CHANGE ON THE HORIZON
After the Civil War, America entered a largely peaceful period of prosperity and growth. Horses of every type were found everywhere, for they were the backbone of commerce, transportation and especially agriculture. Change, however, was on the horizon. One of its greatest heralds was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, otherwise known as the Chicago World’s Fair. Historians have aptly described it as “the Fair that changed the world.” In a total run of only six months it attracted 26 million visitors, 10 million more than the current yearly average at Disneyland. Literally a city within a city, the design of its buildings and the layout of its beautiful grounds were early demonstrations of what can be achieved when architects, city planners and landscape designers work together. Forty-six nations from around the world mounted elaborate exhibits, as did every state and territory in the Union. John Philip Sousa’s band added a parade atmosphere to its Midway Plaisance, where visitors could ride in a Venetian gondola, tour a reproduction of the Gokstad Viking ship that had sailed to Chicago all the way from Norway, or mount a Ferris Wheel rising 264 feet into the air—the first ever erected.
Among the State buildings, Louis Lindsay Dyche’s Kansas exhibit featuring the Panorama of North American Mammals, including preserved hides of the Plains buffalo, caused a sensation—because in 1893, natural science meant adventure and travel to unexplored parts of the Earth, and taxidermy represented a new and exciting blend of art and science. There were huge pavilions filled with the latest ideas in machinery, guns and artillery, transportation, and home crafts. For the first time, visitors could sample a stick of Juicy Fruit gum, have a bowl of Cream of Wheat, munch on some Cracker Jacks or enjoy a Hershey bar, and then swig it all down with a glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer—or a glass (but not yet a bottle) of Coca-Cola.
The huge Hall of Manufactures and Liberal Arts, one of the largest structures ever built, covered almost 1.4 million square feet and featured literature, science, art and music. There, the sublime strains of Antonín Dvorák’s “American Quartet”—conducted by the Czech composer himself—competed with the eerie crackling of Tesla coils. The dynamic possibilities of electricity fascinated the public as they stood before a row of thrumming Westinghouse generators that, “in a demonstration of both power and beauty” as one fairgoer’s guide put it, lit 8,000 arc lamps and 130,000 incandescent bulbs. The generators also ran electric trains, streetcars, boats, elevators, the Ferris Wheel and even a moving sidewalk. Alongside a Morse Code telegraph, known as “the nervous system of commerce,” the visitor could operate a Bell telephone containing Thomas Edison’s improved carbon microphone, so that the user no longer had to shout into the device in order to make himself heard at the other end of the line. Reporters sent by the Chicago Tribune to cover the Fair goggled at the improved Mergenthaler hot-slug Line-O-Type machine, raised their eyebrows at the speed of the latest rotary offset printing machines, and envied the efficiency of newfangled Remington typewriters that not only had QWERTY keyboards but both shift and tab keys.
THE CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR
Where were the horses in all this newfangled technology? The second-largest building at the fair featured the backbone of this nation and of all nations—agriculture. Adjacent was the livestock arena where horses, mules, sheep, swine, poultry, pigeons and pets of all kinds each had their show.
A century and a quarter ago, it was still an apt metaphor to represent the concept of “industry” through a statue of a shovel-wielding farmer controlling a massive Percheron. So culturally ingrained was this image that even though Nikolaus Otto’s internal combustion engines and Karl Benz’s Viktoria model self-powered carriage were prominently on display, most people never thought that horsepower provided by real horses would soon become a thing of the past. What was most reported at the time and what has been most remembered since were not the draft horses that were the mainstay of Midwestern farming in the 1890s. Instead, what excited Army generals and the general focused public attention upon the first major importation of Asil Arabians to America—more than two dozen stallions and mares shipped directly from Syria by the Hamidie Society (see “The Arabian Horse,” EQUUS 441, and “Arabian Horses Come to America,” EQUUS 442).
