One hundred twenty years ago today, July 4, 1893, 325 thousand visitors from around the United States and other spots on the globe swarmed to the shore of Lake Michigan to visit the wonders of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. The fair is famous, among other things, for being the birthplace of the Ferris Wheel and the commercial movie theater (Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxographical Hall).
It’s legacy lives on Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (MSI), which opened forty years later in the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts building, designed by Charles B. Atwood.
In the same year that MSI opened, Chicago hosted another World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress World Exposition,” themed to technological innovation. At its heart though, Century of Progress celebrated the centennial of the founding of Chicago. Below, InPark presents a rare technicolor tour of the 1933 fair (underwritten by Chrysler).
