Fantastic Futures of the Past

A museum revisits various world's fairs-exhilarating expositions from 1850s London to 1960s New York and beyond

- EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

'The Glory of Iron' (c. 1889), by Arthur Waagen, left, which celebrates the construction of the Eiffel Tower; a model of the Trylon and Perisphere (c. 1938), above, by Wallace K. Harrison and Jacques André Fouilhoux.