Almost everything written about the Panama-Pacific International Exposition is about its outside: the courts, the color scheme, the tower and the lights. Todd gave a whole volume of five to what was inside, and opens it not with a machine but with a man who took a small booth in the Palace of Food Products and had his life changed by it.
The man with the egg timer
Todd opens his volume on the exhibits with a man whose name he will not give, on purpose. The man had built a one-armed alarm clock that could be trusted to ring within half a minute of when it was set, and he took a small booth in the Palace of Food Products, thinking housewives might buy one rather than over-boil their husbands' eggs.
What he got first was an order for a hundred clocks from the superintending physician of a London hospital, who wanted them to time the instruments in the sterilizer. Then engineers, shoe manufacturers, a belting company and a railroad came asking for the same little clock. He took 41,000 orders in a few months and had to close his order books, because he had not yet begun to manufacture. That is what an exhibit palace was for. A fair is usually described as a thing the public walks through; the palaces were also a place where a man in a booth found out what his invention was for.
The eight in the block
Eight of the eleven exhibit palaces were joined into a single block behind one continuous outer wall, facing inward onto the courts (see Architecture). Varied Industries took the southeast corner and Education the southwest, entered through a coffered half dome called Philosophy. The four along the bay were the big ones.
- Mines and Metallurgy had a working mine in its basement, which visitors went down into.
- Transportation had railroad track laid onto its floor, with locomotives standing on it beside the motor cars, the ships and the aircraft.
- Food Products ran a ninety-barrel flour mill all season, and you could eat your way around the world there a nickel at a time.
- Agriculture, the largest of the eight, gave every state a room to show what it grew and the machines that grew it.
Machinery closed the east end of the main group of palaces and was the biggest building on the site, big enough that Lincoln Beachey flew an airplane down the length of one of its naves, indoors, before it opened: what Todd calls the first indoor flight ever undertaken in an aeroplane.
Ford's assembly line
In the Palace of Transportation, a Ford assembly line ran for three hours every afternoon except Sunday. A crew of forty to forty-five men built a Model T every ten minutes as the chassis moved along at fifteen inches a minute. The first car rolled out within four minutes of the fair opening. By closing day the line had turned out 4,338 cars, eighteen on a working day.
"Investigation showed that automobiles were being born inside the grounds faster than they could be tagged."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 4 (1921)
It is the exhibit with the longest shadow. A moving line building a car in front of a crowd was, in 1915, a demonstration; within a decade it was simply how things were made.
The transcontinental telephone
The first transcontinental telephone line was completed in 1915 and the fair was its public. A few weeks before the gates opened, on January 25, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell in New York spoke to Watson in San Francisco over the new line, 3,400 miles long. In the Palace of Liberal Arts the telephone company built a small auditorium with a receiver at every seat, and several times a day visitors sat and listened to New York while the headlines from the evening papers were read to them across the continent.
Thomas Watson was at the fair for it, the same Watson who had been on the receiving end in Boston on March 10, 1876, when the first spoken words went over a wire. That first line, Todd notes, was a short bit between two rooms in the same house.
The fourteen-ton typewriter
Crowds gathered in Liberal Arts around a working model of an Underwood typewriter that weighed, Todd says, "14 tons or so," operated by one young woman, printing news bulletins on a roll of paper the width of a printing press's. The keys rose and fell like giant iron legs, and about as stiffly, under motor impulses from an electrically connected keyboard. It could not have broken any speed records.
Todd found the crowd around it more interesting than the machine, and wondered why so many people were drawn to "superlatives of size" rather than to the enterprise that built one for exhibition. After the fair it was taken apart into two railway cars and sold east to the boardwalk at Atlantic City, where it stood about twenty years. It was shown once more at the New York World's Fair of 1939. It is usually said to have been scrapped for the war, but no record of that has been found.
A million volts
Among the electrical exhibits was a million-volt transformer built by Chester Thordarson, which Todd counts among the fair's firsts: no exposition had shown one before. The fair was, by its own reckoning, also the first to show a car assembly plant running, the first opened by wireless, and the first at which a telephone call crossed the continent.
Money, eugenics and the children's booth
Three exhibits are covered in detail elsewhere on this site, because each belongs to a larger story.
- Farran Zerbe's collection of about twenty thousand pieces of money, which Todd called the greatest index to money ever collectively displayed, and the bad French half dollar that started it: see The Money.
- The Race Betterment booth in the Palace of Education, the eugenics movement's exhibit at the fair, with the National Conference on Race Betterment sitting August 4 to 8, 1915: see The People of the Fair.
- The Children's Bureau in the same palace, its milk tests and its model playground, and the YWCA nursery that minded 6,183 children: see The People of the Fair.
Sources
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, volume IV (1921), which is given over almost entirely to the exhibits, with the firsts drawn from volume V, chapter XXXIII, "For the First Time." The egg timer, the Underwood and the crowd around it are Todd's, in his own words where quoted. The Underwood's later travels, to the Atlantic City boardwalk and the 1939 New York World's Fair, come from typewriter collectors' research and a 1939 fair postcard, not from Todd.