Exhibits
Technologies introduced at the fair include the Corliss Steam Engine. Pennsylvania Railroad displayed the John Bull steam locomotive that was originally built in 1831. Waltham Watch Company displayed the first automatic screw making machinery and won the Gold Medal in the first international watch precision competition. Until the start of 2004, many of the fair's exhibits were in the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building in Washington, DC, adjacent to the Castle building.
Consumer products first displayed to the public include:
- Alexander Graham Bell's telephone
- Remington Typographic Machine (typewriter)
- Heinz Ketchup
- Wallace-Farmer Electric Dynamo, precursor to (electric light)
- Hires Root Beer
- Kudzu erosion control plant species
A reconstruction of a "colonial kitchen" replete with spinning wheel and costumed presenters sparked an era of "Colonial Revival" in American architecture and house furnishings. The Swedish Cottage, representing a rural Swedish schoolhouse of traditional style, was re-erected after the Exposition closed, in Central Park, New York. It is now the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre.
The New Jersey official State Pavilion was a reconstruction of the Ford Mansion, which served as General George Washington’s Headquarters during the winter of 1779-80 in Morristown, New Jersey. The reconstruction had a working "colonial kitchen" featuring a polemical narrative of "old-fashioned domesticity." This quaint hearth and home view of the colonial past was juxtaposed against the theme of progress, the overarching theme of the exhibition serving to reinforce a view of American progress evolving from a small hearty colonial stock and not from a continual influx of multi-ethnic waves of immigration.
The right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty were showcased at the Exposition. For a fee of 50 cents, visitors could climb the ladder to the balcony, and the money raised this way was used to fund the rest of the statue.
The building where visitors picked up official Exposition catalogues was, after the Exposition, dismantled and moved to Wayne, Pennsylvania and later Strafford, Pennsylvania, where it still stands, serving as that community's train station.
Read more about this topic: Centennial Exposition
Famous quotes containing the word exhibits:
“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Every woman who visited the Fair made it the center of her orbit. Here was a structure designed by a woman, decorated by women, managed by women, filled with the work of women. Thousands discovered women were not only doing something, but had been working seriously for many generations ... [ellipsis in source] Many of the exhibits were admirable, but if others failed to satisfy experts, what of it?”
—Kate Field (1838–1908)
“It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)