The 1862 London International Exhibition: Machinery on Show and its Message

Four great exhibitions (two in London and two in Paris) put on show 1850s and 1860s international rivalries and achievements across wide realms of art and industry. Even before it opened, the 1862 London Exhibition illustrated how steam power could facilitate speedy completion of a major building project and the manoeuvring of heavy machinery exhibits. Once opened, the Exhibition included a galaxy of machinery, much of it demonstrated ‘in motion’. Getting the ‘Engineering Department’ operational in good time owed much to the diligence of its ‘Superintendent’, Daniel Kinnear Clark. His domain, extensively equipped with under-floor steam pipes and over-head rotating drive shafts, embraced machine tools, cotton spinning ‘mules’, water-pumping demonstrations, sugar mills — and a great deal more. Records of the Exhibition provide plentiful information about mid-nineteenth-century engineering progress. Clark’s own Cyclopædia of the Exhibited Machinery enlighteningly illustrates machine efficiency challenges and engineering design issues of the time.