World's fairs are modern events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas medieval fairs were concerned with the selling of goods, modern world's fairs were involved in the selling of industrial technology and industrial society; they fostered the idea that industrial development was to be equated with social progress. World's fairs not only furnished a place where the latest technological achievements could be presented to an international public, but they provided an orientation to people confronting the vast and rapid changes of industrialism. They offered a photograph of the present, a story of past progress, and a vision of the future. But by the middle of the twentieth century, world's fairs had lost much of their importance and charm.

The first world's fair was held in London in 1851. Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria and president of the Royal Society of the...