WEBVTT - STBYM Live: Weird Science in the Windy City 0:00:03.120 --> 0:00:05.920 Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff 0:00:05.920 --> 0:00:15.560 Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. 0:00:15.600 --> 0:00:18.400 My name is Robert Lamb, and we have a special 0:00:18.440 --> 0:00:21.720 episode for you today. Uh. This is a live recording 0:00:21.840 --> 0:00:25.079 from C to E two the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo. 0:00:25.440 --> 0:00:27.520 We were just there a couple of weeks ago. We 0:00:27.640 --> 0:00:30.960 presented this a wonderful talk where we talked about the UH, 0:00:31.000 --> 0:00:33.960 the the Columbian Exposition there in Chicago. We talked about 0:00:34.000 --> 0:00:37.040 the UH, the origins of the Ferris Wheel, the Parliament 0:00:37.040 --> 0:00:39.760 of World Religions, and of course the H. H. Holmes 0:00:39.800 --> 0:00:42.240 murder House. Now, just a word of warning, the audio 0:00:42.280 --> 0:00:44.960 is a little crisp here because this is a live recording. 0:00:45.400 --> 0:00:48.280 But the the episode is great that the discussion is wonderful, 0:00:48.320 --> 0:00:50.519 so we definitely wanted to share it with you. But 0:00:50.560 --> 0:00:52.680 if it's not your cup of tea, don't fret. The 0:00:52.720 --> 0:00:56.760 next episode we'll be back to the studio recording process 0:00:56.800 --> 0:01:00.880 as usually usual. Alright, so without further ado, let's go 0:01:00.960 --> 0:01:12.560 to the live show. All right. Well, hey, welcome to 0:01:12.640 --> 0:01:14.679 Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, 0:01:14.800 --> 0:01:17.319 and I'm Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick, and we 0:01:17.400 --> 0:01:19.360 are the hosts of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a 0:01:19.440 --> 0:01:24.160 podcast about science, culture, the human mind, and the weirdness 0:01:24.200 --> 0:01:26.920 of reality. So I want to start off with a question. 0:01:26.959 --> 0:01:29.440 How many people here are from out of town not 0:01:29.560 --> 0:01:33.319 from Chicago? Okay, So we've got a good amount of people, 0:01:33.360 --> 0:01:35.920 all right, like maybe half. We're gonna keep you in 0:01:35.959 --> 0:01:38.039 mind for later. This is going to be important because 0:01:38.040 --> 0:01:44.640 we're gonna be talking about Chicago's hotel past. Well when 0:01:44.760 --> 0:01:46.600 we're honored to be here at C two e two 0:01:46.600 --> 0:01:48.640 and they asked us, they said, hey, maybe you could 0:01:48.640 --> 0:01:52.080 put something together that's a little bit Chicago theme. So 0:01:52.120 --> 0:01:55.880 we thought about it, and uh, you know, we decided, well, okay, 0:01:56.120 --> 0:01:58.640 Chicago World Fair, that's gonna that's gonna be what we 0:01:58.680 --> 0:02:01.680 want to focus in on here. And uh, we decided 0:02:01.720 --> 0:02:04.200 that to really dive into this topic, though, we need 0:02:04.240 --> 0:02:07.640 to take a paleo futurist journey into the past of 0:02:07.800 --> 0:02:10.440 this city. Right, So I guess we need to start 0:02:10.480 --> 0:02:14.000 by thinking about Chicago as a city. Um, and I 0:02:14.040 --> 0:02:17.160 want to put forward that the history of American population 0:02:17.240 --> 0:02:20.760 growth as this country has increased in numbers over the 0:02:20.800 --> 0:02:24.760 centuries is a history of urbanization um and that rapidly 0:02:24.800 --> 0:02:28.239 accelerated in the eighteen hundreds. For example, in eighteen forty, 0:02:28.280 --> 0:02:31.840 the U. S population was about seventeen million people. About 0:02:31.960 --> 0:02:35.200 eighty nine percent of those people at that time were rural, 0:02:35.440 --> 0:02:38.080 living out in the country on farms, not in cities. 0:02:38.280 --> 0:02:41.240 Only about ten percent we're living in cities. Just about 0:02:41.240 --> 0:02:44.840 fifty years later, in nine the U. S population sixty 0:02:44.880 --> 0:02:49.120 three million, and by then thirty five percent of Americans 0:02:49.120 --> 0:02:51.320 are living in cities. So over the course of the 0:02:51.320 --> 0:02:54.320 century we see a rapid uptick in the way people 0:02:54.320 --> 0:02:58.120 are are moving in to crowd into dense quarters and 0:02:58.200 --> 0:03:00.239 come to where a lot of the new jobs are 0:03:00.280 --> 0:03:04.600 the new jobs made available by technology and manufacturing and 0:03:04.720 --> 0:03:10.239 by transportation like steam power. But Chicago is a particularly 0:03:10.320 --> 0:03:13.240 crucial part of this urbanization story. I want to go 0:03:13.240 --> 0:03:16.240 back to those years eighteen forty and eighteen nine, eighteen forty. 0:03:16.280 --> 0:03:20.079 Anybody want to guess what the population of Chicago was, Uh, 0:03:20.120 --> 0:03:25.000 ten thousand people. Let the people guess. Shout him out, 0:03:25.240 --> 0:03:30.760 Let the people speak one point five million. We've heard 0:03:32.080 --> 0:03:37.240 it was. Chicago in eighteen forty had forty people in it. 0:03:37.480 --> 0:03:40.360 Wrigley Field as a seating capacity of about forty one thousand, 0:03:40.440 --> 0:03:44.200 so it could fit about nine eighteen forty Chicago's in it. 0:03:44.320 --> 0:03:47.080 Or to give you, to give you like a context, 0:03:47.120 --> 0:03:49.800 that's here and now, right now at C two E two, 0:03:49.800 --> 0:03:52.760 there's between twenty and forty thousand people in this building. 0:03:54.040 --> 0:03:58.040 So we've got eighteen forty Chicago beat. By eighteen eighty, 0:03:58.120 --> 0:04:02.680 population of Chicago is up to five thousand. By eighteen 0:04:02.800 --> 0:04:06.320 ninety it's up to one million. And you have to 0:04:06.400 --> 0:04:10.440 imagine what it does to a place when the population 0:04:10.600 --> 0:04:16.080 and the population density increases that rapidly. But by eighteen nineties, 0:04:16.120 --> 0:04:19.040 Chicago would become the second biggest city in America, finally 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:23.000 beating out Philadelphia, but still behind New York. And by god, 0:04:23.120 --> 0:04:27.240 Chicago wanted to be number one. Those of you from Chicago, 0:04:27.279 --> 0:04:29.160 do you do you have New York hatred? Do you 0:04:29.200 --> 0:04:38.320 have New York? Yeah? Like do you hate your piece? Uh? 0:04:38.360 --> 0:04:41.280 And so I want to put forward that stepping into 0:04:41.440 --> 0:04:43.960 Chicago in the eighteen nineties, if you were, say a 0:04:44.040 --> 0:04:46.920 country farmer coming out of the rural areas and stepping 0:04:46.920 --> 0:04:49.840 into Chicago in the eighteen nineties would have been kind 0:04:49.880 --> 0:04:52.880 of like walking into the city or if we were 0:04:52.880 --> 0:04:56.800 to walk into the city in Blade Runner. Uh. The 0:04:57.080 --> 0:05:00.560 so part of this population explosion in the nineteen century 0:05:00.680 --> 0:05:03.720 was fueled by immigration from all over Europe. So you 0:05:03.880 --> 0:05:07.880 have Chicago flooded with people of diverse ethnic origins. Um 0:05:07.960 --> 0:05:10.960 and this this may be very alien to people who had, 0:05:11.040 --> 0:05:14.120 you know, never met people from all over Europe. Then 0:05:14.240 --> 0:05:16.920 also you've got to think about technology. I would say 0:05:16.960 --> 0:05:19.400 that Chicago at this time was a sort of techno 0:05:19.480 --> 0:05:23.640 punk hallucination where you had this steam powered transport hub 0:05:24.200 --> 0:05:29.240 and most importantly a center of industrialized meat production. So 0:05:29.240 --> 0:05:31.520 so so was it like Blade Runner in that you 0:05:31.520 --> 0:05:34.120 could buy like cloned animals on the street. Wouldn't that 0:05:34.160 --> 0:05:36.360 be great? You know, we were talking on the way 0:05:36.400 --> 0:05:39.599 over here. Another aspect of it is the sort of 0:05:39.760 --> 0:05:42.680 layers of the city. How you see this vertical depth 0:05:42.760 --> 0:05:45.320 in Blade Runner. This is more apparent in Chicago of today. 0:05:45.360 --> 0:05:47.960 But like with the L train and UH and and 0:05:48.000 --> 0:05:50.440 the way, when you're downtown, you you can almost feel 0:05:50.480 --> 0:05:53.800 like you're inside when you're outside. Yeah, I think it's 0:05:53.920 --> 0:05:56.880 it's more prevalent here than about any other city I 0:05:56.880 --> 0:05:58.440 can think of off off in my head that I've 0:05:58.720 --> 0:06:01.800 been to. Yeah, and in the Blade Runner analogy I 0:06:01.839 --> 0:06:06.159 think is especially apt when anytime we're looking back in 0:06:06.360 --> 0:06:08.680 time and we're trying to especially the last couple of centuries, 0:06:08.720 --> 0:06:10.960 and trying to figure out what it was like, uh 0:06:11.279 --> 0:06:14.760 to live in in that day, you you have to 0:06:14.760 --> 0:06:16.839 think of it almost in sci fi terms, because the 0:06:16.839 --> 0:06:20.080 only way to really get a handle on the fact that, yeah, 0:06:20.080 --> 0:06:22.440 this was the this is the bleeding age, this was 0:06:22.839 --> 0:06:26.360 this was this was this was the modern age. It 0:06:26.440 --> 0:06:28.680 was it was the bleeding edge, literally and that it 0:06:28.720 --> 0:06:31.840 was covered in pig blood um because it was the 0:06:31.880 --> 0:06:34.360 city where hogs were slaughtered in process, but it was 0:06:34.400 --> 0:06:39.280 also covered in cold dust, smog, steam, uh and rapidly electrifying. 0:06:39.320 --> 0:06:41.520 I mean, this is a time when electricity is going 0:06:41.600 --> 0:06:44.800 from a sort of rarefied novelty to being dispersed all 0:06:44.839 --> 0:06:48.000 over urban areas. And so this is going to be 0:06:48.040 --> 0:06:50.119 a crucial part of the story we tell today about 0:06:50.160 --> 0:06:54.599 the World's Fair. But another thing is that Eastern cities 0:06:54.640 --> 0:06:57.800 at the time would have looked back on Chicago in 0:06:57.839 --> 0:07:01.400 the eighteen nineties as a sort of effed up backwater 0:07:01.680 --> 0:07:06.000 like there there was there was a very snooty attitude 0:07:06.279 --> 0:07:10.520 towards Chicago. That's like looking at it like like it 0:07:10.560 --> 0:07:15.160 was just pumped up, like ban on technology and cash 0:07:15.240 --> 0:07:18.480 and and pig blood and all of that great stuff, 0:07:18.720 --> 0:07:21.200 but that it didn't really have the refined character and 0:07:21.280 --> 0:07:25.000 culture makes an American city great. Bin with a backpack 0:07:25.080 --> 0:07:28.040 full of pig blood just being injected into his body, 0:07:28.080 --> 0:07:31.000 that sounds great. This is not the brain you carn't understand. 0:07:31.160 --> 0:07:35.360 It's the it's the old band with the getting pumped up. 0:07:36.280 --> 0:07:40.200 Uh So, rapid urbanization had factors that people found both 0:07:40.200 --> 0:07:42.680 alluring and repulsive. And I want to explore one of 0:07:42.720 --> 0:07:46.360 the people who found it repulsive. So in eighteen ninety three, 0:07:46.400 --> 0:07:49.800 the French writer and publisher Octavouzon wrote a letter to 0:07:49.840 --> 0:07:53.320 the periodical The American Architect and Building News, and he 0:07:53.360 --> 0:07:55.920 was reporting on a recent visit he made to Chicago. 0:07:55.960 --> 0:07:58.600 He'd actually been visiting the eighteen nine World's Fair that 0:07:58.640 --> 0:08:02.360 we're gonna be talking about. And in talking about Chicago, 0:08:02.440 --> 0:08:05.960 he he was writing about the prospect of leaving the city. 0:08:06.200 --> 0:08:09.320 And this is an abridged quote. Built upon a mud 0:08:09.400 --> 0:08:12.720 flat on the shore of a somber verdure less lake. 0:08:13.080 --> 0:08:17.120 It was the noisy, furious, impulsive, brutal life which their 0:08:17.200 --> 0:08:22.120 maneuvers its battalions, a life without soul and ideal business 0:08:22.240 --> 0:08:25.840 business business. Is this not the real burden of the 0:08:25.960 --> 0:08:29.040 raven and Pose poem? I don't believe it is. I think, 0:08:29.360 --> 0:08:40.800 I think, probably think that he died in the street. Yeah, Baltimore, though, 0:08:40.840 --> 0:08:44.000 Baltimore is a city with character. It's got old school class, 0:08:44.160 --> 0:08:47.000 or at least they thought. But continuing us, quote, he's 0:08:47.040 --> 0:08:49.440 on the train leaving Chicago, and he's very happy to 0:08:49.480 --> 0:08:52.440 be leaving, he says. The next morning, raising the shade 0:08:52.440 --> 0:08:55.520 of my compartment, I saw behind the glass a smiling 0:08:55.559 --> 0:08:59.840 country unroll itself before nature, thus peaceful in sight of 0:08:59.840 --> 0:09:03.680 the light mists, these mosses, these flowers opening in the sun. 0:09:04.040 --> 0:09:07.680 I forgot the frightful nightmare of the departure from Chicago. 0:09:08.120 --> 0:09:13.640 That Gordian city, so excessive, so satanic, so so yeah, 0:09:13.679 --> 0:09:16.480 this was like hell raiser for this guy from France, 0:09:16.600 --> 0:09:20.240 basically Chicago. Yeah, pin Head lived here. I really like 0:09:20.320 --> 0:09:22.839 Gordian City. I don't. I don't. I think you guys 0:09:22.880 --> 0:09:24.760 should embrace that here in the same way that a 0:09:24.760 --> 0:09:26.760 lot of take it back, a lot of people from 0:09:26.760 --> 0:09:31.839 Atlanta embraced Terminus, as is our alternate title. I think 0:09:31.880 --> 0:09:34.560 that's only after the Walking Dead. But yeah, I don't 0:09:34.559 --> 0:09:36.600 know if that actually works out that well, because to 0:09:36.640 --> 0:09:38.520 be Gordian, I would think it would be hard to navigate. 0:09:38.640 --> 0:09:41.080 So far, I found Chicago much easier to navigate than 0:09:41.120 --> 0:09:43.800 most cities. Right, y'all, this is smart. Y'all have a grid. 0:09:44.040 --> 0:09:47.199 Guys have great public transportation. We're from Atlanta. Try to 0:09:47.240 --> 0:09:51.800 find your way around in Atlanta. Yet, well, they're all 0:09:51.800 --> 0:09:54.920 little cattle trails that got convert anyway. I'm just saying 0:09:54.920 --> 0:09:57.120 it's a great name. I'm that's not saying you're gonna 0:09:57.160 --> 0:10:00.080 get lost. Okay, we got to make it to the fair. Okay. So, 0:10:00.240 --> 0:10:03.720 as cities gathering, urbanization cities gathering, they tend to grow 0:10:03.880 --> 0:10:06.120 up because where you're going to fit all those people, right, 0:10:06.160 --> 0:10:09.560 You've got to expand into three dimensions. So uh so 0:10:09.679 --> 0:10:14.080 driving into three dimensions. The urbanization trend was also tightly 0:10:14.160 --> 0:10:17.680 linked to the development of high rise architecture and and 0:10:17.760 --> 0:10:20.800 this new class of architects to design these tall buildings 0:10:20.840 --> 0:10:23.240 that would pack in all these people in the new cities. 0:10:23.640 --> 0:10:26.520 And this new class of architects included the people Daniel 0:10:26.559 --> 0:10:30.480 Burnham and John Wellborn Route, who were also responsible for 0:10:30.520 --> 0:10:33.560 buildings like the twenty one story Masonic Temple building in 0:10:33.640 --> 0:10:38.800 Chicago pretty good name Satanic, Yeah, and the Rookery Building, 0:10:38.800 --> 0:10:41.720 which is still standing today. I went and saw it yesterday. Robert, 0:10:41.720 --> 0:10:43.240 you saw it, Christian? Did you see it yet? I 0:10:43.240 --> 0:10:45.240 haven't been yet. I'm gonna try to go tomorrow. Well, 0:10:45.320 --> 0:10:47.439 it's if you're in town. It's beautiful. You should go 0:10:47.480 --> 0:10:49.400 in there. Take a look at the lobby. It's got 0:10:49.440 --> 0:10:53.679 this non representative artistry on the architecture inside the lobby 0:10:53.760 --> 0:10:55.400 that makes it look kind of like a mosque. It's 0:10:55.520 --> 0:10:58.719 very beautiful. I love it. Um But anyway, so they 0:10:58.720 --> 0:11:01.160 were designing these new type types of buildings, buildings that 0:11:01.200 --> 0:11:04.560 went up into the sky, stuff people have never seen before. 0:11:05.040 --> 0:11:07.400 And being a high rise architect in Chicago was a 0:11:07.440 --> 0:11:10.160 difficult job because I don't know if anybody here has 0:11:10.160 --> 0:11:13.360 ever tried to build in Chicago. Apparently the soil here 0:11:13.480 --> 0:11:17.120 is just junk. It's uh, it's like a mud flat 0:11:17.240 --> 0:11:19.480 that sinks down, and when you try to build, your 0:11:19.520 --> 0:11:22.400 buildings will sink into the mud and shift. So they 0:11:22.400 --> 0:11:24.640 had to come up with new technologies to build new 0:11:24.679 --> 0:11:27.520 types of foundations that would anchor these buildings. They didn't 0:11:27.520 --> 0:11:31.520 start leaning over halfway through construction. Um, so this really 0:11:31.640 --> 0:11:35.559 is It's we don't often think about buildings as technological 0:11:35.640 --> 0:11:38.560 organisms today, but they really are. These high rise buildings 0:11:38.559 --> 0:11:43.360 were a monstrous achievement of science and technology. So we 0:11:43.440 --> 0:11:46.560 get to eighteen ninety, we're getting to the fair. The 0:11:46.640 --> 0:11:50.160 US Congress votes to host a World's Fair in eighteen 0:11:50.800 --> 0:11:55.200 it's in celebration of does anybody want to guess Columbus 0:11:55.400 --> 0:12:00.959 that guy because it's the Columbian right, Yes, So it 0:12:01.000 --> 0:12:04.680 would be the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing in 0:12:04.679 --> 0:12:08.000 the New World. And who's going to get to host 0:12:08.040 --> 0:12:10.560 the city? There's a big competition between cities. You have 0:12:10.600 --> 0:12:12.480 New York wants to host it. All these cities want 0:12:12.480 --> 0:12:16.240 to host I think St. Louis did, but wouldn't you 0:12:16.320 --> 0:12:22.520 know it, Chicago, this satanic building building, the satanic city 0:12:22.760 --> 0:12:27.160 built on quicksand gets to host the fair. And that, 0:12:27.480 --> 0:12:30.120 I mean that's pretty cool to imagine, like, oh, this 0:12:30.200 --> 0:12:34.120 city all these people thought was just a hellhole. Um, 0:12:34.200 --> 0:12:36.720 and now we're going to bring the entire world there 0:12:36.720 --> 0:12:39.840 and show them what's up. Show them what America can do. 0:12:40.880 --> 0:12:42.960 So this is probably a good place to acknowledge one 0:12:43.000 --> 0:12:45.720 of our key resources in researching this episode, which is 0:12:45.880 --> 0:12:50.839 Eric Larson's excellent two thousand three nonfiction book White City. 0:12:51.400 --> 0:12:54.600 So yeah, you haven't read it. That is a great book, 0:12:55.120 --> 0:12:58.000 absolutely fabulous and one of one of the Mikey resources 0:12:58.000 --> 0:12:59.480 and working in this And one of the points Eric 0:12:59.520 --> 0:13:02.120 Larson made is that it's hard for us today, even 0:13:02.400 --> 0:13:06.080 we got some cheers earlier for hating New York, but um, 0:13:06.120 --> 0:13:09.200 it's hard for us today to understand the depth of 0:13:09.280 --> 0:13:13.240 location based pride in the eighteen nineties that people, when 0:13:13.240 --> 0:13:15.959 the reputation of their city was on the line, they 0:13:16.000 --> 0:13:22.079 took that so seriously. And so fair is coming, you 0:13:22.160 --> 0:13:25.640 gotta make it good. So there was an absolutely frantic 0:13:25.679 --> 0:13:29.000 design and construction phase, and the fair opened finally in 0:13:29.280 --> 0:13:33.199 May one. It began with a horrible flot because it 0:13:33.240 --> 0:13:36.839 coincided almost perfectly with the panic of eighteen ninety three. 0:13:37.160 --> 0:13:39.559 So imagine starting this World's Fair where you want to 0:13:39.600 --> 0:13:42.160 bring everybody and show what your country can do, and 0:13:42.280 --> 0:13:44.720 right then you get a depression. It's like if you're 0:13:44.720 --> 0:13:46.680 at C two E two in two thousand eight, in 0:13:46.720 --> 0:13:49.440 the economy. It is completely plummeted, and you couldn't buy 0:13:49.520 --> 0:13:55.600 cosplay costumes right or worse, maybe worse. So in a 0:13:55.640 --> 0:13:57.160 lot of ways, you could look at the fair as 0:13:57.240 --> 0:13:59.720 kind of a financial failure, but in other ways, I 0:13:59.760 --> 0:14:02.200 think we should look at it as one of the 0:14:02.240 --> 0:14:05.280 coolest and most important events in American history. It was 0:14:05.320 --> 0:14:10.440 this romantic, ecumenical, insane, science fiction assemblage of the spirit 0:14:10.440 --> 0:14:14.080 of the American city, especially the soul of Chicago and 0:14:14.120 --> 0:14:19.840 everything that Chicago embodied, everything angelic, everything satanic, And I mean, 0:14:20.040 --> 0:14:22.760 how cool is this? They built a city within a city. 0:14:23.000 --> 0:14:25.240 They built a city within a city on the shore 0:14:25.240 --> 0:14:28.280 of Lake Michigan, and it lived for a year. It 0:14:28.320 --> 0:14:30.760 was throughout the summer season while people came to the fair, 0:14:30.800 --> 0:14:34.120 and then it disappeared into history, you know. And we've 0:14:34.120 --> 0:14:37.080 been talking about this amongst ourselves as we've been researching it. Like, 0:14:37.440 --> 0:14:41.000 I'm wondering, those of you who are from Illinois, did 0:14:41.080 --> 0:14:43.920 you learn about the White City as you're growing up? 0:14:44.000 --> 0:14:47.240 Was this like a point of pride from the various 0:14:47.240 --> 0:14:49.520 places that we grew up in. I didn't hear about 0:14:49.520 --> 0:14:51.520 it until I was until I read double in the 0:14:51.520 --> 0:14:55.440 White City and this is this amazing thing in American 0:14:55.560 --> 0:14:58.440 history that seems to get glossed over. Yeah, I feel 0:14:58.440 --> 0:15:01.400 like you tend to learn more about your own states 0:15:01.560 --> 0:15:04.320 world thing, right, Yeah, then you do about the about 0:15:04.560 --> 0:15:06.720 You know, everyone wants to celebrate their own party, not 0:15:06.840 --> 0:15:08.920 the great party of it. For me, it was the 0:15:09.000 --> 0:15:15.240 tea party, but the old one. Uh, for us growing 0:15:15.280 --> 0:15:17.360 up in Tennessee, what did we learn more like the 0:15:17.360 --> 0:15:21.280 mini versatile uses of corn chips. Well, and of course 0:15:21.280 --> 0:15:24.000 in Knox Fill we have the big golden globe with 0:15:24.000 --> 0:15:26.800 the wigs in it. Yeah, with the wig tower. Was 0:15:26.840 --> 0:15:30.000 that real? Or was that just the Simpsons? That? What? 0:15:30.880 --> 0:15:34.080 The wig tower? There, wigs in it, the buildings there, 0:15:34.240 --> 0:15:38.400 you have ruined reality for me. Okay, So each of 0:15:38.400 --> 0:15:40.480 the three of us is going to focus on one 0:15:40.560 --> 0:15:42.600 major aspect of the fair that we want to talk 0:15:42.600 --> 0:15:45.840 about that we found especially interesting. But before we get 0:15:45.840 --> 0:15:47.800 into that, we just wanted to give you a little 0:15:47.800 --> 0:15:49.960 bit of the texture of the fair so you can 0:15:50.040 --> 0:15:51.920 know what all is going on there. There's absolutely no 0:15:52.000 --> 0:15:53.920 way we could explore everything that was happening at the 0:15:53.960 --> 0:15:56.600 fair because it was I mean, it was the the 0:15:56.600 --> 0:15:58.840 whole world in a in a in a single place, 0:15:59.520 --> 0:16:01.920 it would be a possible, but to try to give 0:16:01.960 --> 0:16:04.200 you a quick picture, one of the first things you'd 0:16:04.280 --> 0:16:08.160 notice if you walk into the fair is probably the architecture. Now, 0:16:08.240 --> 0:16:12.160 they had landscape architecture right from Frederick Law Olmstead, the 0:16:12.160 --> 0:16:14.760 guy who designed Central Park in New York and a 0:16:14.800 --> 0:16:16.560 lot of I mean a lot of times. If you 0:16:16.600 --> 0:16:18.960 go to a city and you find a beautiful park 0:16:19.080 --> 0:16:23.520 with greens and nice sloping contours and uh tastefully selected 0:16:23.560 --> 0:16:27.479 plants and all that, you look it up designed by Olmstead. Yeah, 0:16:27.560 --> 0:16:30.520 so are our big park back in our hometown of Atlanta. 0:16:30.600 --> 0:16:34.440 Piedmont Park is an Olmstead park. That's pretty cool. It 0:16:34.560 --> 0:16:37.239 is pretty cool. It's best when it's full of dogs, 0:16:37.240 --> 0:16:39.800 exactly when they get away from their owners and they 0:16:39.840 --> 0:16:44.320 come and get your hot dog. I'm not speaking from experience, 0:16:44.320 --> 0:16:50.000 I don't, but yeah, but also building architecture, so um. 0:16:50.040 --> 0:16:52.680 The person who is selected to head up the fair, 0:16:52.720 --> 0:16:55.200 to be the czar of the fair and control all 0:16:55.320 --> 0:16:59.440 of its machinations was Daniel Burnham. The architect I mentioned 0:16:59.440 --> 0:17:03.680 earlier was responsible for the rookery uh, and he also 0:17:03.720 --> 0:17:06.639 wanted the fair to be about building architecture. And this 0:17:06.720 --> 0:17:09.080 is what led to the White City. We had the 0:17:09.160 --> 0:17:11.919 image up earlier. It seems to be gone now, uh, 0:17:12.359 --> 0:17:15.879 But this was this was a city built on the shore. 0:17:16.040 --> 0:17:18.880 It was in Jackson Park on the shore of Lake Michigan, 0:17:19.640 --> 0:17:22.080 and he invited architects from all over the place, all 0:17:22.119 --> 0:17:24.679 the best architects in the country to come together and 0:17:24.760 --> 0:17:27.760 build a city in the neo classical architecture style. So 0:17:27.760 --> 0:17:29.879 if you're trying to picture that, think I think like 0:17:29.920 --> 0:17:33.480 ancient Rome. Think columns and cornices and sort of like 0:17:33.520 --> 0:17:36.760 the design you would find in the US capital, uh 0:17:36.800 --> 0:17:41.560 and things like that. It suggests stateliness, power, pride, empire 0:17:42.160 --> 0:17:45.320 uh and other various beautiful and evil things all wrapped 0:17:45.359 --> 0:17:48.680 into one. But because they were on a really tight schedule, 0:17:49.200 --> 0:17:51.040 they've been thinking about what are we going to paint 0:17:51.040 --> 0:17:53.399 all the buildings that they just went all white, just 0:17:53.520 --> 0:17:56.919 everything white. It just painted all white. Basically, it's like 0:17:56.960 --> 0:17:59.160 they put the primer on it. It's like they got 0:17:59.160 --> 0:18:02.119 their miniatures ready for the big game and they had 0:18:02.160 --> 0:18:04.520 time for the primer, but not to really paint the army. 0:18:04.600 --> 0:18:06.280 But hey, you know, you gotta that's a game. You 0:18:06.320 --> 0:18:07.880 got a game that's a good way to think about 0:18:07.880 --> 0:18:12.639 the White City, like a big game of Warhammer. Warhammer, 0:18:13.080 --> 0:18:15.879 I guess it would. It's the future. The future is 0:18:15.960 --> 0:18:19.760 those the emphasis here, right. Okay, So you've got the 0:18:19.800 --> 0:18:21.680 White City and you're walking in there, and you try 0:18:21.720 --> 0:18:23.800 to imagine going to this on like a hot summer 0:18:23.880 --> 0:18:26.320 day with the sun beating down and all these white 0:18:26.359 --> 0:18:28.840 buildings and then the sun reflecting off the lake. It 0:18:28.840 --> 0:18:34.119 would be not only beautiful but probably literally hurt your eyes. Uh, 0:18:34.720 --> 0:18:37.440 just all this is all this light, but you're so bright. 0:18:37.440 --> 0:18:42.800 You gotta wear shades. Man, oh man, I'm like that 0:18:42.920 --> 0:18:46.720 was the slogan at my college graduation. No way they 0:18:46.720 --> 0:18:49.320 made us wear sunglasses. It was real silly. Anyway, who 0:18:51.320 --> 0:18:55.960 embarrassing personal history? We don't do that enough. Anyway. By night, 0:18:56.000 --> 0:18:58.520 you would you would witness another one of the fairest marvels, 0:18:58.560 --> 0:19:02.399 which is electric lighting. Now, electric lighting was had already 0:19:02.400 --> 0:19:05.400 existed at this point, but it wasn't fully adopted everywhere, 0:19:05.440 --> 0:19:09.320 and so they had enormous amounts of electric light going 0:19:09.359 --> 0:19:11.040 on at this fair more than a hundred and twenty 0:19:11.080 --> 0:19:16.320 thousand incandescent electric lamps, seven thousand arc lights. George Westinghouse 0:19:16.560 --> 0:19:19.560 the guy who held the rights to Nicola Tesla's Alternating 0:19:19.600 --> 0:19:23.440 Current was the one who got the contract to electrify 0:19:23.560 --> 0:19:25.280 the Fair, and this actually played a big role in 0:19:25.359 --> 0:19:29.520 getting Alternating Current AC accepted as the new standard over 0:19:29.800 --> 0:19:32.199 Edison's d C. I'm sure y'all we got fans of 0:19:32.200 --> 0:19:35.320 the current wars out here. Yeah, we have. We have 0:19:35.359 --> 0:19:37.840 a couple of episodes about that stuff. These guys in particular, 0:19:37.880 --> 0:19:42.080 did a really great episode about the uh, the religious 0:19:42.119 --> 0:19:45.480 aspects of electricity. Yeah, if you want to go check 0:19:45.520 --> 0:19:47.160 that out in our back catalog. What is it called 0:19:47.160 --> 0:19:48.879 Early Days of Electricity. It's about how a lot of 0:19:48.920 --> 0:19:51.760 people used to think electricity was magic and holy and 0:19:52.040 --> 0:19:54.320 they wrote poems about it and then it got really boring. 0:19:54.359 --> 0:19:56.760 Around the same time they started electrocuting people in the 0:19:56.800 --> 0:20:02.200 electric chair. So the Fairy used three times as much 0:20:02.200 --> 0:20:06.040 electricity as the entire city of Chicago. This is definitely 0:20:06.040 --> 0:20:10.600 a technological revolution. Um. More random curiosities from the Fair. 0:20:10.640 --> 0:20:12.520 I just want to mention a few real quick. The 0:20:12.560 --> 0:20:16.639 future of weaponry. The largest artillery gun ever built up 0:20:16.680 --> 0:20:19.280 to that time, by the Fritz, by the Fritz, by 0:20:19.320 --> 0:20:23.239 the German gun. Yeah, while he was the Fritz. He 0:20:23.320 --> 0:20:29.080 was Fritz Krupp, the German gun god who made artillery weapons. 0:20:29.080 --> 0:20:31.960 So this was the biggest one, every twenty seven tons. 0:20:32.320 --> 0:20:35.840 It was capable of shooting a one ton shell. Krupp 0:20:35.880 --> 0:20:40.000 claimed up to a range of sixteen miles, and people 0:20:40.200 --> 0:20:44.320 nicknamed it Krup's baby or Crup's monster. And I think 0:20:44.320 --> 0:20:46.400 this is interesting because you get a kind of preview 0:20:46.880 --> 0:20:49.080 of some of the carnage that's going to come with 0:20:49.119 --> 0:20:52.280 the changing technological world. And just I guess with twenty 0:20:52.359 --> 0:20:54.280 five years from then, once we get to World War One, 0:20:54.320 --> 0:20:59.320 the first really true artillery campaign. So this is like 0:20:59.400 --> 0:21:02.520 the moat up of their time, the what the moab? 0:21:02.680 --> 0:21:05.480 The mo Yeah pretty much. Yeah. And then didn't they 0:21:05.560 --> 0:21:08.119 like that you told me this. They would fire the 0:21:08.200 --> 0:21:10.920 shells at targets here in Chicago, right, so they could 0:21:10.920 --> 0:21:14.080 demonstrate its power. Thankfully, they did not try to fire 0:21:14.119 --> 0:21:17.080 the gun inside the city. They had these destroyed targets. 0:21:17.119 --> 0:21:20.320 It was almost like warnings. They had these destroyed targets 0:21:20.400 --> 0:21:23.520 to be these sheets of eighteen inch thick steel that 0:21:23.560 --> 0:21:26.560 are just blown to smithereens by the gun. Uh, they 0:21:26.560 --> 0:21:29.119 claimed the gun had done this. No nobody really saw it. Happen. 0:21:29.200 --> 0:21:32.119 I guess we have to assume it worked. But the 0:21:32.160 --> 0:21:34.639 fair had a Hall of Electricity. Apparently there was just 0:21:34.680 --> 0:21:38.360 an ungodly noise inside. Can you imagine all this nineteenth 0:21:38.359 --> 0:21:42.360 century electricity uh display? So Nicola Tesla had all these 0:21:42.400 --> 0:21:47.000 devices there to show off how electricity worked, induction motors, um, 0:21:47.200 --> 0:21:49.399 you know. Can you imagine the whirring and the clattering 0:21:49.440 --> 0:21:53.240 and the static discharge crashing like there's lightning and screaming 0:21:53.280 --> 0:21:54.960 all in the building. I'm sure it would have been cool. 0:21:56.640 --> 0:21:59.640 It sounds like here kind of Also about the hall 0:21:59.680 --> 0:22:03.000 of like tricity, they had a Benjamin Franklin statue in 0:22:03.119 --> 0:22:08.600 Michael Angeloyd glory, except he was clothed boring. What was 0:22:08.600 --> 0:22:14.120 he wearing standard Benjamin Franklin crap? I don't know even 0:22:14.200 --> 0:22:17.959 they shared that coat with the spectacles. Think he had 0:22:17.960 --> 0:22:20.080 his spectacles on. But to go for the real thing, 0:22:20.080 --> 0:22:22.320 they should have had him nude, like the David with 0:22:22.359 --> 0:22:31.320 the arm back holding a kite. Yeah. One last thing 0:22:31.359 --> 0:22:34.720 I want to mention is the cultural displays of the fair. 0:22:34.760 --> 0:22:37.439