The Palace of Machinery — 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair
A stunning collection of archival photos from the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904 — from inside the aptly-named Palace of Machinery exhibition.
I've added just a small subset of the photos I could find with familiar names in vintage machinery, along with a few others that caught my eye for one reason or another. Among the exhibitors in these photos alone, you'll spot — Buffalo Forge, Hall & Brown, Brown & Sharpe, and Starrett — just to name a few.
What you're seeing are unedited from glass-plate negatives, evidenced by the "acid burn"-style degradation on some of the photos. Such a thing always feels like a reminder that we should remember these remarkable moments from days long gone, so they're not quietly lost to time and America's endless march of progress.
Just imagine being alive, then and there, to experience something like this with your own eyes. The sheer scale and ambition seen in exhibitions from this era stands alone, forever casting its shadow over what most of us have experienced, or will, in our lifetime — and we owe our thanks to the patient photographers of the day that managed to capture so much of it, in such detail, to be rediscovered over a century later.
All that said, I'd likely spend my time within the Palace of Machinery — since no part of me wants to experience the infamous "dog-eating Igorot tribe" aspect of it all. You can Google that if you have to, but I'd also say, don't.
— David
Notes on just what happened in 1904 St. Louis…
The Atlantic put together this excellent photo collection of the exposition as a whole — here's their introduction…
In April 1904, St. Louis opened its doors to the world for what was officially called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, but was widely known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. Millions of dollars had been spent to build the 1,200-acre fairgrounds and its nearly 1,500 buildings—a huge scale that ended up delaying the opening by a year. During the eight months the fair stayed open, nearly 20 million people paid a visit. On display were marvels of technology, agriculture, art, and history, and there were amusement rides and entertainment to be found in a section called “the Pike.” The fair introduced a huge audience to some relatively new inventions such as private automobiles, outdoor electric lighting, and the X-ray machine—as well as foods from across the United States and around the world. The exposition also had a focus on anthropological exhibits—with an approach that is shocking by today’s standards: In some cases, organizers brought people from the Philippines, the Arctic, and elsewhere to the fairgrounds as set pieces among re-creations of their home environment or villages. After the fair closed, nearly all of its structures were demolished within a short time, leaving only a few footprints, ponds, and canals in Forest Park in St. Louis.
From Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Wikipedia)
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, commonly known as the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904, was the last great international exposition before World War I. The fair, built on a 1,200 acre site, included hundreds of thousands of objects, people, animals, displays, and publications from 62 exhibiting countries and 43 of the 45 states. The setting of world records, such as the largest organ, and working displays of every important technological advance were significant design goals. The Fair was a combination of trade show, civic showpiece, and monument to culture, along with more than a tinge of American pride. The Fair showcased the grandiose ambition of the gilded age, forming a kind of collective tribute to the nineteenth century's international understanding of the furtherance of peace, prosperity, and progress. It's a grand snapshot in time of American and foreign societies as they wished to portray themselves.
Notes on the actual imagery & archive, for those who get into the details like I do —
The highest-resolution photos are best seen on the original archive/collection, which lets you zoom to a truly impressive level of detail. I've collected those full-scale masters and that's what I'm posting here, but they’ll end up downsized a bit.
The subset of the archive these photos come from is by filtering down the collection:
exhibitions & displays (1263) >> machinery -- exhibitions -- 1900-1910Here's a direct link to where I found these (159 in total).
To dig through the entire archive (all 6,719 photos) for yourself, here's the link.