How America Celebrated Its 100th Birthday

The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 promised a glorious industrial future. Outside its gates, the country seethed with violence and corruption.

- Jake Lundberg

William Dean Howells, the editor of The Atlantic, wandered through Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876 trying to make sense of a spectacle that defied description. Two wheels, one small, one large, seemed to tell the story of the great transformation on display. The small one was made of wood—an old spinning wheel set up in a rude log cabin meant to conjure colonial Plymouth. As Howells related, a reenactor playing the Mayflower pilgrim Priscilla Alden paused in her work to give an old Quaker woman a turn. At first, the woman’s “long-unwonted fingers” seemed rusty. She struggled to splice the thread, then got it tangled while Howells and others watched in breathless silence. Finally, though, her dexterity revived, and the wheel came to life “with a soft triumphant burr, while the crowd heaved a sigh of relief.” It was, Howells reflected, “altogether the prettiest thing I saw at the Centennial.”

But Howells and millions of other Americans went to Philadelphia as much to look forward as to look back. Far more thrilling than the wooden spinning wheel was the huge cast-iron wheel—30 feet in diameter and 122,000 pounds—turning almost noiselessly at the center of the complex works of the Corliss Engine in Machinery Hall, driven by steam pumped in from a separate building. Howells sat, stunned, before the engine’s “infinitely varied machinery” working “with unerring intelligence.” No Priscilla Alden or old Quaker was necessary here—just a single, mostly idle attendant whose only job was to occasionally put down his newspaper and administer a few drops of oil.

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