A Victorian Wonder.

The Great Exhibition - 1851.

What have these objects in common?

-         A knife with 1,851 blades

-         Furniture carved from giant lumps of coal

-         A bed that became a life raft

-         The world’s largest mirror

-         The model of a suspension bridge designed to link England with France?

Answer: They were all displayed at The Great Exhibition of 1851.

Queen Victoria opening The Great Exhibition, 1st May 1851.

Housed within the magnificent Crystal Palace (see previous post), Prince Albert’s idea was to draw together up-to-date technology from all over the world, to display under one roof.  

The concept was a roaring success. The Great Exhibition received over 827,000 visitors in the (just under) six months it was open. The busiest day was October 7^th (just before the Exhibition closed) with a total of 110,000 visitors on that one day. At one point 92,000 people were inside the Crystal Palace at the same time – a world record of the day.

But amidst the hustle and crush, there was one oasis of calm – the Newfoundland Exhibition. Their display took the visitor through the production of cod liver oil and mysteriously, wasn’t very popular.

The American display nearly didn’t happen at all. Congress provided sufficient funds to ship their exhibits as far as England but no further. With their goods impounded at the docks, it was an American philanthropist, George Peabody, who stumped up the $15,000 to get the display up and running. However, after this unpromising start, the goods themselves came as a huge surprise. There were innovative machines for doing really useful things such as a sewing machine by Elias Howe, an automated reaper by Cyrus McCormick and an automated revolver by Samuel Colt.



The India Pavilion at The Great Exhibition.


But strangely, the most popular place within The Great Exhibition were the elegant retiring rooms. Furnished with flushing toilets they were a revelation in themselves and not to be missed. In one day alone, these toilets accommodated the comfort of 11,000 people – quite something when at the time the British Museum boasted of having two, outside privies.

The Crystal Palace, home to The Great Exhibition, in Hyde Park.

 The Great Exhibition was such a success that it generated a profit of 186,000 GBP. With this money thirty acres of land, just south of Hyde Park was purchased which became affectionately known as ‘Albertropolis.’ It was on this site that most of the famous institutions and museums that dominate London to this day were built: The Royal Albert Hall, Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum and the Royal Colleges of Art and of Music. So even though The Great Exhibition is gone, the legacy lives on.



The entrance hall to the Natural History Museum, London - in the modern day.



'Miraculously Improbable,' - The Crystal Palace.

‘Miraculously Improbable’ – the Crystal Palace.

Following my midweek post ‘Regency Panes’,  let’s look at a Victorian glass building:

“As miraculously improbable as a giant soap bubble.”

Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, 1851. (Thanks to mytimemachine.co.uk)

The building is, of course, the Crystal Palace – home of The Great Exhibition, 1851. But this wonderful edifice didn’t start life with such a snappy name; it’s original title was,

‘The Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.’

When the Punch columnist, Douglas Jerrold, saw the finished building he dubbed it ‘The Crystal Palace’, and the name stuck!

 Punch Magazine, reknown for its dry wit and caustic humour.

The idea for the Great Exhibition is credited to a civil servant, Henry Cole (incidentally, Mr Cole is also credited with the invention of the Christmas card – as a way of encouraging people to use the penny post.) But designing a suitable building to house the exhibition did not go smoothly. A competition ran, but of the 245 entries, all were rejected as unsuitable. It fell to the unlikely person of the head gardener at Chatsworth House, Joseph Paxton, to have the idea of a giant building based on hot houses.

Contempory view of Crystal Palace.

With a certain serendipity, two events meant his design became possible. First was the invention of sheet glass (which cooled more quickly, required less polishing and could therefore be produced more rapidly than plate glass) and secondly, the abolition of the Window Tax (1696, tax on the number of windows) and Glass Tax (1746 tax on the weight of glass in a window)

The beauty of Paxton’s design was that the building was made from interlocking parts which could be manufactured off-site, and assembled on-site; like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Cast iron trusses measuring 3 foot by 23 foot 3 inches, formed a giant frame from which a total of a million square foot of glass  hung – a third of England’s glass production for a year.

St Paul's Cathedral during The Blitz, WW II.

The finished building measured exactly 1,851 feet long (as a tribute to the year, 1851, when The Great Exhibition was opened). The interior volume was so vast that four Saint Paul’s Cathedral would fit inside; but the Crystal Palace took a mere 35 weeks to build, whereas Saint Paul’s Cathedral took 35 years.

In 1851 this glinting, transparent building was almost beyond the public’s imagination,

“..as miraculously improbable as a giant soap bubble.”

The magnificent interior, large enough to accomodate Hyde Park's elm trees.

[ Next Wednesday – NEW blog post on:  Terrific Great Exhibition Trivia ]