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| Telephone display at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (source: American Society of Electrical Engineers) |
Judging by press accounts and historians' notes, the technology of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition was the technology of expansion—the technologies that made transportation and life in and on the land of the fair's century-old namesake possible.
Though westward expansion as a concept was more than a century-old by the time of the fair, it seems the organizers of the 1904 exhibition took it upon themselves to at least slightly prove the viability of a good life in both St. Louis and the Western United States.
Something to prove
The St. Louis/Chicago rivalry is about more than baseball. As the United States developed in the 19th Century, St. Louis's riverfront location gave it an edge in Midwestern commercial dominance. But the railroads weakened river commerce, and the Civil War further damaged business downriver. In a 2014 retrospective on the fair, journalist Tim O'Neil notes that St. Louis originally bid for the 1893 Columbian Exhibition. The city also initially seemed poised to lose the first American Olympic Games to its rival. Headed into its own Worlds Fair, St. Louis had much to prove to prevent itself from becoming Chicago's smaller prairie sibling.
In this way, it seems like the Paris of 1889, which John Stamper describes as eager to display the works of its host country and show it hadn't lost its ability to innovate in the hundred years since the revolution. [4] Stamper also describes Vienna in 1873 as "challenging the dominance of London and Paris" in being the first city outside of England or France to host an expo. [3] (There's little evidence to suggest the competition with Chicago played out in the display of St. Louis goods over that of its rival, as described in Darryl Hafter's piece on Paris in 1806 [2]. And while there's no equivalent to the Eifel Tower [1] remaining from the 1904 fair, St. Louis's expo did inspire a lasting work of Americana, in the musical Meet Me In St. Louis.)
An easier life with technology
The chief displays of technology at the fair were in the Palace of Electricity and the Palace of Machinery (home to the fair's power generator). Each was designed by a St. Louis-area firm, and the two stood next to each other on the fairgrounds.
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| The Palace of Electricity (source: Missouri Historical Society) |
The standout exhibit of the Palace of Electricity was the a wireless telegraph tower, which, as the Missouri Historical Society notes, "allowed fairgoers to send wireless messages to Chicago and Springfield without using a telegraph line." The MHS also notes that the display "wished to show that electricity was the lifeblood of the twentieth century and gain a glimpse of electricity’s potential." A handbook published by The American Society of Electrical Engineers—which held its convention in St. Louis in 1904—details many demonstrations of telephonic technology, electricity, and machinery at the fair. Most of these were put on by individual power companies displaying their various electric motors and how they could power assorted apparatuses.
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| The Palace of Machinery (source: Missouri Historical Society) |
In the Palace of Transportation, trains of all types were displayed, but the MHS notes that a fairly new but not widely available invention was shown, too: "160 automobiles that suggested new possibilities of travel."
These displays begin to form a pattern. And, given Stamper's writings on how fairs were an opportunity to demonstrate the power and potential of the host country or region, they take on a symbolic value when given the settings around them. In the week of the fair's opening, the St. Louis Palladium newspaper noted that the true spirit of the fair was "not the states of the east, but these of the west, the states carved out of the Louisiana territory, the states that stretch from the gulf to the Canadian border, from the Mississippi River to the Puget sound; states that have within a century of time been builded out of the wilderness."
The emphasis on the new land, its agricultural output (the Palace of Agriculture was the largest at the fair), and the focus on the potential of then-developing communications and transportation technologies tells a story in itself. It's the story of an untamed land being tamed. It's a land being tamed by individuals, and a land that is now open to individuals. Personal automobiles can carry one person west at a time. One person can speak on a telephone to another in a private conversation free from telegraph operators or telegram takers (though for decades party lines presented the potential for annoying interruptions to this person-to-person communication). Phones, cars, and wireless telegraphs all shrink the lands west of the Mississippi to a scale the size of the individual. The technology on display in St. Louis was technology that made land not only livable, but reachable, and showed that life on this land could be not only possible, but pleasurable.
Source List
[1] Reading: William Thompson “’The Symbol of Paris:’ Writing the Eiffel Tower” The French Review vol. 73, no. 6 (May 2000) pp. 1130-1140.
[2] Daryl M. Hafter “The Business of Invention in the Paris Industrial Exposition of 1806,” The Business History Review vol. 58, no. 3 (Autumn 1984) pp. 317-335.
[3] John W. Stamper “The Industry Palace of the 1873 World’s Fair: Karl von Hasenauer, John Scott Russell, and New Technology in Nineteenth-Century Vienna,” Architectural History vol. 47, (2004) pp. 227-250.
[4] John W. Stamper “The Galerie des Machines of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair,” Technology and Culture vol. 30, no. 2 Apr. 1989 pp. 330-353.
John W. Stamper “The Galerie des Machines of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair,” Technology and Culture vol. 30, no. 2 Apr. 1989 pp. 330-353.
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