Museums: The Great Exhibition (part 5 of 6)

“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 thus, 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.”

— Charlotte Bronte A visit to the Crystal Palace, 1851
The Brontes' Life and Letters, by Clement Shorter (1907)

The Great Exhibition of 1851 held at Hyde Park in central London was the first of a number of 19th century world's fairs. It was a celebration of British achievement and industry as well as gathering of world cultures.



Exterior view of The Crystal Palace, 1851
Hyde Park, London

Its centerpiece was the massive Crystal Palace. This pre-fabricated iron and glass building covered 770,000 square feet of floor space and housed 13,973 exhibitors. The building design was approved and the entire structure was manufactured and assembled within a year. The size of the building (1,848 feet wide x 456 feet deep with a centrally located barrel vault 110 feet high), its skin of clear glass (900,000 square feet of it) and the quick assembly of its pre-fabricated parts (by 2,000 unskilled labors) had a major influence on architecture of the period. The building's major drawback, a build-up of heat due to its greenhouse style construction, was temporary dealt with during the exhibition by draping canvas over the large roof.

Three million people or about a third of the population of Great Britain visited the Exhibition. High attendance created a surplus of £186,000 which was later used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, all of which were built in the area to the south of the exhibition site.

Interior view of one wing of The Crystal Palace

"As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast Exposition is now set in motion, so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind."

— President Grover Cleveland
Opening speech for the
World's Columbian Exposition

The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago

President Cleveland touching the
electric button to open the Exposition

The financial and cultural success of the Great Exhibition led to a period in which world’s fairs sparked the creation of museums. The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 generated the nucleus of the Smithsonian’s then new National Museum and Chicago's Field Museum arose from that city's hosting of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.