The Promotion of New Technology Through Fun and Spectacle: Electricity at the World's Columbian Exposition

Amusement parks and world's fairs have always been showcases for technologies harnessed and configured for the purposes of fun and spectacle. The same technologies that ran the industrial development of America, turned work into a regimented and mechanized activity, powered the 20th century with new energy sources, and expanded information transfer and communication to unlimited orbits, have been utilized in amusement enterprises often before their embrace by the general public or acceptance by the business/industrial sector. Amusement parks and major fairs are influential promoters of new technologies because of their modes of presentation: * technologies are transformed into vehicles and mechanisms designed for fun and spectacle; * complex technologies are put on display for all to visualize and comprehend; * novel technologies are demonstrated to be safe as well as commercially viable; * and the amusement setting allows technologies to be experienced in a relaxed, leisure atmosphere where machines seem to enhance sensory experience, enrich pleasure, and become servants to human whims. The technologies of amusement essentially create artificial realms where sensory stimulation, exotic spectacle, and relaxing environments provide escape from work-a-day reality. When new technologies are experienced in the amusement guise, they are eagerly and confidently embraced with a joyful spirit. In contrast, in the common, unadorned, and competitive "actual" world, a novel technology will threaten and frighten because it imposes itself on individuals generally without attention to the cultivation of comprehension or engagement. While in recent years, amusement enterprises are clearly stimulating the development, acceptance, and interest in "virtual reality" experiential simulations generated by computer systems, perhaps the most momentous influence of an amusement enterprise on the public acceptance and proliferation of a new technology was the World's Columbian Exposition's promotion of the then frightening and unproved power source, electricity. The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's journey to the New World, was a germinal influence in American culture and industrial progress. Chicago's "White City," as the Exposition was popularly dubbed, was a plaster actualization of a prophetic New Jerusalem, a perfect world, created from America's technological ingenuity, engineering prowess, capitalist enterprise, frontier spirit, and the relentless, all-encompassing planning of its designers. Montgomery Schuyler, the noted architectural critic, summed up the profound cultural influence of the Exposition as its successful integration of "unity, magnitude, and illusion" (Schuyler 300). The White City achieved, for a fleeting summer, a grand actualization of the dream of America's Puritan colonists to establish a "new Heaven," a "City on a Hill" in the New World wilderness. Today, looking back more than a hundred years, we recognize that the lasting legacy of the great Chicago fair is not the monumental White City with its magnificent architecture emulating "Baroque Rome" and declaring to the world that America considered itself the cultural equivalent of Western Europe, but instead the engineering feats, technical inventions, and industrial success that formed the framework supporting the splendid shell of spiritual and aristocratic allegory. Like all international expositions before and after it, the Columbian Exposition was primarily a showcase for industrial progress, a grand means to advertise technical achievements, inventions, and products. It brought to the eyes of the world the power of steel to construct vast structures such as the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building measuring 1687 feet long and 787 feet wide (the largest enclosed building constructed to date), and also the more frivolous but enormous Ferris Wheel with its axle weighing 45 tons, and its 264-feet-high bicycle-wheel framework supporting 36 pendulum cars each holding 60 passengers. …