What Was The Great Exhibition of 1851?

On May 1, 1851, 20,000 people, including Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, attended the opening of a spectacular event in London's Hyde Park: "The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations."  The huge Crystal Palace housing the display (itself a monumental feat of glass and steel design) stretched nearly a third of a mile down the park's lawn, the glass atrium reaching over some of the park's ancient trees, which were deliberately preserved.  In six months when the Exhibition closed, six million visitors had poured through the long halls to view the more than 100,000 items on display. (Queen Victoria herself visited the Exhibition (more than forty times!)  The sudden growth of the railway meant that people from all over Great Britain could come to London, many for the first time.  In just the five years prior to The Great Exhibition, the miles of railroad track in Britain had doubled, from around 3000 miles to more than 6200 miles.  When they arrived, visitors saw the machines of the new industrial age and industry's raw materials.  They saw items from overseas colonies and  household goods, works of craftsmanship and novelty items, like an eighty-blade knife, and a razor with the Crystal Palace etched into the metal.  And while it was history's first true "world's fair," The Great Exhibition was in every way a stage for the display of Britain's industrial might.
    The optimism surrounding the Exhibit can best be summed up in the words of Prince Albert, the chief sponsor of the event.  "The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention....Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions."