but was by no means a foregone conclusion.

Background


In February 185, the building committee appointed by the Royal Commission advertised, in English, French and German, for designs for the exhibition building to be based in Hyde Park, central London.  By the time the competition closed in mid-April, 245 designs had been received which were then exhibited at the Institution of Civil Engineers.  The building committee in fact rejected all 233 designs and instead produced one of their own, largely designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, chief engineer to the Great Western Railway.  This design called for a brick building, requiring some fifteen million bricks, with a sheet iron dome 200 feet in diameter (larger than the domes on St Paul's Cathedral in London and even St Peter's Basilica in Rome).

The Building Committee's design for a structure to house the Great Exhibition.

This design was, perhaps unsurprisingly, met with ridicule, the Times of London calling it [FIND QUOTE].  Whilst the building commission attempted to solicit tender offers for the construction of this design, Joseph Paxton, a young landscape architect, happened to discuss the unfolding debacle of the Exhibition building with a colleague and sketched an idea for a plan on a piece of plotting paper.

Paxton's original blotting paper sketch of his Crystal Palace design.  Source: Syracuse School of Architecture website: http://soa.syr.edu/faculty/bcoleman/arc523/lectures/523.crystal.palace.images.html

Paxton's influences

Paxton's background was as a gardener and landscape architect, working first as under-gardener for the Horticultural Society at Chiswick and then as head gardener at Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire's estate.  His major work at Chatsworth was the Great Conservatory covering an acre of ground through which a carriage could be driven, though this was just one of the many glasshouse-like structures he designed.  The "legitimate father" of the Crystal Palace was the Lily House he built at Chatsworth in 1849, no longer in existence, to protect a giant Victoria Regia, a rare and newly discovered tropical water plant.  Paxton himself acknowledged this in an article for the Daily News on 7 August 1851:

"Fortunately at this time I was erecting a house of peculiar construction, which I had designed for the growth of that most remarkable plant, the Victoria Regia; and it is to this plant and to this circumstance that the Crystal Palace owes its direct origin".

 

Paxton's Great Conservatory at Chatsworth, 1836-1841. It was 277 feet long, 123 feet wide and 61 feet high making it the largest glass house in the world at that time.  Source: Syracuse School of Architecture website: http://soa.syr.edu/faculty/bcoleman/arc523/lectures/523.crystal.palace.images.html

The design

The final Crystal Palace was 1848 feet long and 408 feet wide with a central transept 72 feet wide and 108 feet tall.  It covered one 18 acres of ground and enclosed 33 million cubic feet of space.  

Crystal Palace perspective.  Source: Syracuse School of Architecture website: http://soa.syr.edu/faculty/bcoleman/arc523/lectures/523.crystal.palace.images.html

Transept with Crystal Fountain.  Source: Syracuse School of Architecture website: http://soa.syr.edu/faculty/bcoleman/arc523/lectures/523.crystal.palace.images.html

The original design envisaged flat roofing for the building, but a public uproar at the felling of several old trees for a temporary exhibition led Paxton to refine his ground plan so as to bring the trees within the building and cover them with a circular roof, similar to the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth.  A rare photograph, below, taken in 1852 once the great space had been cleared but before the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham, shows the accommodation of a great elm tree clearly.

Crystal Palace Transept, photo taken by Benjamin Brecknell Turner 1852. Source: Victoria & Albert Museum collection - http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O75282/photograph-crystal-palace-transept-hyde-park/

Race and ethnicity

An international exhibition

The Great Exhibition was, from the start, intended as an international exhibition, bringing all nations together in common industry.  Prince Albert, for example, at a Mansion House meeting in 1850, spoke of "peace, love and ready assistance, not only between individuals, but between the nations of the earth". [1] [Times 22 March 1850].   Many foreigners did indeed come to the Great Exhibition.  In a contemporary account of the Great Exhibition, Henry Birch expressed amazement at the multi-cultural, ethnically diverse crowd he claimed to see at the palace:

"From whence have all these people been gathered?...They include men of every clime and color: - the European, the American, the Indian, the Chinese, the African, the Greenlander, the white, the black, the brown, the red; all the forms and figures, shades and colors of the human family". [2]

Season ticket for the Great Exhibition. Source: the Institution of Engineering and Technology website

Even if somewhat exaggerated in style, the description above illustrates that there was no overt segregation and little or no race based discrimination at the Great Exhibition. There was, however, a marked divide between the Great Exhibition's stated aim of bringing all nations together and Victorian perceptions of the world order.

Victorian perceptions of world order

From around the 1840's, the idea of race as a scientifically based explanation of cultural and/or biological difference was increasingly prominent in Britain, used in a variety of arenas to explain why some civilizations were superior to others and why they were likely to remain so.  Whilst Darwin's Origin of the Species was not published until 1859, the ideas contained within it, as well as nascent ideas of social darwinism, were beginning to be discussed within Victorian elite.  Put simply, theories of social darwinism could justify (and were increasingly used to justify) Britain's rule over inherently "inferior" peoples of her colonies.  These native peoples were variously assumed to be "fixed" in a perpetual childhood or alternatively able to achieve civilized status but only through graduation education and acculturalisation over a long period of time.

Such ideas of the inherent differences between white Europeans and other civilizations were apparent at the Great Exhibition.  Thomas Onwhyn's pamphlet Mr and Mrs Brown's Visit to London to the see the Great Exhibition of All Nations.  How they were astonished at its wonders, inconvenienced by the crowds, and frightened out of their wits, by the Foreigners, provides an illuminating example [3].

Cannibal Islanders: an illustration from Thomas Onwhyn's Mr and Mrs Brown's Visit to London to see the Great Exhibition of all Nations.  Source: http://russianlancashire.wordpress.com/category/anglo-russian-relations/russophobia/

The group of "Cannibal Islanders' are depicted as animal like savages, sitting at an outdoor restaurant, beneath a sign that reads "Soup a la Hottentot".  They have dark skin, bare feet and monkey-like faces and one holds a knife, threatening to eat the Browns' child.

The satirical report Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission, which was sent to report on the Great Exhibition; wherein the opinion of China is shown as not corresponding at all with our own by Henry Sutherland Edwards provides another glimpse of Victorian attitudes [4].  

Frontispiece to Henry Sullivan Edward's An Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission, which was sent to report on the Great Exhibition.  Source: Stanford University - http://www.stanford.edu/group/ww1/spring2000/exhibition/chinese.html

The Chinese emperor has sent Congou, who has killed his grandmother, mother, wife and daughter, to provide an account of the exhibition.  One stanza of the long, rhyming poem reads:

The opening in short was as dull as could be;

There was no execution whatever to see;

There was no one impaled and the use of the saw 

Is not even mentioned in English law.

Whilst overt racial discrimination was not a feature of the Great Exhibition, racism in the sense of a belief of inherent differences in people's traits and capacities as a result of race certainly was.

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Notes


[1] The Times 22 March 1850
[2] Young, Paul. Globalisation and the Great Exhibition. Palgrave macmillan, 2009.  Pg 53
[3] Auerbach, Jeffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: a nation on display. Yale University Press, 1999.  Pg 174
[4] Ibid.  Pg 175

Financing the Great Exhibition

Britain in the 1840s

Major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation and technology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural makeup of Britain.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a majority of the population lived in the countryside and London had 1 million inhabitants.  By 1850, half of the population of Britain lived in towns and the population of London had doubled.   At the start of the 1840's, railway lines in Britain were few and scattered, but by the end of the decade, a virtually complete network had been laid down and the majority of towns and villages in Britain were connected.  By the mid nineteenth century, Britain had become the world's leading industrialized power.

The factory, one of the mainstays of the Industrial Revolution in Britain

Against this background of rapidly increasing wealth and empire, the 1840's were difficult years economically.  Britain experienced two "bubbles" and a financial crisis; railway shares underwent a substantial reversal during the railway mania and the price of corn rose and fell dramatically soon afterwards, partly as a result of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.  It was in this uncertain economic climate that advocates of a national exhibition faced the challenge of drumming up support and finances.

Financing the Great Exhibition

One of the liveliest contemporary debates surrounding the organization of the Great Exhibition was how such a huge undertaking was to be financed.  Was the Exhibition to be funded largely by private individuals who faced the prospect of losses if the Exhibition was a failure, but potentially large gains if it was a success, or was it instead to be financed through public funds and voluntary contributions?

The first advocates of the Great Exhibition, members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (later the Society of Arts) initially faced little choice in the matter.  It was clear that the support of Prince Albert, royal consort and president of the Society, would be necessary to raise the necessary funds.  Though expressing interest in the idea of a national exhibition from an early stage, Prince Albert showed caution in publicly backing the concept until sufficient public support had been proven.  Only after such support had been demonstrated would he advocate the establishment of a royal commission to oversee the organization of the exhibition.

Prince Albert, taken by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, 1853

Without a royal commission, the Society faced great difficulty in securing the financial backing necessary to drum up the required public support for the project.  After much fruitless negotiation with several builders and contractors, the Society turned to a public works contracting firm, Messrs James and George Munday, who agreed, on certain conditions, to advance £20,000 as a prize fund, erect a suitable building, find offices, advance any funds necessary for preliminary requisites and to take on the whole risk of loss.

Once the royal commission had been officially established in January 1850, however, and with important sections of the press vehemently against the private financing of a national and public exhibition, the Royal Commission moved to terminate the contract.

Henry Windham Phillips, The Royal Commissioners for the great Exhibition of 1851, Victoria and Albert Museum, London


At a meeting of the "merchants, bankers and traders of the City of London" (so wrote the Times on 26 January 1850), a resolution was proposed and seconded,

"That this meeting entirely concurs in the reasons which have induced the Royal Commission to terminate the contract with the Messrs. Munday, and to rest the success of the proposed exhibition entirely upon public liberality."

In seconding the motion, a Mr T E Baring spoke for the mood of those present, according to the Times, stating:

"That contract might have been necessary at the time when first entered into, in order to give to the world some evidence that the plan would in some shape be brought into execution; but it did not meet with general concurrence, from the notion that every individual should, as far as possible, give his consent to the project; and when the matter was confined to a contract, that seemed rather to exclude an appeal to public contributions. That contract was now terminated, and it was the people of England that the Royal Commissioners appealed. (Hear, hear.) As citizens of London they were proud that the first appeal was made to them, and he trusted no gentleman present could doubt that the appeal would be successful. (Hear, hear.)".

The outcry over the prospect of a national event being funded by private capitalists who might potentially benefit from public funds forced the organizers and the commissioners to make the event a truly public and national undertaking.  The Great Exhibition was to be funded not by the government or the wealthy few, but by people of all classes by means of voluntary contributions.

The Royal Commission oversaw the establishment of over 300 local committees throughout the United Kingdom which were responsible, among other things, for gathering subscriptions from within their boundaries.  The success of these committees, whilst mixed, is evidenced by the fact that over half the funds for the Exhibition came from outside London.  Whilst the City of London contributed £26,632, Bradford contributed £1,605, Glasgow £2,666 and Rochester £13.

Contemporary reaction to the Great Exhibition

Contemporary reaction to the Great Exhibition was almost universally favorable from the day it opened on 1 May 1851.

A review in the Times of London on 2 April 1851, the day after the Exhibition was opened by Queen Victoria, describes public reaction to the Exhibition:

"Certain it is that people who had never before seen the sun rise, except through a ballroom window, were in full activity soon after dawn, impelled by the impulse that seem to lend life and energy to the whole substance of the great and somewhat lethargic metropolis...the arteries of the great city surged with life, beat full and strong under the pressure of a hitherto unknown excitement.  Never before had so vast a multitude collected together within the memory of man".

"Written words are powerless and weak in the presence of that great muster of worldly magnificence - that stupendous act of homage to industry and the peaceful arts".

The Times recorded attendance figures, takings and occurrences at the Exhibition on a daily basis throughout the summer of 1851, commenting on 12 May 1851, for example:

"This is the tenth day of the Great Exhibition and it is literal truth to say that every one of the myriads who have visited it has done so each successive day with increased admiration and delight.  This is proved not only by the enthusiastic expressions one hears from every side, but still more by the pecuniary success.  The sale of season tickets continues as brisk as if the Exhibition were still to open and none of the exclusive attractions...have been exhausted".

Individual reaction was, on the whole, equally as favorable.  Charlotte Bronte, author of novels such as Jane Eyre and Shirley, visited the Great Exhibition and described her visit in a letter:

Jane Eyre, depicted in a painting by George Richmond in 1850

"Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance".

William Makepeace Thackeray, one of the leading novelists of the Victorian era, was moved to write a poem about the opening of the Crystal Palace:

As though 'twere by a wizard's rod                               

As blazing arch of lucid glass

Leaps like a fountain from the grass                        

To meet the sun.

A quiet green, but few days since;

With cattle browsing in the shade,

And lo! long lines of bright arcade

In order raised!

A palace as for a fairy prince,

A rare pavilion, such as man

Saw never since mankind began,

And built and glazed.

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.

I felt a thrill of love and awe

To mark the different garb of each,

The changing tongue, the various speech

Together blent:

A thrill, methinks, like His who saw

"All people dwelling upon earth

Praising our God with solemn mirth

And one consent."

Extract from 'A May Day Ode' by
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863)
Published in The Times, 1 May 1851