Note sull'episodio
The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition marked 400 years since Columbus and drew over 27 million visitors when the US population was about 65 million. Chicago beat New York for it on the eighth ballot in the House after banker Lyman Gage raised millions more in 24 hours. Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted turned swampy Jackson Park into a Beaux-Arts city made of staff, a mix of plaster, cement, and jute over wood frames, and Francis Davis Millet spray-painted it white with compressed air. That White City inspired the City Beautiful movement and the 1909 Plan of Chicago.
Westinghouse underbid Edison's 1.72 million dollar offer to light the fair with alternating current, and after Edison's bulb patent blocked him, crews constantly replaced fragile stopper lamps. Tesla spun his Egg of Columbus on a rotating magnetic field. The Midway Plaisance brought George Ferris's 264 foot wheel, Juicy Fruit, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the zipper's ancestor, but African American exhibits were shut out, prompting a protest pamphlet by Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, while non-white peoples were displayed in mock villages. A Cold Storage Building fire killed 15, Mayor Carter Harrison was assassinated just before closing, and fire consumed most of the grounds in July 1894.
- How Tesla's copper egg demonstrated the principle of the AC induction motor
- The Ferris wheel's 36 cars, each holding 40 riders, driven by two 1,000 horsepower steam engines
- Douglass handing out 10,000 copies of The Reason Why from the Haitian Pavilion
- H. H. Holmes walking the fairgrounds with Annie and Minnie Williams
- The Palace of Fine Arts becoming the Museum of Science and Industry, and Katharine Lee Bates writing America the Beautiful