Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876

Excerpt

THE CENTURY—ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.

VI. THE DISPLAY—INTRODUCTORY.

All things being ready for their reception, how were exhibits, exhibitors and visitors to be brought to the grounds? To do this with the extreme of rapidity and cheapness was essential to a full and satisfactory attendance of both objects and persons. In a large majority of cases the first consideration with the possessor of any article deemed worthy of submission to the public eye was the cost and security of transportation. Objects of art, the most valuable and the most attractive portion of the display, are not usually very well adapted to carriage over great distances with frequent transshipments. Porcelain, glass and statuary are fragile, and paintings liable to injury from dampness and rough handling; while an antique mosaic, like the "Carthaginian Lion," a hundred square feet in superficies, might, after resuscitation from its subterranean sleep of twenty centuries with its minutest tessera intact and every tint as fresh as the Phoenician artist left it, suffer irreparable damage from a moment's carelessness on the voyage to its temporary home in the New World. More solid things of a very different character, and far less valuable pecuniarily, though it may be quite as interesting to the promoter of human progress, exact more or less time and attention to collect and prepare, and that will not be bestowed upon them without some guarantee of their being safely and inexpensively transmitted. So to simplify transportation as practically to place the exposition buildings as nearly as possible at the door of each exhibitor, student and sight-seer became, therefore, a controlling problem.

In the solution of it there is no exaggeration in saying that the Centennial stands more than a quarter of a century in advance of even the latest of its fellow expositions. At Vienna a river with a few small steamers below and a tow-path above represented water-carriage. Good railways came in from every quarter of the compass, but none of them brought the locomotive to the neighborhood of the grounds. In the matter of tram-roads for passengers the Viennese distinguished themselves over the Londoners and Parisians by the possession of one. In steam-roads they had no advantage and no inferiority. At each and all of these cities the packing-box and the passenger were both confronted by the vexatious interval between the station and the exposition building—often the most trying part of the trip. Horsepower was the one time-honored resource, in '73 as in '51, and in unnumbered years before. Under the ancient divisions of horse and foot the world and its impedimenta moved upon Hyde Park, the Champ de Mars and the Prater, the umbrella and the oil-cloth tilt their only shield against Jupiter Pluvius, who seemed to take especial pleasure in demonstrating their failure, nineteen centuries after the contemptuous erasure of him from the calendar, to escape his power. It was reserved for the Philadelphia Commission to bring his reign (not the slightest intention of a pun) to a close....