Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [54]
The White City not only had more lights than the 1889 exposition; it had more lights than any real city in the country. Every day, the lights at the exposition consumed three times the electricity used to illuminate nearby Chicago. And the fair required electricity for mechanical power as well: a moving sidewalk equipped with chairs transported people who arrived by boat from Lake Michigan to the heart of the fairgrounds; electric boats, along with the gondolas, ferried people across the manmade lake—lined with statuary and dotted with fountains—at the city's center; and the world's first Ferris wheel carried passengers seated in Pullman cars 264 feet in the air, giving them a kaleidoscopic view of the city, Lake Michigan, and the Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan countryside before it brought them back to earth.
If Chicagoans, who had already grown accustomed to electric light and gaslight, were stunned by the "brilliance almost too dazzling for the human eye to rest upon," how must it have seemed to the many visitors from small settlements and farms along the Mississippi Valley and in the surrounding states who'd left homes that were illuminated only with oil lamps and candles? To those from rural places everywhere? As one young girl, newly arrived from Poland, exclaimed, "Having seen nothing but kerosene lamps for illumination, this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven." Country visitors knew that the future lay in the cities—the young had been leaving the farms for decades, and rural life, based on the self-sufficiency of the family, had ceased to be typical. To them, the fair might have been not only dazzling but also consoling in its stark contrast to Chicago or any other late-nineteenth-century American city, for the White City—full of oddity, irony, brilliance, grace, and absurdity—was also a dream city, one without the burden of reality: a city without factories or tenements, skyscrapers, stockyards, slaughterhouses, trash heaps, coal ash, or tax collectors. Its furnaces ran on oil piped in from forty miles away, and the tenders wore white uniforms. What trash the visitors scattered about the grounds was picked up every night and carted away.
Chicago, with a population of more than a million, was the American city of the moment, having grown and flourished, observed architect Louis Sullivan, "by virtue of pressure from without—the pressure of forest, field and plain, the mines of copper, iron and coal, and the human pressure of those who crowded in upon it from all sides seeking fortune." Along with its stockyards, train yards, smokestacks, and factories, it could brag of having two dozen skyscrapers—more than any other city at the time—as well as three dozen railroads and hundreds of millionaires. Advertising splashed across the sides of streetcars and loomed on large billboards. "Chicago, one might say, was after all only a Newer York," suggested writer and editor William Dean Howells, "an ultimated Manhattan, the realized ideal of that largeness, loudness and fastness, which New York has persuaded the Americans is metropolitan." Electric wires cluttered the air above the streets. The elevated railways clanged and screeched. Grime and soot settled upon the city's countless poor and working poor, their broken-down tenements, and the red-light district. "'Undisciplined'—that is the word for Chicago," proclaimed H. G. Wells, "a scrambling, ill-mannered, undignified, unintelligent development of material resources."
Strange to think that much of it had risen out of the ashes of its infamous and devastating fire in 1871. Stranger still to consider that sixty years before the exposition, at a time when thousands of gaslights already lined the streets of London and Paris, Chicago was a French and Indian trading village of fewer than four thousand residents, its homes and shops illuminated with