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The Opening of the Great Exhibition - 1851

60 second histories
by: Squaducation date: 01 May

Opening of the Great Exhibition  -  

May 1st 1851

 

Many have credited Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, solely with the idea and plans for this wonderful event. However the idea and driver was a man called Henry Cole, the man also credited with the invention of the Christmas card. He was an assistant record keeper at the Public Record Office but also wrote and published journals, including the Journal of Design, as well as having a passion for the arts and industry.  

 

It was in 1846 that he met Prince Albert in his role as council member for the Society of Arts and the two got on well. Soon a Royal Charter was obtained and the society changed its name to the Royal Society for Encouragement of the Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce. They had both seen the exhibition in Paris in 1844 of French manufacturing and decided that one in London was necessary to show off not just British and Commonwealth industry, but also items from around the world. The official name was the “Great Exhibition of the works of industry of all nations” – the first international exhibition of its type.

 

The design of the hall produced massive interest and 248 plans from various architects – both amateur and professional. None of these was deemed good enough and a hybrid of all of them was put forward by the organisers. However it would take 15 months and 15 million bricks to make and this was not feasible. The design then chosen was by Joseph Paxton, who was mainly known for his greenhouses and had just designed one for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House. It would take 10 months to build, use 300,000 sheets of glass, each 1.3m x 25.3cm, 24 miles of a newly patented guttering to hold it all together and a ridge and furrow roof. The question now was where to put it. The Duke of Wellington proposed Hyde Park and this was agreed.

 

The building, known as the Crystal Palace, was built by 5,000 navvies and was 564m by 138m in size and over 30m high. In the centre was a fountain nearly 10m high made of pink glass. Queen Victoria opened it on time and on budget on May 1st 1851. It ran until October and was visited by over 6million people including Charles Darwin, Samuel Colt, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Eliot and Lewis Carroll. It was also the first venue with public toilet cubicles, designed by George Jennings. He charged a penny for using this facility, thus the expression ‘to spend a penny’.

 

The ‘palace’ held over 100,000 objects displayed along 10 miles by over 15,000 contributors. As a British exhibition the hosts were entitled to half the space which they used in conjunction with those in the Commonwealth. The biggest exhibit was a hydraulic press that had lifted the tubes used to construct a bridge in Bangor. Each tube weighed 1,144 tons, yet just one man operated the machine. There was also a steam hammer that could both forge the main bearing of a steamship as well as gently crack an egg. Liza Picard, writing for the British Library, explains some of the other items on display.

 

There were adding machines which might put bank clerks out of a job; a ‘stiletto or defensive umbrella’– always useful – and a ‘sportsman’s knife’ with eighty blades from Sheffield – not really so useful. One of the upstairs galleries was walled with stained glass through which the sun streamed in technicolour. Almost as brilliantly coloured were carpets from Axminster and ribbons from Coventry.

There was a printing machine that could turn out 5,000 copies of the popular periodical the Illustrated London News in an hour, and another for printing and folding envelopes, a machine for making the new-fangled cigarettes, and an expanding hearse. There were folding pianos convenient for yachtsmen, and others so laden with curlicues that the keyboard was almost overwhelmed. There was a useful pulpit connected to pews by rubber tubes so that the deaf could hear, and ‘tangible ink’ for the blind, producing raised characters on paper. A whole gallery was devoted to those elegant, sophisticated carriages that predated the motorcar, and if you looked carefully you could find one or two velocipedes, the early version of bicycles. There were printing presses and textile machines and agricultural machines. There were examples of every kind of steam engine, including the giant railway locomotives…In short, as the Queen put it in her Diary, ‘every conceivable invention’.

Canada sent a fire engine with painted panels showing Canadian scenes, and a trophy of furs. India contributed an elaborate throne of carved ivory, a coat embroidered with pearls, emeralds and rubies, and a magnificent howdah and trappings for a rajah’s elephant. (The elephant wearing it came from a museum of stuffed animals in England.)

The American display was headed by a massive eagle, wings outstretched, holding a drapery of the Stars and Stripes, all poised over one of the organs scattered throughout the building. Although the general idea of the Exhibition was the promotion of world peace, Colt’s repeating fire-arms featured prominently, but so did McCormick’s reaping machine. The exhibit that attracted most attention had to be Hiram Power’s statue of a Greek Slave, in white marble, housed in her own little red velvet tent, wearing nothing but a small piece of chain. This was of course allegorical.

The largest foreign contributor was France. She exhibited sumptuous tapestries, Sevres porcelain and silks from Lyons, enamels from Limoges and furniture. Unlike British exhibits in the same class, many of which were sadly lacking in taste, the visual impact of the French display was stunning. It was backed up by examples of the machinery used to produce these beautiful objects. France was a worrying competitor in the markets on which Britain prided itself, especially in textiles.

The Russian exhibits were late, having been delayed by ice in the Baltic. When they did arrive, they were superlative. They included huge vases and urns made of porcelain and malachite twice the height of a man, and furs and sledges and Cossack armour. Chile sent a single lump of gold weighing 50kg, Switzerland sent gold watches.

Amid all these wonders, there were two, which caught the public imagination. The first was the famous Koh-I-Noor diamond. It was supposed to be of inestimable value, but most people found it disappointing, although they crowded round to see it. It lay in a safe like a large parrot-cage, and on special days it was lit by a dozen little gas jets, but it still failed to sparkle. (It was not until it had been skilfully cut that its beauty emerged. It is now part of the Crown Jewels).

 

When it closed the exhibition had been self financing and had even made a profit large enough for Cole to construct buildings that would house the complex of Science and Natural History Museums and the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, the Royal Colleges of Art, Music and Organists, the Imperial College of Science and the Royal Albert Hall – not a bad legacy.

 

The history of the Crystal Palace however was not so happy. It was moved to Penge Common next to Sydenham in south London but was destroyed by fire on November 30th 1936. The insurance on the building was insufficient to rebuild it but the name was used to rename the nearby residential area Crystal Palace. 

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