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INTRODUCTION California Welcomes the World All of the great world’s fairs of history—London, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Paris—gazed back in time and recorded the progress made by important events, discoveries, and inventions.They also looked forward.The first international fair in 1851 portrayed a world dominated by the new industrial capitalism. Exhibits in London’s Hyde Park represented an ordered world where people bought and sold goods and exchanged ideas about art, science, technology, education, and the relations among nations.The magical world’s fairs that followed celebrated the march of human progress by honoring these themes.1 San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 was no different. The state’s nineteenth-century dream had rested on antiindustrial and agrarian themes, but the 1915 exposition announced California ’s future. In the Palace of Transportation, a Ford rolled off an assembly line every ten minutes.The Palace of Machinery displayed life-sized models of California’s mechanized canneries, cement mixers, electricity-lit mines, Pelton water wheels, power plants, and diesel engines.The fairalso gave one last tribute to the ideals of a century that had been defined, above all, by one of the most self-confident and exuberant ideas of all times: progress.2 This nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century notion of progress rested on an abstract but universal set of ideas. In theory, progress promised many things: material and commercial development, scientific and social enlightenment , free markets, and rule of law. The San Francisco Exposition’s machine exhibits, international pavilions, and educational displays honored these ideals. Most of all, the fair celebrated technical innovation. Paris had the Eiffel Tower; Chicago had its Ferris wheel; San Francisco had the Panama Canal. Perhaps nothing symbolized the modern era more than this canal, the world’s largest engineering project to date. Nations had 2 INTRODUCTION dreamed of constructing a waterway through the Isthmus of Panama since Balboa landed there in 1500. This vision spilled over into the next four centuries . In the mid- to late nineteenth century, applied science in the forms of civil engineering, fluid mechanics, and hydraulics made large engineering works possible. In the 1890s, international teams of engineers and workers began to use dredges, steam shovels, cranes, locomotives, and drills to cut a canal through fifty miles of Panama’s hills and rocks. By 1914, they had excavated a mass of earth larger than the Egyptian pyramids and built the world’s greatest water bridge.The fair’s two million visitors walked through the San Francisco Exposition’s rose-colored gates just as the Panama Canal admitted the first ships through its locks.3 The fair’s working model of the canal had “oceans” at each end and a moving platform with 144 miniature double-decker electrical cars that transported visitors from the “Pacific” to the “Atlantic” in twenty-three minutes. Spectators sat in comfortable chairs and held telephone receivers to their ears. Phonograph records, which operators switched on and off to correspond with the various sections of the journey, relayed recorded lectures on the canal.Visitors learned about how the locks opened, closed, and admitted vessels. Fairgoers marveled at models of Panama’s rivers, mountains , existing and submerged cities, dams, lighthouses, “electric mules,” and power plants.4 The model canal was an exercise in geography, engineering , and culture, a lesson that stamped onto visitors’ minds the crowning achievement of a half century: the conquest of technology over the natural environment and, as the San Francisco Examiner remarked, humankind’s “mastery of this planet.”5 In the mid–nineteenth century, modern transportation and communication systems helped set our modern world in motion. The application of iron, steel, and fossil fuels to industry, transportation, and communication changed the way that people and nations interacted. First, these changes accelerated growth in material production. Second, they helped integrate a global economy.The Suez Canal, steamships, submarine telegraph cables, and transcontinental railways locked distant places together in modern financial and commodity webs. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels noted in 1848 that capitalist production “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” Capitalism “draws all, even the most barbarian , nations into civilization [and] creates a world after its own image.”6 The rise of modern capitalism, which marked the beginning of a half centuryof economic liberalism, touched almost every part of theworld. For the first time, developments local to one region spread quickly to others.7 The third effect of modern technology, a direct consequence of the sec- [18.191...

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