The Wonders of Machinery Hall
1893 World's Columbian Exposition
To celebrate the hundredth birthday of America, a grand exposition was held at Philadephia in 1876. The exhibition of engines, pumps, machine tools, locomotives, etc. on display was one of the largest ever seen anywhere. Yet just seventeen years later Machinery Hall at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 far surpassed the Centennial Exposition in size. As large as Machinery Hall was, over 700 would-be exhibitors had to be turned away because the 14 acres of floor space was filled to capacity.
Here,
you can take a time machine back to Machinery Hall and see some of the incredible
exhibits - from the giant Allis engine to the lathes, planers, and precision
measuring machine. You get articles from 1892 and 1893 issues of American
Machinist Magazine that were written for machine men which means you get technical
details that won't be found elsewhere: details on piping, compressed air,
engine foundations, lawsuits over boiler exhibitions, details on how President
Cleveland may, or may not, have started the exhibition with a push of a button
on May 1, 1893.
You'll see the amazing engines: General Electric, Galloways from England, the Buckeye, McIntosh & Seymour, Dick & Church and more.
The star attraction, though, was the giant engine built by E.
P. Allis & Co., of Milwaukee - a quadruple expansion of Reynolds-Corliss design
with a 72 inch stroke driving a 30 ft diameter flywheel having a 76" wide
face. On it were placed two leather belts to transmit power to Westinghouse
dynamos which generated the electricity needed by the fair. (Remember, electricity
was a brand new technology.) You get drawings and technical details that would
never have appeared in newspapers of the 
time.
The Allis may have been the largest, but the other engines were not wimpy. For instance, the Galloways engine ran on a hundred pounds of steam pressure driving a 23 ft flywheel at 70 rpm. Most of these large engines drove dynamos as well.
Behind machinery hall was built the largest boiler house in the world. Oil was brought in via a pipe line from eastern oil fields through Whiting, Indiana by the Standard Oil Company at, get this, the whopping price of 72-1/2 cents per barrel!
You also get details of drill presses, tool grinders, valve milling machines, roll grooving machines, tool maker's lathes, testing machines, and much more.
Photographs
and drawings from the American Machinist articles are reproduced, but many
more photos from other sources are also included to give you sense of what
was present. And once you see the size and breadth of the exhibition you'll
wish you could go back and spend a week... and take that brand new high-tech
handheld camera called the Kodak.
Great reading. Great photos. One great exhibition. There may be some ideas here for model makers. Or collectors of old machinery. Or people who want to understand how machinery evolved over the decades. Fascinating content. Get a copy! 8-1/2 x 11 softcover 192 pages
No. 23675... $16.95
|
||||||||||||
