wooly.

It turns out that there was another world's fair devoted to cotton. It happened just a few years after the now famous Atlanta International Cotton Exposition of 1881. The World Cotton Centennial of 1884, held in new Orleans, was a bit of a crapper.

New Orleans was at the very centre of the cotton industry and was home to the Cotton Exchange. If ya wanted cotton, dis was the place. But the fair was a non starter. One of the original directors took off for Brazil with over a million bucks before the fair even opened.

It did have the worlds biggest building at that time (covered over 30 acres) and was lit with more lights than all of New Orleans had at the time.

The fair was a a money loser. It was decided that the fairs buildings would be held over and used for the North Central & South American Exposition of 1885. Sounds exciting. It too couldn't get the whole she bang back in the black. What was left in the spring of 1886 was sold off for whatever they could get.

The photo above is of a stuffed alligator on exhibit at the fair. I can see the link between cotton and reptiles.

Turned a tidy profit.

In reading up on the state of fairs I was quite surprised to find how many they're were. Hundreds and hundreds of them from the mid 1700's onward. Most were held in the larger centre's, particularly the ones with an industrial achievement theme. Seems every city with a better way to bake bread or flush body fluids had to have a fair.

Not to be outdone, tiny little Launceston, Tasmania had a cracker of a fair in 1891-92. It ran from November till March and had nearly 1400 exhibitors.

Dubbed The Tasmanian International Exhibition, it was the biggest event the town ever hosted, which pretty well meant the whole damn island. Like many similar fairs it was part trade fair, part cultural splash and part community pride.

A rather unique historical quirk occurred when it came time to issue tickets. For those attendees who purchased a season ticket, their photograph was taken and affixed to the ticket, much like a passport. The photographer, Richard Nicholas, kept a copy of all the photos taken for the tickets and pasted them into an album with the corresponding name next to them. In all, over 1300 locals have their picture in this album. A perfect snapshot of life in small town Tasmania in the 1890's.

The fair turned a handsome profit of 180 pounds.

Everyone clean?

So after spending 70 odd days at the cotton exhibition we may need a day or two at the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition. Dresden, Germany was the lucky town that hosted this gem.

I had to do some digging to come up with any real details about this celebration. Thank god that many newspapers are digitally archived. Still, who would archive this?

Anyway, the Hungarians had quite an exhibit it seems. They showed off the hygiene quality in their public school system, demonstrations of sewage works and had a working slaughterhouse.

The Chinese showed off preserved fruit. Apparently it was cheap.

The Austrian pavilion featured something called "electro-hygeine." Hmmmmm.

Wonder where all the exhibits went after the show?

Yawn.

Just a short post on this little item. It's 1881 and if your in Atlanta Georgia the International Cotton Exposition is the place to be. Sixty fun filled days. Yes, that's right, 2 solid months of the delights of cotton.

The exhibition was, by any account, a huge success. There were over 1100 exhibitors including 7 foreign entries.

Guess without TV and the Internet you gotta do something.

It will make you feel a little woozy.

In my research into world's fairs my journey took me to some surprising places. There were those worrisome electrical "medical" devices, but this takes the cake. It's so out there it's beyond odd.

Short aside time: I actually worked in the old Eatons in Montreal where a device very similar to the one below was used.

So here we go. Sometimes around the beginning of the 1800's a British inventor, George Medhurst, came up with the idea to send letters and packages through pneumatic tubes. Shortly after that he expanded his idea to include people in what can only be described as a container pushed through a huge rubber tube by air pressure, essentially the same damn thing as the smaller packets.

Skip ahead 20 odd years and we find another British inventor, John Vallance, toying with the same idea. What are the odds about this going on anyways? Two British guys messing with huge black rubber tubes? Vallance actually built a full sized version, some 8 feet in diameter and running for 150 feet. Cooler heads prevailed and no one was forced to ride INSIDE the thing. In fact Medhurst pretty much knew for sure that it would be a crappy customer service experience and said so early on.

In 1827 he proposed a much more comfortable alternative with his "atmospheric railway". He kept the tube small and ran it along a standard rail line, using the air pressure to pull the train along the track.

All told, 4 atmospheric railways were built in England, France and Ireland. The latter two just used air power to pull the train up a hill, it was on it's own going down. The most successful of these railways, the London and Croydon Railway ran over 7 miles. The darn thing propelled a train to 70 miles an hour in 1845! That's moving by any standard. A small tube was layed between the rails with a slit in the top for a hook to protrude from. It was sealed with rubber and leather flaps to keep the pressure up. A piston in the tube was pushed by the air pressure. The railway folded in 1847.

Another railway, the South Devon Railway ran for about 15 miles and was seriously considered for a total run of over 50 miles. The railway's chief engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel thought this was the way to go. Because of the hilly terrain a larger tube was used and this system pushed trains along at 60 mph.

Other British inventors kept at the shooting a person through a tube idea. The Electric and International Telegraph Company, in 1853 used the idea to propel cartridges with paper messages in them, mainly telegrams, from the receiving telegraph office to their customer's desk. This was exactly what was used when I worked at Eaton's. In 1860, Josiah Latimer Clark, inventor of the above device joined up with Thomas Webster Rammell to form the London Pneumatic Dispatch Company and came up with a 30 inch tube into which a lozenge shaped craft was inserted and squirted through to it's destination.

Intended to carry cargo only this gizmo was demonstrated in 1861 at Battersea. A larger 4 foot diameter one came out shortly after and then an almost locomotive sized one was shown at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1864 and could carry people. Hmmm. Basically the huge tube 8x9 feet had a rail type car inserted into it that had a flared skirt of bristles to keep the pressure in, kind of like a spitball in a pen shaft.

Fair game.

The American Institute Fair, started in New York in 1829 was America's first fair and tried to do what all the fairs of the time were doing. "At these fairs were displayed the finest products of agriculture and manufacturing, the newest types of machinery, the most recent contributions of inventive genius . . ." All kinds of doo dads from the best minds of the day. Organized by the American Institute and run pretty much regularly till the turn of the century, the 1829 fair was the first fair on American soil that could be called a world's fair.

Since it was run annually, the attendance wasn't at the levels of European fairs, but drew spectators who came each year to see what was new. Kind of like the the latest cars at the auto shows.

Reading some NY Times articles from the 1880's gives a hint at what the audience could expect.

Electricity was the big thing then and companies vied for eyeballs. One company demonstrated (just how I don't want to know) a "splendid exhibit of electro-medical devices." Sweet Jesus. It gets worse. They apparently had an apparatus for "galvano-cautery" too.

Another company offering wares in the same field had a machine called a water rheostat described as a "marvel of cheapness and efficiency."

And to make you feel all warm inside we have a company offering electric burglar alarms. The description I found of them sounds pretty damned sophisticated, even for now, with keyed entry, on/off for different zones, and timers to set for when you are away. They also made remote gas lighting and extinguishing devises.

Wonder if they made any gas sensing devices.

Small, but mighty.

I'm going to skip over a few fairs (all French, my they love a good fair) and jump to the early 1800's when not one, nor two but three fairs were held in Paris. Dubbed the THE NAPOLEONIC EXPOSITIONS, they were held in 1801, 02 and 06 respectively. They actually fell on the heals of the industrial fair of 1798 and quite honestly all four of them could be lumped together. France had been eyeing England's fairs and were concerned that they were in England's shadow when it came to industrialization and modernization.

So here we find Napoleon doing a jolly good job of kicking butt and France feeling pretty cocky and what better way to strut your stuff then have a national exposition.

What is truly amazing about these fairs is that they included a little of what you would expect like manufacturing processes and art and more than a good dose of other stuff. Furniture, clock and watchmaking, agriculture were all represented.

On the dull practical side, but none the less amazing, we have Joseph Jacquard and his loom, winner of a bronze medal at the exposition. The fame it brought Jacquard was not all positive. His life was threatened by mill workers thrown out of work as a result of his labour saving, speedy device. The government stepped in and saved his hide. Their vigorous endorsement gave skeptics a chance to see how much more fabric could be produced and in patterns hitherto unattainable.

France's dominance as a producer of quality textiles was a theme revisited in subsequent expositions. Signs of equality were everywhere. There were displays of cloth woven by blind weavers and a special section devoted to cloth spun by convicts.

Expo-nential.

First thing you gotta know about worlds fairs is that they have a governing body. An official entity that covers the whole fair/exposition thing. Not surprisingly it's called the Bureau of International Expositions. One may have expected an office but a bureau is nice. Classy. They were founded in 1928, which is surprising since fairs have been a part of the human landscape for centuries. Thanks God they organized when they did.

OK, to get the ball rolling let us journey to England, the year is 1760 to an event called the First Exhibition. Though not a "worlds" fair it was nevertheless real big for the time, and in fairs that's what counts.

Sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts it featured a series of exhibitions showcasing not so much the artistic abilities of the crafts people but their manufacturing and commercializing ability. Examples of tapestry, carpets and porcelain competed for prizes.

The following year there was an exhibition of agricultural methods and machinery. Bet it was hard to get a ticket for that. The RSA got into a whole lot more exhibitions over the next 100 years or so. More on that in another post.

And, just so you know, the Royal Society instituted a tree planting program in the 1750's (50 million trees planted) to offset the deforestation by Britain's shipbuilding industry. Them's a lot of boats.