Largest World's Fair Featured Ice Cream Cones, Fax Machines

May 3, 2004 -- One hundred years ago, May Fann was among millions of people who flooded to St. Louis to see the future.

"My eyes aren't large enough to see it all," May Fann told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1904. "How can there be so much in the world?"

In the age of TiVo, MP3 players and remote surgery, it may be difficult to imagine how a fair featuring fax machines, electric typewriters and cultural displays from the Philippines and Japan could prove so captivating.

Still, a century ago, these kinds of items were at the cutting edge of knowledge and, in the absence of television, movies and the Internet, giant fairs were one of the only ways to introduce the public to innovation. As President William McKinely described the events, the World's Fairs represented "timekeepers of progress."

"Back then it was a very big deal," said Max Storm, founder and president of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair Society in St. Louis, Mo. "Everything was new and exciting."

Machines, ‘Mites’ and Dog-Eating

The 1904 fair was the largest World's Fair in history with 12 major exhibition buildings sprawling over 1,272 acres, or 2 square miles and with nearly 20 million people — or about a quarter of the country's population — in attendance between April 30 to Dec. 1, 1904.

It was officially called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition because it marked the 100th anniversary of the acquisition, and featured such "futuristic" items as X-ray machines, fax machines, telephone answering machines, the ice cream cone and the submarine.

Premature babies — and newfangled incubators that helped care for them — were even on display.

The somewhat disturbing exhibit was placed in the entertainment wing of the fair and allowed ticket-purchasers to enter a large hall and watch as doctors and nurses attended to premature infants lying in rows of the incubators. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, the fairgoers could then buy souvenir soap in the shape of a baby and snack at the Incubator Café.

A newspaper advertisement from the time touted the exhibit, saying, "See the mites of humanity whose lives are being preserved by this wonderful method."

Anthropologists offered the public a peek into their studies through their own alarming displays. Under the direction of anthropologist W. J McGee, people from all over the world were collected and placed on display according to their "stage of development."

Patagonians from South America lived in horse-hide tents on the fairgrounds, Pygmies from the Congo performed ceremonial dances and Filipinos were grouped together and sometimes, to the fascination of fairgoers, prepared and ate dogs for dinner.

"There was no TV so one of the functions of the World's Fairs was to put people from around the world on exhibit," said Robert Rydell, author of several books about World's Fairs. "The practice had a long, ignoble history."

Other fields of science made waves in more tasteful presentations.

Inventor Thomas Edison oversaw a vast array of electrical exhibits in the Palaces of Machinery, Transportation and Electricity. The electrical plug and wall outlet, for example, was a new concept and would soon become ubiquitous in American homes.

In the field of physics, French mathematician Henri Poincare hailed the "principle of relativity" in an address at the fair as one of the few principles that would persevere in the field of physics. Sure enough, one year later, Albert Einstein would offer his groundbreaking theory of relativity with the formula E = mc2.

Ice Cream Cones In, Banana Coffee Out

With so many people roaming the grounds, the fair also became a perfect testing ground for innovations in a another field of research — food.

"One day in September, there were 450,000 people at the fair. You can just imagine the demand at lunchtime," said Pam Vaccaro, author of Beyond the Ice Cream Cone, a book detailing food at the 1904 event.

Legend has it that when an ice cream vender at the fair ran out of serving cups, a nearby Syrian immigrant vender rushed to his aid by rolling the ice cream into his sugar-covered pastries. The cones, sold as World's Fair Cornucopias, were an instant hit so that a month later, at least 50 venders at the fair were selling the treat.

True?

"It could have happened, but it sounds fishy to me," says Vaccaro.

In fact, a year earlier, a New York City vendor had patented a press to make waffle cups for his Italian ice cream.

Whatever the ice cream cone's actual origins, Vaccaro says the 1904 fair at least elevated the treat, and many other foods, to a new level of popularity. Other American delicacies that were made famous by the fair were hamburgers, hot dogs (called sausage sandwiches), puffed rice, Dr. Pepper (invented a year earlier in Waco, Texas) and fairy floss, otherwise known as cotton candy.

The fair also served to weed out a few culinary flops, including banana and date-flavored coffee, when they were spurned by the crowds.

Today, World's Fairs carry on, with official events every five years (the next expo is scheduled to take place in 2005 in Aichi, Japan). But now they take place with significantly less fanfair. Storm attends the fairs regularly, but suspects they don't come close to generating the excitement that reverberated from the largest World's Fair in history.

"They're a lot smaller," he said, "and they just don't have that 'wow' factor."