Everything from German beer gardens to Samoan wrestlers were present in this prototypical amusement park. Scott Joplin played his newfangled music and people could sit and enjoy the most modern of libations, the newly carbonated soft drink. Corn was everywhere in Chicago. Almost all the State Pavilions featured corn objects. This was the first of the hybrid corns that swept the American midwest.
Standardized time is an invention of the modern era.
In 1883, the Naval Observatory agreed to telegraph standard railway time, a great boon for Western Union, which happened to own the Self-Winding Clock Company. At the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, Western Union built a network of 200 clocks, all regulated from their central pavilion, topped with a 150-foot clock tower. Electric powered streetcars hauled people to the Exposition, trains of 4 cars jammed full of people inside, on the roof, and hanging off the sides. The fair brought farmers, school children, and residents from small towns all over the midwest to Chicago to learn about culture and technology and to entertain themselves. One group that came in droves to Chicago were the world's engineers.