Exploring the 1893 World's Fair

More than 130 years ago,

the city of Chicago,

Illinois seemed too grand to be real.

This was the location of the 1893 World's Fair,

also known as the Columbian Exposition.

At the heart of this historical phenomenon was

an ephemeral metropolis known as the White City.

The fairgrounds sprawled over 600 acres,

featuring more than 200 monumental structures that defied imagination.

The manufacturers and liberal arts building alone covered nearly 32 acres.

With the capacity to fit four of the great Roman Colosseum inside and seat 300,000 people,

its vastness was almost incomprehensible.

One of the event's most iconic images is the 65-foot golden statue of the Republic,

gleaming in the sun and towering over the central lagoon of an elaborate canal system.

Borrowing ideas from ancient Venice,

visitors could cover more territory by traveling in Venetian-style gondolas through the canals that spanned most of the fairgrounds.

Norway even sailed a full-sized replica of a Viking ship across the ocean to be put on display.

Approximately 27 million people from around the world were introduced to foods that have since become universally recognizable,

such as peanut butter, Hershey's chocolate, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Cracker Jacks, Juicy Fruit Gum, and Vienna sausages, to name a few.

The integration of electrical power into nearly every aspect of our lives can, in many ways, be traced back to this event.

Electricity lit the night,

with the grounds illuminated by more than 100,000 incandescent light bulbs,

a recently patented invention at the time.

Technological marvels such as the first practical electric automobile and the first electric kitchen with an automatic dishwasher were also introduced.

The entertainment area brought to the public the concept of amusement parks, with attractions,

sideshows, international villages, and the first widespread use of souvenir merchandise like postcards, coins, and other memorabilia.

Interestingly,

spray paint and the concept of whitewashing can also be traced to the

The very first Ferris wheel was created for the event by bridge builder and steel magnate George Washington Gale Ferris.

As the story goes, he sought to rival the Eiffel Tower,

the highlight of the 1889 Paris Fair.

At 264 feet tall, his wheel could accommodate 2,160 people at a time and offered panoramic views of the entire fairgrounds.

The precursor to the electric moving sidewalk from the 1900 Paris Expo was also debuted in Chicago.

It was constructed on the pier to save people from having to walk the 2,500-foot length to and from their steamships.

Much like its successor in Paris, there were multiple platforms moving at different speeds in a looping circuit.

The first platform was for standing and moved at only 3 miles per hour, while the second, fitted with benches,

moved slightly faster at 6 miles per hour.

As we delve deeper into the world's fair events, a pattern begins to emerge,

one that seems to defy the conventional history we've all been taught.

In cities all over the world, we consistently see the same grand and ornate structures,

civil engineering, and infrastructure projects being constructed on a colossal scale within an impossible time frame.

Less than 30 years after the Civil War,

we find cities like Chicago looking as if they could be part of Vatican City or anywhere else in Old World Europe.

Yet we're told that everything was built using wood, plaster, and temporary materials, with the intention of demolishing them when the fair ended.

However, without exception,

some isolated buildings still stand today because some were constructed with permanent materials.

Everything else got destroyed. But we get a glimpse of the craftsmanship involved through structures like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry.

In Chicago's case,

the majority of the fairgrounds didn't need to be demolished because they were conveniently destroyed by fire a few months after the event ended.

Why were certain ones constructed from permanent materials?

And why did they so often hold the title of the world's largest building at the time?

It raises the question, how could the world's largest buildings have been constructed using mostly temporary materials?

Are we to believe that just over a century ago,

people made a habit of building some of the largest, most magnificent, and ornate buildings ever seen, only to use them for a few months?

Even if we disregard the buildings themselves, the earthworks involved in these projects would challenge modern capabilities and equipment under such tight timelines.

And most importantly, why would they do all of this just to destroy it?

Could the world's fair events have been the perfect cover to hide the remnants of a unified global system that existed before the upheaval of the Civil War and two world wars were used to reshape our world?

The similarities between the narratives surrounding the fairs, the architecture, and the scale all seem to point to something more than coincidence.

It suggests a carefully orchestrated erasure of a past we were never meant to remember.

We have to ask ourselves,

how much of our history has been rewritten?

What has been lost, and how much has been hidden in plain sight?