By James Pethokoukis and Charles Pappas

At the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, more than 50 million visitors came to explore pavilions of Space Age optimism. General Motors’ Futurama ride gave a 15-minute tour of the near future, complete with underwater hotels and a Jetsonian city of tomorrow. Techno-optimism was characteristic of other World’s Fairs in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. But what happened to the World’s Fairs and the vision of the future they presented? To answer that question, I’ve brought on Charles Pappas.

Charles is a senior writer at Exhibitor Magazine, where he covers trade shows and World’s Fairs, and the author of Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World’s Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: If I Google “World’s Fair” there will be a little question box that pops up. And the first question that gets asked is, “Are there still World’s Fairs?”

Well, beside the question you’ll probably see a picture of your grandmother, because most people sort of assume that this is something old people used to do. But a lot of the problem is that the access of World’s Fairs has moved from America and London and Paris over to what was, if you will, the “Third World” — to Shanghai, to Kazakhstan, and now to Dubai. It’s really an exercise in soft power for those countries and all the people who exhibit there, but ever since the debacle of the World’s Fair in 1984 in New Orleans, we have lost sight of them. And we sort of assume that nobody does them anymore. And if they did, what would be the point?

I think to the extent that maybe younger people are aware of World’s Fairs, it’s likely because they’re fans of The Simpsons cartoon. There’s a famous episode which makes fun of the ’82 Knoxville World’s Fair, showing it as a ghost town and making a big joke of it. And then you mentioned the ’84 New Orleans World’s Fair. So were those the last big World’s Fairs in the United States?

Those were the last gasp. ’82 in Knoxville, you’re right, was immortalized by the Simpsons. And it is a wonderful episode, but a little unfair in how it’s posited, because for one thing, we introduced touch screens there — they were called AccuTouch — and that was America’s and the world’s first glimpse of what computing would bring you. New Orleans, a couple years later, had the dubious distinction of going broke before the fair ended. And that really kind of crystallized the idea that fairs just can’t be run anymore, that there’s no attraction to them, that there’s nothing new they can show the way they used to. But as we’ve seen though, in the last few years, that’s been turned upside down, especially by Shanghai and now Dubai, where in a real way they’re bringing the future to the world.

I want to talk about why the US seemed to, in a substantial way, get out of the World’s Fair business, and why it’s coming back. Well, let’s just take a step back: How did they begin? There have always been markets and exhibitions showing their wares. But when did what we would think of as a modern World’s Fair begin?

The modern one began . . . Well, let’s blame it on the French. Because in 1851, the first real World’s Fair, “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” took place in London. But the reason it came about was in 1844, seven years before, there was a Paris industrial fair where they were showing the works of the nation of France. So two British people, Matthew Wyatt and Henry Cole got the idea that Britain could do this and Britain could launch itself on the world’s stage even more, but it would open itself up to competition. So they created a vast structure called the Crystal Palace, which was 1,851 feet long, 408 feet wide, and nine stories tall. They invited 14,000 exhibitors, 6,500 of which were from other countries. It created the modern idea of the World’s Fair, not just as a place to show products, but as a place to present the future and, not coincidentally, to exercise soft power nation-building. And ever since then, it’s segued into Paris, into Vienna, into the United States. And now, as I’ve said before, it’s occurring in other parts of the world that want to launch themselves on the world’s stage and to establish themselves through this exhibition of power and ideas, and to communicate with the world what they’re all about.

I would imagine with the Crystal Palace exhibition, if you were just a farmer, a rural person in England, you must have really felt like you were taking a big step into the future at that point.

Well, when you look at buildings, for instance, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, you’re seeing something that’s pretty extravagant and kind of awesome. So imagine, as you just said, that person in 1851 who may never have traveled more than a few miles outside of their birthplace, who’s seeing a palace of glass and steel rods unlike anything ever done before — because the architect Joseph Paxton designed it biomorphically, that is, based on nature. So he took an Amazonian water Lily — named, of course, in honor of Queen Victoria — and then designed a building around that.

So you’re walking up to a glass palace, it’s so tall and so big that an urban legend springs up immediately about it, that they had to bring in an army of hawks to take out all the sparrows that were congregating inside and picking up the food bits. Now it’s not true, but it should have been. But the real fact here is that’s how it impressed itself on the consciousness of Britain — that there was this extravagant, almost science-fiction idea of what architecture could be, of what Britain could be at that time. And accordingly, it drew the world’s attention. So roughly six million people came, in a time when the population of England itself was about 10 million. So it gives you an idea of how many people saw it. And then think what that does: That’s a congregation of people, a concentration of the populace that can create the tipping point for ideas, for ideologies, and spread throughout the world (faster now than then, but fast nonetheless).

What I find so interesting is that you had this exhibition during the Industrial Revolution, maybe even the Second Industrial Revolution, that was really beginning to accelerate, that was moving beyond just better weaving technology. And this was sort of sending a message: I would think that this revolution is going to be wild; it’s going to create something amazing. For most of humanity, one day was sort of like the next, but if you go to the exhibition, you would think, “Wow, tomorrow may not be like today, it could be very, very different.”

You hit on a key point here: the idea that everybody could have the benefit of this because of industrialization, the ability to produce a lot of products very fast and ship them all over the world. So at the next World’s Fair, 1855 in Paris, almost everything you could see had a price tag on it, meaning you could go up and just buy it. And how amazing would that be in an era when so many things were bespoke, when so many things relied on craftspeople to make them individually — which has a beauty of its own, obviously, but there’s also a beauty in millions being able to join in and enjoy products that uplift their lives and make their labor a little easier. So then along with that, you start getting ideas introduced as well as products. In fact, they started to launch the concept of kindergarten and of buying on credit at the World’s Fair in 1855. You start getting this kind of mass consumption of products and ideas that people can now use to make their lives better.

And that, again, sort of acts as a fuel to really spur even more countries to want to do these expos, to show, “Yeah, we can join in; we’re the same.” And we can kind of laugh at their naïveté, if you will, but it’s better to compete on that stage than to use guns to do it. And in that sense, Europe was expanding, Europe was growing — not without pains, obviously. But this allowed international competition to take place on a peaceful stage. And that really was something, especially if you look at Europe’s history.

When did the United States get involved and get interested in World’s Fairs?

Actually, they did one in 1853, about two years after. They copied the Crystal Palace and even called it “The Crystal Palace.” And then they went to town with it. I wouldn’t call it a failure, but it wasn’t quite as extravagant as the 1851 palace. But it did have something kind of fascinating. At one point P.T. Barnum produced part of it, which again, can tell you a little bit about it. But they also introduced the safety elevator, something I find really fascinating. Now imagine, this is 1853. So this guy, Elisha Otis, hoists himself on a safety elevator, standing on top of it, above the crowd. There’s a rope holding it. Now we’ve had elevators for centuries, especially since at least the Roman Colosseum, but they have a tendency to fall. Whether it’s a chain or a rope, they have a tendency to break. People fall, they’re injured, and they die.

So above hundreds and hundreds of spectators, Otis cuts the rope. People gasp, people cry out because this is like walking out of a window but not falling — but his safety latch held. And in that moment he solidified his business. Now consider the power of this 170 years later. I know there’s a lot of other elevator makers in the world, but I can only think of Otis’s name. I know there are others, but I can’t think of them. Otis, though, I know. And they’re worldwide today. And then later on, they introduced the escalator at the 1900 exposition in Paris. So it’s an ability to change the world, to impact lives and to, if you will, in a more businesslike sense set brands up for decades-, even centuries-long domination. And that’s part of the power of expos.

What was the first big World’s Fair that was a major event? Would it be the 1893 one in Chicago? Or was there an earlier one? And by that I mean, one where people from all over traveled to it, not just in the region — something that people around the country are aware of and that might be the big thing they do that year?

I would say 1889 in Paris. Because you have Thomas Edison introducing the phonograph. You have the Eiffel Tower being built. And now we’re starting the very barest beginnings of electrifying the world. So at one point you have this new source of energy coming to the foreground. There’s a wonderful painting by Charles Curran called “Evening Illuminations at the Paris Exposition.” They had covered the Eiffel Tower with 5,000 light bulbs. And at night they would set it up, and it would just glow in the dark. And there’s a picture in this painting of a woman climbing on someone’s shoulders, just to get a look at it, just to gawk at it. Imagine what that would’ve been like in a world which to that point had basically been lit by fire. This was new. This was revolutionizing the world. Then on top of that, you have what was a monstrosity, the Eiffel Tower, which people denigrated as a tragic stove pipe.

The Paris intelligentsia absolutely hated it — 300 of them wrote a letter condemning it. The writer Guy de Maupassant actually used to eat his lunch underneath the tower because, he said, “That way I don’t ever have to look at it when I’m looking out at Paris.” They hated it. And now, of course, what? Everyone loves it. The Eiffel tower is now the most valuable monument brand in the world. It’s estimated to have a worth around $500 billion. That’s a billion with a B. This is what the fair creates: this mass meeting of minds that can sometimes have an effect that ripples down through centuries. So at the same fair, when Edison introduced the phonograph, he put 50 of them out and he very wisely had people record things like the French National Anthem. And so the French could go up and listen to this. And he recorded the voices of famous opera singers, people that others might know by name, but they would never obviously have heard them because recorded music doesn’t exist.

Imagine what that would be like to hear a disembodied voice, something that never existed before. So, by the way, he also went out and recorded the voice of the German military strategist, Helmuth von Moltke, the only person born in the 18th century whose voice has actually been recorded. It was amazing. It was the future being brought to you. It was the wonders of science kind of overriding the fears of superstition. And in that sense, I think they brought us science, they brought us technology, they brought us the future.

Speaking of introducing technologies, why don’t you briefly tell us the story of the incubator? That one is really interesting.

It is. It is an odd one, too. At that time, 1904, the infant mortality rate in America was roughly 165 births per 1000. That is huge. That actually is more than certain Third World countries today, which gives you an idea of how dire a situation it was.

Now, incubators had been around for a few years, but it was a new technology. People don’t trust it. How do you make them trust it? You find a way to demonstrate to many at a time that it’s benevolent. So at the fair, they took a room and put medical staff in there and a row of incubators. And then they went to orphanages and they got preemie babies from orphanages and placed them into incubators. Now, obviously, that would be a bit touchy to do today. But the point is this: The 20 million people who attended the fair saw this and they saw that it was a helpful, benevolent technology. And virtually overnight public opinion changes. Again, a tipping point of millions being able to see something at one time and then the ripple effect of them spreading the news afterwards.

To the extent that people today are aware of the history of World’s Fairs, they might know, especially if they’re from Chicago, of the 1893 World’s Fair, and maybe the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, which was maybe one of the last big international events before World War II. And if you were going to write a history of the 20th century, you’d probably mention that World’s Fair.

The 20th century for America sort of starts with that World’s Fair. We used it for a number of purposes. One of which being that Roosevelt used it to extend the Good Neighbor policy with South America. It was a bit of a launching pad for that, or rather to extend its influence. But I think the most important part of that fair was Futurama. General Motors created the world’s largest diorama: 36,000 square feet. Now imagine they’ve built two million trees of 18 different species; 50,000 miniature, Hot Wheels-sized automobiles, 10,000 of which could work; thousands of skyscrapers. And then you rode around it, over it, 552 people at a time, on a carousel that took about 17 and a half to 18 minutes to complete the circuit. And what you saw was a moving city — not the rural America that had been beaten down by the Dust Bowl and by the depression, but a gleaming city where many of the cars might be semi-automated.

And this is the world you were going to have by 1960, it said, and they pretty much hit that expectation. You came out of there with techno-optimism. You thought, “Technology can help meet the future. It can bring us into the future.” And for that alone, I think it was a real triumph of the spirit of planning. And in fact, the designer of that, Norman Bel Geddes, Roosevelt called him to Washington to advise on a federal highway act that was passed in 1944. It had enormous influence on legislation itself, which I think is another remarkable effect of World’s Fairs: what they can do to help the world.

And there’s another point I want to make about this, which is kind of subtle, but when you saw this diorama and you saw these things moving, you saw the construction that would stand in place for construction that would go on all over America. Remember the depression was marked by one thing: silence. Construction had fallen to almost zero in many cities. There was a silence that hit America in those years. Now there’s the implication of all this energy, of all this activity that the future, and of course GM, were going to bring us — it was subtle, but it was actually accurate and it worked. And I think they deserve a tip of the hat for being able to communicate that idea and, if you will, sell that idea to Americans.

And then 25 years later, we had Futurama II at another World’s Fair in New York City. But in that Futurama, there was a more expansive vision of the future. It was really almost more holistic because it showed humanity — probably led by America — on the Moon, under the ocean, and cityscapes perhaps even inspired by the Jetsons. Again, a World’s Fair presenting the future as a place you’d probably want to live.

You’re right. Moon bases, undersea hotels (which, by the way, we have in Dubai), they would clear the Amazon — well, maybe we should have just scaled that one back a bit. But the thing is they almost sextupled the size of the New York one in ’39 for this one. It was massive, even bigger than before. But again, GM, the sponsor for this one as well, was selling a future of autonomous cars. And then also there you had the IBM pavilion, which I think matches in optimism and foresight what would happen with computers. So you’d walk into this very odd-looking building that was round with the letters “IBM” emblazoned in three dimensions, 3,000 times around the top of it — because what was it supposed to look like? The typing element in this electric IBM typewriter that was a computer for its era.

Five-hundred people at a time went in, and you were lifted as high as nine stories up. And then this Charles Eames-designed extravaganza starts to take place. Fourteen projectors hitting nine polygon-shaped screens talking about how computers will affect your life. Now, computers are five-ton monstrosities then. Maybe they have five MB of memory (your iPhone would die if it had that little), but it shows everything from housewives to football coaches showing how they devise what they do —  a recipe or a game plan — using the same logic computers do, so that they’re not frightening anymore. And while these things were really gendered, through the stereotypes of the era, it was understandable. I was there. I saw it, and I remember being wowed by it, being just mesmerized.

And then you’re lowered out after 15 minutes and you go out and you see a puppet show using Holmes and Watson using 20 questions, deductive logic, to solve a case the way a computer would. Then you can walk up and write a date out and a computer would read it — handwriting recognition, pretty cool, pretty science fiction. And then you’d write out a date for example, and it would give you the headlines for that date from a New York Times database. But I left it with one impression. And one impression only: that IBM was computers the way Google today is search — they’re interchangeable. And that set in motion IBM’s rise at that period, and it’s still been dominant despite some ups and downs in the last few decades. But it’s also important because not only were they selling us on computers, rather the idea of computers, but at that time we had just come out of a recession in the ‘50s which was sometimes referred to as the “automation recession.”

So people still had a fear of automation and what it would do to our jobs, especially when you consider these are not things we have in our homes yet. They’re things that these lab guys in white coats attend to like priests of some sort of malevolent God, but now we had something better. We had a future where it was going to help us. And argue if you will on the truth or accuracy of that, it was the ability of IBM to use exhibiting at this mass event, because roughly 50 million people showed, to sell itself in that manner and to convey a sense of the future in that style.

So what happened? Is it that techno-optimism sort of disappeared and maybe we weren’t as receptive to those ideas? Or did the fairs themselves change and maybe they weren’t as optimistic about the future? Did they still present that joyous, “Let’s take one giant leap” kind of attitude?

It’s a perfect storm of all of those. And what I mean by that is, at that time, the environmental movement was starting up in which in many cases, technology rightly seemed to produce more problems than it solved. So by 1974, you have the first real ecologically-minded expo in Spokane where the US pavilion took a 17,000 square foot space in front of it to talk about the average waste that a family of four leaves. GM took the occasion, not for Futurama, but to show a hybrid car of the future, the XP-833. So you’re now scaling down. You’re now looking at, “We are in a problematic period.” It was about products, then about progress, and then, if you will, about panic. So the expos are moving in a sense to approach that topic in that way to say, “We are now in a problematic period and we need to solve it.” Which in a sense can kind of fuel the idea that technology is the problem and that there’s not much fun in seeing it anymore.

Also, the advent of screens. Now, television was introduced to the public really in 1939 in New York, so we can see things on screen. With the internet age it’s even easier to see things on screen. So expos have got to segue now from something that may just be of visual delight, to experimenting with them, to experimenting and demonstrating those just like Otis did with an elevator. And I believe that the solution to this is to have more live demonstrations of technologies that you and I could try out for real. And you can’t do that online, and it stands a catastrophic chance of failure just like Otis and his elevator, because if it could collapse, if it can fail, then you know this demonstration is legit and it’s worth its while — it’s worth you looking at it and trying this technology. That, I think, is the one hurdle expos are still trying to get over: to move from just screen to actually demonstrating these really cool things that are out there.

You throw all that together, plus the economic difficulties of, for instance, New Orleans . . . But there I’d even throw in a caveat. Granted, New Orleans went broke before the fair ended. That’s a debacle. That’s pretty bad, but here’s the thing: The areas that they renovated for the fair have brought in roughly $81.7 billion in revenue since that fair in 1984. That’s not bad. So these fairs have to be looked at as, “Do they lose money immediately?” Maybe. And what do they do in the long term? Because, after all, Shanghai in 2010 spent at least 50 billion on infrastructure, but at least two think tanks estimate that they may get anywhere from a five-to-one to 10-to-one return on that investment long term. That’s huge. That’s worth doing. So it’s not like the Olympics where you kind of throw a lot of money, then it’s done.

A city that plans this well actually ends up with a long-term benefit because of the infrastructure they’ll build to bring in more business. Another example, the ’74 Spokane expo: They lost about $700,000 immediately with the expo, but it’s estimated that they brought in $700 million in revenue because of increased tourism and also some of the infrastructure building. So these things can not only just be cool for the area and fun to attend, they can also build out their areas. Similarly, Dubai thinks they’ll get at probably a three-to-one return. They’re spending about $9 billion. They probably will get back $27 to $33 billion for what they’ve invested in. That’s not a bad return.

Around the late ’90s the US sort of got out of the financing part of it. I noticed that there was a piece in Reuters saying that the US might get back into it and allow the government to start spending money to participate in World’s Fairs again. So is America going to get back in that business? And are we going to see, not just World’s Fairs in the United States, but ones in other countries which have very impressive American exhibits? Some of our exhibits without government funding have not been too impressive, if I understand that correctly.

Well you’ve hit on a touchy point with government and fair people in the US, but you’re right. We got out of the business more or less formally in the year 2000 after admittedly some economic hanky panky, if you will, at a couple of the expos with US pavilions. So part of the federal government said, “No, we don’t want to deal with this anymore.” But under the Trump administration, we started to get back into it again in a bipartisan way, which I think is quite admirable. Currently, we do have pavilions, but they tend to be corporate funded rather than government funded. So they tend to be heavy on the advertising. And I’ve been to them since Shanghai and several aren’t bad. But again, when you’re relying more on sponsorship and advertising, it’s very hard to execute a vision.

Though the one way in which US pavilions just shine better than anybody in the world they bring in anywhere from, let’s say 50 to 150 students who speak the language of that host country and they become ambassadors for us, and they take part in charities and other projects to help out in that country and introduce people to America, through meeting people at the pavilion. This is enormously successful and overrides the drawbacks of the pavilion in other ways. But I see us in the future, though, getting back to this for one reason: We’re trying again to get one here for the year 2027. Minneapolis, in fact, is trying to get it. And if they do, the theme would be based on health. And part of what they want to do, which I think would be a really cool idea, is to have a lot of technologies you will try out, that you can actually test out there, which I think could bring a lot of people and, again, put expos back on the map with something you can’t get on Twitter or just watching a program on YouTube. Yeah, it’s cool, and it’s convenient. But nothing beats face-to-face marketing; nothing beats people face-to-face, experiencing something in the flesh.

When might we get a full-scale World’s Fair that we would remember the way we remember some of the ones in the past in New York?

You’re right. You’re right. That would be a smaller one. The big ones take place, by design, in every five year period. So in other words, 2010, ’15, ’20 . . . And ’25 will be in Osaka. Others haven’t bid yet for the 2030 one. The smaller ones occur between those big ones. And for instance, they’re limited to a size of 25 hectares or about 62 acres. The big ones can be any size. So for instance, this one in Dubai is about twice the size of the country of Monaco. The one in Shanghai was about 1,305 acres. They can be massive, massive grounds where a lot takes place on them, but I wouldn’t sell the smaller ones short because if they focus well enough, the idea of experiencing all these things can be set in stone and you can really leave it with much of the same experience.

But when you get to the big ones, here’s what happens: Up till about 2010, the code word on fairs was to “out-Eiffel Eiffel.” Someone always wanted a plan to do something that the Eiffel tower did for Paris in that fair. And since 2010, you know what you hear people say? “We want to out-Shanghai Shanghai.” And I suspect Dubai is going to get close to or exceed Shanghai. I mean, think about this. The United Arab Emirates pavilion itself is biomorphic, designed based on nature, of a falcon’s outstretched wings designed by Calatrava. It’s beautiful, but the cool thing is the wings move up and down to generate electricity. And I think something like that is just fantastic. You’re seeing a lot of really interesting designs here that can just wow you, that just mesmerize you. And, as I say, that’s part of the fun of expos.

My guest today has been Charles Pappas. Charles, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast.

Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Charles Pappas is a senior writer at Exhibitor Magazine and the author of Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World’s Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World.

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