(1851)
Opened with great pomp and ceremony by Queen Victoria this seminal international exhibition was held in what the periodical Punch dubbed ‘the Crystal Palace’, a prefabricated structure of iron and glass designed by Joseph Paxton and erected in Hyde Park, London. It attracted more than 6 million visitors, involved more than 15,000 exhibitors, and had more than 10 miles (16 km) of display frontage. Fifty per cent of the exhibiting space was devoted to 7,351 British and Empire products and the rest to 6,556 products from overseas. Although it had been hoped that the Great Exhibition would bring together positively the fields of art, science, and manufacture, in the event it attracted considerable critical debate. Many of the highly ornamented and decorative designs exhibited technical ingenuity for its own sake and, as a result, attracted the antipathy of leading Victorian design critics. These included Richard Redgrave, Ralph Nicholson Wornum, Owen Jones, and others opposed to what Augustus Welby Pugin and John Ruskin saw as morally decadent and constructionally dishonest products. The 17-year-old William Morris was also horrified by what he saw. However, it should also be remembered that many of the designs that featured on such an important international stage were especially made to win prestige and were therefore by nature more decorative and deliberately eye-catching than many more functional and ornamentally restrained designs for everyday mass production. International exhibitions, by their very nature, were designed to explore new markets, to consolidate existing ones, or to establish leadership in particular fields, thus providing important platforms for national economic and industrial policy initiatives.
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations had its generic roots in a series of French National Exhibitions that had begun in Paris in 1798 where manufacturers from many branches of industry showed a wide range of products including ceramics, glass, furniture, and textiles. Just as the French National Exhibitions had been intended to restore French manufacturing industry to its former position of dominance in the wake of the political upheavals of the Revolution, so the Great Exhibition of 1851 was the culmination of a number of initiatives in the 1830s and 1840s to re-establish the position of British industry as the ‘workshop of the world’ after a period of decline following the Napoleonic Wars. These included the establishment in 1935 of a Parliamentary Select Committee on The Arts and their Connection with Manufacturers and the subsequent institution of a national framework for design education. By 1849, the 11th French National Exhibition attracted 4,500 exhibitors and its scale and ambition resulted in key British design propagandists Henry Cole and Digby Wyatt being asked to report back on it to the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). In Britain, during the 1840s, the Royal Society of Arts had itself mounted a series of small-scale competitions promoting British industrial products that embraced the principles of artistic design. Such initiatives had brought Cole into the Society and, from 1847, developed into a series of annual exhibitions of industrial products culminating in the show of 1849, which attracted 73,000 visitors over a period of seven weeks. With the support of Prince Albert, the president of the RSA, and spurred on by Cole and Wyatt's 1849 report that the French were themselves considering an international exhibition, British ambitions were raised to do the same and a Royal Commission was swiftly established early in 1850 to oversee its development. Although the RSA severed its formal connections with the exhibition as a result, a number of its key members continued to serve on the commission.
At the Great Exhibition itself the public could admire many works that could be seen to embrace the interlinked fields of art, science, and manufacture, typified by a range of high-quality products manufactured by the Coalbrookdale Company. Amongst them were the ornamental gates to the exhibition, an Iron Dome, chairs, sculptures, and a variety of detailed ornamental castings, a number of which were designed by artists that had been employed by Henry Cole for his Felix Summerley's Art Manufactures. Of considerable public interest were the machine tools and other exhibits that reflected the advances that had been made in civil and mechanical engineering, including railway locomotives, Nasmyth's steam hammer, marine engines by Maudslay and others, more than twenty machine tools manufactured by Whitworth, and the crowd-pulling envelope-making machine by De La Rue. Such attention reflected the considerable esteem that the public held for Victorian engineers. Visitors were also able to indulge their curiosity in countless other exemplars of technical virtuosity, whether a garden seat for Queen Victoria carved from a block of coal, a penknife with 80 blades and tools, or steamship furniture capable of conversion to life-rafts. The literal absurdity of such exhibits was satirized in Punch magazine's account of ‘Mr Punch's Counter at the Great Exhibition’, a distant resonance of Jonathan Swift's ironic portrayal of the Royal Society in his satirical novel Gulliver's Travels published 125 years earlier. By the mid 19th century materials such as papier maché had achieved a considerable level of durability, approaching that of wood, and could be seen in a wide variety of artefacts, from chairs to pianos. Articles manufactured from gutta percha, a material first intorduced to the British public in the 1840s and patented in 1844, were also displayed at the exhibition. It was able to be moulded, stamped, coloured, cast, and polished and was used for a wide variety of goods, including ornaments. Also widely admired for their novelty in 1851 were electroplated industrial art products and examples of Parian were, a medium imitating marble and capable of holding considerable detail that had been developed by ceramic manufacturers Minton & Copeland in the 1840s.
Amongst the many functional exhibits on display in the Crystal Palace the greatest impression was made by those from the United States of America that capitalized on the exploitation of standardization as a means of harnessing the true potential of mass-production technologies for mass markets. This outlook became known as the American System of Manufactures and was seen in products such as Colt's firearms, Hobbs' locks, McCormick's reaper and sewing machines. Its economic potential was sufficient to bring about the establishment of a Royal Commission that reported on the Machinery of the United States in 1854-5.
The Great Exhibition proved to be a highly profitable venture with a profit of £186,437, the surplus being used for educational purposes including the purchase of 87 acres (35 hectares) in South Kensington, London, as a centre for the arts and sciences. It was here that the 1862 International and the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibitions were later mounted and now housed a number of key buildings connected with the arts and sciences including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, Imperial College, and the Science Museum. The 1851 exhibition also stimulated a whole series of other international exhibitions, commencing with the Great Industrial Exhibition in Dublin and the World's Fair in New York in 1853, followed by the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855.
