Welcome to the World of To-Meh-rrow

Last week Google's regular novelty banner featured an interactive image celebrating the 160th anniversary of the first World's Fair, known as The Great Exhibition and held in the purpose-built Crystal Palace in 1851; a showcase, inside and out, for the best the world had to offer - not just the cutting edge of the day, but a spyglass through which ordinary people could glimpse the world of tomorrow.

Image - Google

Last night I found myself talking to a friend who had just come back from a day at Grand Designs Live. "I don't know what I expected it to be," she said, "but it was just a load of stalls selling paint. I wanted to feel inspired; I wanted to feel... something..."  It turned out that she'd gone to the show in the hopes of finding rather more inspiration than she'd expected from the Ideal Home Show ("Yeah," put in another friend, "that was shit."), but it turns out that's simply not what these shows are about; they are trade shows, pure and simple. This may come as no surprise to anyone (it certainly didn't to me), but it got me thinking about what we, as a society, seem to have lost.

Earlier in the day we had been to visit the Dirt exhibition at The Wellcome Collection; a history of dirt, grime, disease and the ways in which societies have sought to tackle them. In one corner there was a collection of posters & other materials from the first International Hygiene Exhibition, held in Dresden in 1911.

Image - Franz von Stuck (via Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden & Wikipedia)

Image - germanhistorydocs

Here was a gathering to showcase the pinnacle of medical science from around the world, organised by the owner of a mouthwash company, who would a year later go on to found the German Hygiene Museum. And although, yes, many of the exhibits were products for sale, the Exhibition represented the idea that by bringing together and sharing these ideas we could create a better world (Sadly in this case, the same museum and even the same spirit would later be co-opted by the Nazi regime to spread the "science" of racial medicine, until it was bombed by Allies during WW2. It has since been rebuilt and returned to its original purpose of spreading genuine medical knowledge.).

All of this got me wondering what had happened to the spirit of the Great Exhibition and the World's Fairs that followed it. What happened to the moving walkways, the walking, talking, smoking(?!) robots and cities under the sea? What even happened to the World's Fair?

Moving walkway, Paris 1900
Image - Brooklyn Museum Archive (via Wikipedia)

Underwater City, Futurama, 1964 New York Word's Fair
Image - Jeffrey Stanton

It turns out that the World's Fair is still alive and supposedly well (competition is well underway to decide the host for 2017/2018); it's just that, well... nobody cares any more.

In the 1950s London rebuilt its South Bank for the Festival of Britain and people flocked from around the world to marvel at what was possible and what they could expect to see in the future. In the year 2000 we got the Millennium Dome which, as far as I remember from my visit, was notable for having a 2-storey McDonald's with a lift (and some kind of machine from BT that would have put your face onto a little 3D Elliot cycling E.T. across the sky, if only it had been working at the time).

So what changed? Maybe not enough. Maybe after more than 150 years of waiting for the walkways, the robots and the bubble-cities we simply became too cynical. And not just we, the public, but the corporations that used to sell us these visions of the future that inspired short-term dreams but ultimately long-term bitterness at their undelivered promises. Perhaps it was safer to rip up the beltways, send the robots to Butlins and let us all literally watch paint dry until we gave up caring about the future, unless it was in terms of mitigating our impact on it.

Titan the Robot
Image - Butlins

Maybe I'm completely wrong though. I'm sure there are plenty of people ready to point out that there are many more trade shows now annually than we would have had in a decade 50 years ago and that events such as E3 and MacWorld continue to draw crowds of millions a year to marvel at the shape of things to come. I know this because I looked it up. I know this because of an army of friendly geeks on Twitter. But I won't be packing up a picnic to go check them out with my grandparents, my mum and my fictional dog.  It seems that, for now at least, the World of Tomorrow is a thing of the past.