Volume V Part 12 (1/2)
Save the Art Building, the structures at the Fair were designed to be temporary, and they were superfluous when the occasion which called them into being had pa.s.sed. The question of disposing of them was summarily solved. One day some boys playing near the Terminal Station saw a sinister leer of flame inside. A high wind soon blew a conflagration, which enveloped the structures, leaving next day naught but ashes, tortured iron work, and here and there an arch, to tell of the regal White City that had been.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Several people watching a fire.]
Electricity Building. Mines and Mining Building.
The Burning of the White City.
The financial backers of the Fair showed no mercenary temper. The architects, too, worked with public spirit and zeal which money never could have elicited. Notwithstanding the World's Fair was not financially a ”success,” this was rather to the credit of its unstinted magnificence than to the want of public appreciation. The paid admissions were over 21,000,000, a daily average of 120,000. The gross attendance exceeded by nearly a million the number at the Paris Exposition of 1889 for the corresponding period, though rather more than half a million below the total at the French capital. The monthly average at Chicago increased from 1,000,000 at first to 7,000,000 in October. The crowd was typical of the best side of American life; orderly, good-natured, intelligent, sober. The grounds were clean, and there was no ruffianism. Of the $32,988 worth of property reported stolen, $31,875 was recovered and restored.
CHAPTER VI.
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT
[1890-1893]
The century from 1790 to 1890 saw our people multiplied sixteen times, from 3,929,214 at its beginning, to 62,622,250 at its end. The low percentage of increase for the last decade, about 20 per cent., disappointed even conservative estimates. The cities not only absorbed this increase, but, except in the West, made heavy draughts upon the country population. Of each 1,000 people in 1880, 225 were urban; in 1890, 290. Chicago's million and a tenth was second only to New York's million and a half. Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and St. Louis appeared respectively as the third, fourth, and fifth in the list of great cities. St. Paul, Omaha, and Denver domiciled three or four times as many as ten years before. Among Western States only Nevada lagged. The State of Was.h.i.+ngton had quintupled its numbers. The centre of population had travelled fifty miles west and nine miles north, being caught by the census about twenty miles east of Columbus, Indiana.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Frame of twelve story building.]
The New York Life Insurance Building in Chicago.
(Showing the construction of outer walls.)
The railroads of the country spanned an aggregate of 163,000 miles, twice the mileage of 1880. The national wealth was appraised at $65,037,091,197, an increase for the decade of $21,395,091,197 in the gross. Our per capita wealth was now $1,039, a per capita increase of $169. Production in the mining industry had gone up more than half. The improved acreage, on the other hand, had increased less than a third, the number of farms a little over an eighth.
School enrollment had advanced from 12 per cent. in 1840 to 23 per cent.
in 1890. Not far from a third of the people were communicants of the various religious bodies. About a tenth were Roman Catholics.
Improvement in iron and steel manufacture revolutionized the construction of bridges, vessels, and buildings. The suspension bridge, instanced by the stupendous East River bridge between New York and Brooklyn, was supplanted by the cantilever type, consisting of trusswork beams poised upon piers and meeting each other mid-stream. Iron and steel construction also made elevated railways possible. In 1890 the elevated roads of New York City alone carried over 500,000 pa.s.sengers daily. Steel lent to the framework of buildings lightness, strength, and fire-proof quality, at the same time permitting swift construction.
Walls came to serve merely as covering, not sustaining the floors, the weight of which lay upon iron posts and girders.
At the time of the Centennial, electricity was used almost exclusively for telegraphic communication. By 1893 new inventions, as wonderful as Morse's own, had overlaid even that invention. A single wire now sufficed to carry several messages at once and in different directions.
Rapidity of transmission was another miracle. During the electrical exposition in New York City, May, 1896, Hon. Chauncey M. Depew dictated a message which was sent round the world and back in fifty minutes. It read:
”G.o.d creates, nature treasures, science utilizes electrical power for the grandeur of nations and the peace of the world.” These words travelled from London to Lisbon, thence to Suez, Aden, Bombay, Madras, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, and Tokio, returning by the same route to New York, a total distance of over 27,500 miles.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Three vertical generators about thirty feet in diameter.]
Interior of the Power House at Niagara Falls.
Self-winding and self-regulating clocks came into vogue, being automatically adjusted through the Western Union telegraph lines, so that at noon each day the correct time was instantly communicated to their hands from the national observatory. Another invaluable use of the telegraph was its service to the Weather Bureau, established in 1870. By means of simultaneous reports from a tract of territory 3,000 miles long by 1,500 wide, this bureau was enabled to make its forecasts indispensable to every prudent farmer, traveller, or mariner.
The three great latter-day applications of electrical force were the telephone, the electric light, and the electric motor. In 1876, almost simultaneously with its discovery by other investigators, Alexander Graham Bell exhibited an electric transmitter of the human voice. By the addition of the Edison carbon transmitter the same year the novelty was a.s.sured swift success. In 1893 the Bell Telephone Company owned 307,748 miles of wire, an amount increased by rival companies' property to 444,750. Estimates gave for that year nearly 14,000 ”exchanges,” 250,000 subscribers, and 2,000,000 daily conversations. New York and Chicago were placed on speaking terms only three or four days before ”Columbus Day.” All the chief cities were soon connected by telephone.
At the Philadelphia Exposition arc electric lamps were the latest wonder, and not till two years later did Edison render the incandescent lamp available.
The use of electricity for the development of power as well as of light, unknown in the Centennial year, was in the Columbian year neither a scientific nor a practical novelty. On the contrary, it was fast supplanting horses upon street railways, and making city systems nuclei for far-stretching suburban and interurban lines. Street railways mounted steep hills inaccessible before save by the clumsy system of cables. Even steam locomotives upon great railways gave place in some instances to motors. Horseless carriages and pedalless bicycles were clearly in prospect.