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For all the wildness of Tesla's exhibits, his greatest accomplishment at the fair stood in Machinery Hall: twelve perfectly synchronous polyphase dynamos—each about ten feet high and weighing seventy-five tons—which sent current to every corner of the grounds. The hall, Jill Jonnes, notes, was "alive with the deafening mechanical clanking and whirring ... and unpleasantly redolent of fumes and oil and grease.... Great engines in the Westinghouse nave ran even greater generators, which in turn flashed 2,000 volts of AC from each double Tesla machine forth through the subways." But it wasn't the machinery alone that held people's attention. "Popular interest was divided between these machines, the largest of their kind up to the time, and the switchboard," wrote Westinghouse biographer Francis Leupp. That switchboard, made of a thousand square feet of marble and situated in a gallery that was reached by spiral staircases, controlled 250,000 incandescent lights. "What astonished visitors most, perhaps, was to see this elaborate mechanism handled by one man, who was constantly in touch, by telephone or messenger, with every part of the grounds, and responded to requests of all sorts by the mere turning of a switch."

One of the most provoking testimonies to the quality of the light controlled by the turning of that switch is Winslow Homer's The Fountains at Night, World's Columbian Exposition, which he painted while visiting the White City. For centuries, artists had depicted nights in warm, muted colors and worlds disappearing in shadow where a viewer might sense the ongoing fading of light. But in Homer's work, the illumination feels endless. This isn't the light of antiquity: flowing and falling water spans the picture, and the light has turned it entirely luminous—no wake of light in the dark here—against which the statuary and the gondola with its oarsmen and passengers seem all that much darker. Bright white flecks the forelocks, foreheads, and noses of the resolute horses of Frederick MacMonnies's fountain and the upturned face of one of the fairgoers in the gondola that swiftly cuts across the lake. It feels as if the boat will momentarily race past the frame of the painting—it is we who are ephemeral—but the light will never change, or so it seems where the work now hangs, in the midst of other nineteenth-century oil paintings. Surrounded by a nimbus of rich reds, browns, and greens; by paintings of pastures and marshes in pure daylight or slowly disappearing in the dusk; by depictions of fruit and wood and faces kindled by oil lamps and toned down by varnish and time, Homer's Fountains —with its blacks and whites and grays, its grave intensity—stands at odds with everything else in the room, as if he has painted the unblinking eye of the late century staring into the future.

When the World's Columbian Exposition went dark after six months, the Laplanders put oceans between themselves and the Dahomey, the belly dancers, and the sword fighters. The buildings, sheathed with "staff" (plaster of Paris mixed with jute fiber and cement), had always been mere spider weaves of struts and supports meant to last only for a summer and fall. Both the mayor of Chicago and the architect of the White City, Daniel Burnham, advocated burning the grounds. "I believe," the mayor said, "if we cannot preserve it ... I would be in favor of putting a torch to it ... and let it go up into the bright sky to eternal heaven." Although some of the buildings were destroyed by an accidental fire in 1894, much of the fair was dismantled. "There are 'bits' of the World's Fair at the present time all over the world—in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in the two Americas, in Australia," reported Scientific American. Some of the plaster ornaments were sold as souvenirs; some of the glass went to greenhouses; the salvaged steel was sent to Pittsburgh furnaces. Flagpoles ended up at schools and convents. The statue of Benjamin Franklin found a home