X-Nico

8 unusual facts about the Great Exhibition


Alfred Atmore Pope

Pope's father Alton was a successful woolen goods manufacturer, winning prizes for his mill's samples during The Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in 1851.

Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations

Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations was a World's Fair held in 1853 in what is now Bryant Park in New York City, in the wake of the highly successful 1851 Great Exhibition in London.

Frederick Bakewell

Frederick Collier Bakewell (29 September 1800 – 26 September 1869) was an English physicist who improved on the concept of the facsimile machine introduced by Alexander Bain in 1842 and demonstrated a working laboratory version at the 1851 World's Fair in London.

Friedrich von Hermann

Warmly supporting the customs union (Zollverein), he acted in 1851 as one of its commissioners at the great industrial exhibition at London, and published an elaborate report on the woollen goods.

Green Lane Works

The firm flourished and their products won a first Council medal at the The Great Exhibition of 1851 and a Medaille d'honneur at the Exposition Universelle of 1855.

Margaret Levyns

After winning two scholarships, the Queen Victoria Scholarship and the 1851 Exhibition Memorial Scholarship and spending 1912-14 at Newnham College, she returned to South Africa and was promptly awarded another scholarship to the John Innes Institute where she chose to study genetics.

William Greener

He also invented a self-righting lifeboat, which was exhibited with a rocket gun and, several of his famous percussion muzzle loading shotguns and rifles at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where he was awarded a gold medal.

Wootz steel

Specimens of daggers and other weapons were sent by the Rajahs of India to the International Exhibition of 1851 and 1862.


Alfred Paxton Backhouse

His middle name, Paxton, was selected to honour the creator of The Great Exhibition's Crystal PalaceJoseph Paxton – as it was on show during the year of his birth.

Joseph Nigg

A piece of this sort, thirty inches in height, was presented by Nigg, on behalf of the Viennese factory, at the The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.

William Waud

William Waud, trained as an architect in England, was an assistant to Sir Joseph Paxton and worked on the design of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Yardley of London

Yardley, then known as Yardley & Statham, exhibits at The Great Exhibition in 1851 in The Crystal Palace.


see also

14 Irene

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in the Crystal Palace of Hyde Park, London, ran from May 1 until October 18, 1851.

Khwaja Alimullah

It was auctioned after it was exhibited, along with another famous Indian diamond Koh-i-Noor or the "mountain of light", in 1850 at the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park organised in honour of Queen Victoria.