America at the Fair
Page 17
Western Wheel Works (1891–1899) used the ornate entrance of the Transportation Building as a backdrop to advertise its bicycles. It was one of some 75 bicycle manufacturers in Chicago at the time of the Fair. Many failed in the Depression of 1893–1897 and nearly all were out of business by the start of the 20th century.
Thos. Cook & Son offered individual and group travel to selected destinations in Britain, Europe, the Holy Land, Egypt, and as far away as India, Australia, and New Zealand. Their ultimate offering for the wealthy was the “Round the World Tour” by land and sea covering 25,000 miles and lasting 222 days. The grand tour started with a tour of London and then left by train to Liverpool for the 3,000-mile journey by steamship across the Atlantic to New York. After a stay of several days in New York, the tour moved by train to Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Niagara Falls, and on to Chicago. From Chicago, it traveled through the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake City and on to San Francisco. Next came the 16 to 18 day steamship cruise across the Pacific to Japan. After five weeks touring Japan, the tour moved on to Hong Kong, Canton, and Singapore, and then to the splendors of British India and Ceylon. Several weeks later the travelers boarded the P&O steamship from Bombay en route to Egypt through the Suez Canal, and toured the pyramids and the bazaars. Guests sailed the Nile River on the 221-foot Ramses the Great, powered by a 500 horsepower engine, or one of three other river steamers owned by Thos. Cook & Son. From Port Said, the Cook world tour crossed the Mediterranean to visit the glories of Italy before traveling to Paris and ending in London. Cook’s 1893 guided round-the-world “strictly first-class tour” covered all “necessary expenses” at a cost of £450. Americans who started the tour in San Francisco and ended in London paid £355.
Thos. Cook & Son of London was the world’s leading luxury travel company. Cook & Son’s booth at the Fair advertised round-the-world tours covering 25, 000 miles over 222 days.
The British exhibit included the Rocket steam engine, which entered service in 1828. Steam locomotives started running in the United States in 1830, making the canal system redundant.
The first steamship journeys across the Atlantic took place in 1838. Soon, the Hamburg-America, Red Star, Cunard, and White Star lines were offering regular voyages from European ports to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The principal European ports sending steamers to the New World were Liverpool, Hamburg, Bremen, and Genoa. The North German Lloyd sailed from Bremen to New York with weekly steamer service as well as sailings to South America and Australia. North German Lloyd displayed at the Fair a map of the world showing the daily location of its 80 steamers on the high seas. The steamers took eight to twelve days from various European ports to New York, with luxury suites costing up to $500 one way (as much as a Chicago meat-cutter earned in a year). The 19th century traveler had access to excellent guidebooks. John Murray published the first guide books of London and selected places on the Continent in 1836. Karl Baedeker in Leipzig published his guidebooks in German, English, French, and Italian. These classic guides of Britain, the Continent, the Holy Land, and Egypt were written by experts and came with detailed maps and illustrations. Andre and Edouard Michelin in France began their series of guidebooks in 1900.
The White Star Steamship Line had its own pavilion in the shadow of the vast Manufactures building. The company was founded in 1845 to carry gold prospectors from Europe to Australia. In 1868 the company was bought by Sir Edward Harland of Harland & Wolff shipbuilders of Belfast. Harland and Wolff built the luxury liner Majestic and its sister ship Teutonic for the Liverpool to New York run. The White Star pavilion at the Fair displayed models of the dining, smoking, reading, and state rooms of these liners to encourage travel to Europe. 13
Domestic travel companies arranged excursions to the World’s Columbian Exposition. Raymond & Whitcomb of Philadelphia offered tours between May and October 1893. Travelers assembled at the Baltimore & Ohio railway station for an 11:35 a.m. departure in the first-class compartment of a Pullman Palace sleeping car. The trains, fitted with luxury dining rooms, traveled via Washington and Baltimore to arrive in Chicago at 6:00 p.m. the following day, a journey of 18 hours and 25 minutes. The passengers were accommodated near the fairgrounds at the Raymond & Whitcomb hotel. The hotel’s 325 luxury rooms each came with its own bathroom and porcelain tub. The passengers spent seven days at the Fair, touring the major sights and enjoying the fun at the Midway Plaisance. At the end of their visit, the travelers boarded a train for Port Huron, on to Niagara Falls, and returned to Philadelphia. The 11-day, all-inclusive trip to and from Chicago cost $125. For those who could afford an even more spectacular trip, Raymond & Whitcomb offered extensions from Chicago to Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, California, Yellowstone National Park, and even Alaska.
Railroads
During the last third of the 19th century, the United States vastly expanded its railroad network. The tracks laid between 1880 and 1890 alone would have traveled four times around the world (Tryon, Lingley & Morehouse 1930). In all, 200,000 miles of track, bridges, and stations covered the eastern half of the nation, with new lines extending to the west and the southwest. Steel rails had replaced iron to hold the heavier and more powerful locomotives, pulling more freight cars. Over 100 American companies were in the business of building steam locomotives. The largest of these were the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia; the Lima Locomotive Works of Lima, Ohio; and the Schenectady Locomotive Works. In 1901, Schenectady joined with seven smaller works to form the American Locomotive Company. Baldwin built the locomotives for the Pennsylvania Railroad and Topeka & Santa Fe, as well as exporting engines as far afield as India. Chicago—the major center for the railroad supply industry—was home to Pullman Palace Car Company, American Car Company, and Union Car Company. In the early 1890s, Pullman alone built 12,000 freight cars and 1,800 passenger cars a year. The Griffin Wheel Foundry Company of Chicago made the wheels for the heaviest of the railroad locomotives and carriages. The Chicago-based meat packers—Swift, Armour, and Morris—had fleets of thousands of refrigerated cars. The mills in Indiana and Pennsylvania forged the steel for the rails and the bridges. Railroads were a dangerous business, and accidents from braking and coupling, falling off the rails, and industrial diseases such as asbestos, phosphorus, and lead exposure, were common.
The Chicago & North Western was one of the great Midwestern railroad systems. It was known as the “Pioneer Railroad” because its 1848 predecessor was the Galena & Chicago, the first railroad to enter Chicago. This illustration shows the C & N.W. 1893 steam locomotive Columbia.
Over 250 locomotive and railroad supply companies were represented in the American section of the Transportation Building. Among these were Acme Railway Appliance Company of Boston (maker of electric signaling appliances), American Refrigerator Transit Company of St Louis, American Railway Water Company of Chicago (maker of automatic water station and pumping equipment), Buckeye Automatic Car Coupler Company of Columbus, and Cleveland Fog & Crossing Company (maker of switches for fog and crossing alerts). The Marion Steam Shovel Company displayed its steam-powered shovels on wheels, the Sheffield Velocipede Car Company demonstrated its one-man underground mine car propelled along narrow rails by foot-power, and the Baldwin Works showed its powerful 200,000-pound locomotives. There were companies that made shades for train carriage windows, cables for electric trolleys, brakes, gates, wheels, steering, axles, and railway lamps. The historic Pioneer, used in 1848 on the Chicago to Galena line and the first locomotive to enter Chicago, was on display. The Old Colony Railroad from Boston to Cape Cod showed one of its early steam engines, while the Chicago & Northwestern line displayed its newest engine. These demonstration locomotives were jacked up a half-inch above their rails. Steam power turned the wheels and blew the whistle—to the delight of the crowds. The Pullman Car Company showed its opulent dining and parlor cars as well as the luxury of its sleeping cars. The New York Central displayed its express engine, capable of speeds of 100 miles per hour. I
n the Transportation Building, the steam-powered locomotive was still king, but the nearby Electrical Building showed that electric street trolleys and locomotives were ready to compete.
Carriages
Three acres in the north section of the Transportation Building were devoted to a display of horse-drawn carriages, still the main form of transportation. As late as 1893, there were thousands of companies across the United States making pony carts, surreys, buggies, phaetons, rockaways, coupes, wagons, sulkies, and trotting sleighs. There were many companies making farm and lumber wagons, grocery delivery wagons, street sprinklers, fertilizer spreaders, and fire wagons, as well as companies making saddles, harnesses, bridles, whips, and horse-blankets. Among those at the Fair were the Brewster Company of New York; the Favorite Carriage Company of Storrs, Ohio; and Fulton & Walker of Philadelphia. The James Cunningham Company of Rochester, New York, and the Rock Falls Manufacturing Company of Sterling, Illinois, displayed their horse-drawn hearses and funeral carriages.
The city of Columbus grew with the railroads and its designation as the capital of the state of Ohio. It was home to some 30 buggy companies and was known as the “Buggy Capital of the World.” The largest of these companies was The Columbus Buggy Company, founded in 1875 by Clinton Dewitt Firestone. The company advertised extensively and developed markets across the nation. To meet growing demand, the company built new vehicles at the rate of one every eight minutes. One of its salesmen was Harvey Samuel Firestone, born in 1868, who determined that rubber tires would give a more comfortable ride than the standard steel-on-wood. In 1890, he left Columbus Buggy to start his own company. In 1904, the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company contracted with Henry Ford to make pneumatic tires for Ford automobiles. Early in the 20th century, Columbus Buggy tried its hand at building automobiles, but the venture failed and the company declared bankruptcy in 1913.
Morgan & Company of London attempted to enter the high end of the American carriage market.
Henry and Clement Studebaker started their carriage business in a blacksmith shop in 1852 in South Bend, Indiana. During the Civil War, the Studebaker brothers built wagons for Union forces and grew to become one of the nation’s largest carriage makers. In 1902 the company began the switch from horse-drawn vehicles to electric- and gasoline-powered automobiles. By 1919, horse-drawn Studebaker vehicles were no longer made, and the company was the only one of the thousands of American wagon makers to successfully move to automobiles. A half-century later, the Studebaker automobile plant too, went out of business.
This picture shows Pope Manufacturing Company’s exhibit of Columbia bicycles. Pope was the largest bicycle company at the time but failed as an automobile maker.
Recycling—Sewing Machines to Bicycles
In 1846, Elias Howe Jr. of Spencer, Massachusetts, invented the sewing machine, but his device was soon copied by others. Between 1850 and 1890 there were over 250 companies in the United States making sewing machines, with the Singer Company becoming dominant through innovation and cost cutting. As the market became saturated, many sewing machine companies turned to bicycle making in order to survive. One of these distressed companies was the Weed Sewing Machine Company in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1876, Albert Pope, a Boston shoe machinery maker, attended the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and, smitten by the British-made high-wheeler bicycles, decided to import them into the United States. The steep import tariffs of the day persuaded Pope to instead manufacture his own bicycles close to home. He contracted with the Weed Company to build the high wheelers, and later took over the Weed factory for his Columbia bicycles, based on the British-made Duplex Excelsior. Pope’s American-made high-wheelers were sold for $100, which made them $20 cheaper than imported bicycles. Pope popularized bicycle ownership by sponsoring bicycle races, riding clubs, sports clothing, and riding magazines. The high-wheeler—with a front wheel of 46 to 52 inches and a small back wheel—was heavy and clumsy, and accidents were frequent. The bicycle craze took off in 1890 with the development of the safety bicycle, which had smaller wheels of equal size, and pneumatic rubber tires to cushion the ride on rutted roads. Safety bicycles weighed only 35 pounds, and women joined the men in the pleasures of bicycle riding. Some 3,000 companies in America alone tried their hand at building bicycles. Fashions changed forever as riding bloomers and pants liberated women from corsets, stiff petticoats, and ankle-length dresses. Bicycle shops selling the latest equipment and stores selling bicycle clothing appeared in every town.
The major American bicycle companies exhibited their goods in the Transportation Building at the Fair. Pope Manufacturing, America’s leading bicycle company, had the largest exhibit. Also present were the Chicago companies Western Wheel Works, American Cycle, Ames & Frost, Featherstone, Bradley Chainless Bicycle Company of Albany, Central Clyde of Indianapolis, Lozier of Toledo, Stearns of Syracuse, Warwick of Springfield, and Rouse Hazard of Peoria. The 1893 Fair caught the bicycle craze near its peak, with bicycle companies rapidly expanding to meet demand. The industry peaked in 1899, when one million bicycles were sold, but early in the new century the demand cooled. In 1914 , only 160,000 American-made bicycles were sold as companies merged or failed. The rise and fall of the sewing machine was followed by the rise and fall of bicycles. None of the American bicycle companies was successful in shifting to automobiles (Herlihy 2004).
Three acres of floor space in the Transportation Building displayed horse carts, carriages, buggies, phaetons, coupes, and wagons. Electricity and the gasoline engine would soon do away with horse-power.
The 1876 Centennial Exposition awed Philadelphia with the power of steam. Seventeen years later the Chicago Fair excited everyone with the promise of electricity. In the 1890s the horse and cart were still extensively used in towns and on the farm. For long distances, the steam locomotive and the steamship dominated. Electric-powered street trolleys and diesel and gasoline engines were beginning to appear and were rapidly changing the modes of travel. Very few visitors to the Fair could have imagined that the omnipresent railroads, railroad stations, horse carriages, steamships, street trolleys, and even bicycle companies would soon fade as the gasoline-powered automobile began its 20th century rise.
10. MACHINERY HALL
The Machinery Hall, also known as the Palace of Mechanical Arts, was designed by the Boston architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns. Robert Swain Peabody (1845–1917) descended from old Massachusetts stock and graduated from Harvard College the year after the Civil War ended. In 1870, Peabody and John Goddard Stearns Jr. (1843–1917) formed a partnership that went on to design many distinguished buildings. The firm was a favorite of America’s super-rich, such as the Vanderbilt clan and J. Pierpont Morgan. Using Colonial Revival, Victorian Gothic, and French Academic styles, Peabody & Stearns were the architects for nine of the grand Newport cottages. The firm designed many of Boston’s elegant Back Bay townhouses, the Custom House, and the boat houses at Harvard and Yale. Their fame spread beyond New England. In 1887 Peabody & Stearns designed the James Hill House on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, with 36,000 square feet of living space in 42 rooms and 13 bathrooms, each with running hot and cold water. At the 1893 Fair, Peabody & Stearns also designed the Massachusetts Pavilion, in Colonial Revival style and based on John Hancock’s home.
The Machinery Hall was 846 feet long and 492 feet wide with a total floor space exceeding 23 acres. At the eastern doorway was the seated figure of Columbia with a sword in her right hand and the olive branch of peace in her left. A statue of the proud and erect Christopher Columbus was at the northern entrance to the hall. Hundreds of American exhibits were clustered in the west and south of the building, with the foreign exhibits in the east and north. Machinery Hall showed the “inventive skills” of American engineers in the “transmission of power whether by electric, steam, hydraulic or pneumatic apparatus.” There were over 70 classes and thousands of individual exhibits showing “almost every mechanical device fashioned by the ingenuity of man” (Bancro
ft 1893). On display were the tools and machines to build America’s schools, railroads, bridges, street trolleys, and factories, as well as the utilities for clean water, sewerage removal, and power. The latest machinery to manufacture textiles, shoes, hats, and gloves, and to fight fires and cut wood, were on display. The sewing machines, parlor stoves, kitchen ranges, pianos, magazines, books, and newspapers that were coming into the home were displayed in Machinery Hall The clamor of the ingenious engines and the whirling of the wheels in the hall was deafening, but still the crowds came. These products of the American system of mass-production supplied abundant consumer goods at prices the working man and woman could afford.