Great Exhibition of 1851: Leech Barometers, Penny Toilets and Shilling Days

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After the revolutions of 1848 and a successful French industrial exposition in 1844, Henry Cole and Prince Albert won a royal commission for a Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park, despite warnings from the King of Hanover that it would draw a revolutionary mob and that Queen Victoria should flee to the Isle of Wight. Joseph Paxton, a horticulturalist who had designed greenhouses for the Duke of Devonshire, produced the Crystal Palace in nine months: 1,848 feet long and 454 feet wide, built from standardized cast iron and over 300,000 panes of glass made in Birmingham and Smethwick and shipped in by rail. A vaulted transept enclosed full-grown elm trees that the public refused to see cut down.

More than 13,000 exhibits from Britain, its colonies and 44 foreign nations filled the hall, from the Koh-i-Noor diamond to machines turning raw cotton into cloth. Six million people came between May and October 1851, about a third of the population of England and Wales, and Queen Victoria visited 34 times. Prices fell from a pound a day for the season's elite to five shillings and then one shilling, and Thomas Cook organized travel for 150,000 visitors. The surplus of 186,000 pounds bought land in South Kensington, nicknamed Albertopolis, for the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. The rebuilt Crystal Palace at Sydenham burned on November 30, 1936.

• Frederick Bakewell's image telegraph sent drawings using synchronized cylinders, varnish on tin foil and chemically treated paper.
• Samuel Colt disassembled revolvers, mixed the parts and rebuilt working guns to prove interchangeable parts.
• Dr. George Merryweather's Tempest Prognosticator used 12 leeches in bottles that rang bells as storms approached.
• Over 827,000 visitors paid a penny for George Jennings' flush toilets, giving Britain the phrase spending a penny.
• One-shilling tickets alone brought in four and a half million shillings, and the poor lined the tracks to watch excursion trains pass.