The New York World's Fair opens - April 22nd, 1964

On this day in 1964, the second New York World's Fair opened at Flushing Meadows Park in the Queens borough of New York City. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to this Day in History Class,
a show for those who can never know enough about history.
I'm Gabe Lousier, and today we're taking a closer look
at one of the most popular World's Fairs of all time,
including the weird exhibits, classic attractions, and breakthrough inventions that

(00:23):
they viewed there. The day was April nineteen sixty four.
The second New York World's Fair opened at Flushing Meadows
Park in the Queensborough of New York City. The sprawling

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fair featured dozens of exhibits and attractions, representing eighty nations,
twenty four US states, and nearly fifty corporations. The theme
of the show was a Millennium of Progress, a cheery
sentiment that was well reflected by the optimistic visions of
the future presented in the exhibits. The fair operated for

(01:08):
about a year and a half and wasn't anywhere near
as profitable as its organizers had hoped, but by most
other measures, the event was a triumph. All these years later,
the nineteen sixty four World's Fair is still fondly remembered
for its space age flair and its unique blend of
earnest idealism and blatant commercialism. In general, world's fares have

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lost a lot of their luster over the years, so
much so, in fact, that many listeners might not even
be familiar with the concept. So let's start with the basics.
A world's fair is like an international trade show, but
not restricted to a single industry, and with much more
public appeal. They feature lavish exhibits hosted by different kinds

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of companies and organizations, as well as countries from around
the globe. The point of the exhibits is to introduce
upcoming products, demonstrate scientific advancements, or test out ideas for
how to improve agriculture or aviation or whatever else. There's
a commercial aspect to the fairs, to be sure, but
there are more high minded aspirations as well. In fact,

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world's fairs are sometimes compared to the Olympics in that regard.
They're both inclusive, world spanning events that are meant to
celebrate human achievement in camaraderie and progress. Making a bunch
of money along the way is more of a secondary goal,
at least in theory. Modern world's fairs got their start
in eighteen fifty one, when Britain hosted the Great Exhibition

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of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London.
It wasn't nearly as catchy a name as World's Fair,
but most countries actually don't use that term. Great Britain
described all the fairs they hosted as exhibitions, while most
of Continental Europe and Asia have chosen to call them
international expositions. It all amounts to the same event in

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the end, and there's even a single governing body that
oversees where and when the events are hosted. It's called
the Bureau of International Expositions or the b i E.
This Paris based organization has run all the official expos
since it was established in ninety eight. There are all

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kinds of rules about who can host exhibitions and how
often they're allowed to occur. For example, the current rule
is that one large exposition can be held every five years,
and one smaller one can be held in between. Another
major rule is that only one event is allowed per
country every ten years. And here's the thing. In nineteen

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sixty four, the United States broke both of those rules. Seattle,
Washington had hosted its own big exposition just two years earlier.
That meant it was too soon for New York City
to host its own large scale World's Fair, but infamous
city planner Robert Moses wouldn't take no for an answer.

(04:03):
After the b i E rejected his proposal, Moses said,
oh well, and carried on with what was basically a
rogue World's Fair. Because the fair didn't earn accreditation from
the b i E, some European countries refused to have
any involvement with the unsanctioned event. This included some heavy
hitters too. For instance, France, Britain and Italy all chose

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to sit out the fair. This forced the organizers to
get a bit creative. They brought in more corporate sponsored exhibitions,
but they also extended an invitation to smaller geopolitical powers
that had been traditionally shut out from such events. This
was the unexpected benefit of the fair's rogue status. It
allowed nations as diverse as Thailand, Morocco, and Honduras to

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seize the spotlight on the world stage. These international exhibits
served as an introduction for tens of million of Americans
to the history, language, and food of dozens of less
familiar cultures. Another standout aspect of the nineteen sixty four
World's Fair were the corporate sponsored exhibits that had been
designed and built by Walt Disney and his freshman crew

(05:16):
of imagineers. Walt had been a lifelong fan of World's Fairs,
and the clearest example of his passion was his Disneyland
theme park. Roller Coasters and ferris wheels are theme park
attractions that got their start at World's Fairs, but the
entire concept of highly themed areas filled with different attractions
is lifted whole cloth from World's Fair pavilions. So naturally,

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Walt Disney was thrilled when the nineteen sixty four exhibition
was announced for New York City. He wanted to be
a part of it in any way he could, and
he definitely got his wish, ultimately designing and building not one,
but four different attractions for that year's fair, and true
to the fair's theme of Space Age progress Us, the

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focal point of all of Disney's exhibits were robots, or,
as he called them, audio animatronics. Disney had debuted that
technology a year earlier with the Birds and his enchanted
Tiki Room attraction at Disneyland, but it was at the
nineteen sixty four World's Fair that this new form of
robotic animation really came into its own. For example, Disney

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made a lifelike recreation of Abraham Lincoln for the fair's
Illinois Pavilion, the state where Lincoln practice law and later
served in government. It was one of the most ambitious
audio animatronics the company had ever attempted. That was partly
due to the complex hydraulic system that drove the figures movements,
but there was also the fact that the robot was

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made to look like an actual person. At that point,
a robot had never been built with the convincing likeness
of a real human being. Yet when National Geographic took
an early look at Disney's work in nineteen sixty three,
they conclude did that the animatronic Lincoln was quote alarming
in its realism. When the exhibit opened at the fair,

(07:07):
Disney's take on Lincoln looked so real that a five
year old boy in the audience thought it was the
real deal. He reportedly looked up at his father and shouted, Daddy,
I thought you said he was dead. The artists that
Disney were able to pull off such a convincing likeness
thanks to the forethought of the real Abraham Lincoln. Just

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two months before his assassination, President Lincoln allowed a sculptor
to make a life mask of his face, and almost
exactly a hundred years later, that's what Disney used to
make their version as accurate as possible. The Lincoln exhibit
proved to be such a hit that the company overhauled
the animatronic to make it even more convincing, and then

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installed it as a permanent attraction in Disneyland the following year.
If you're like me, you're probably wondering about those other
three attractions that featured audio animatronics. Well, don't worry, I've
got you covered. First up, there was a charming little
boat ride you may have heard of, called It's a
Small World. The attraction was originally made as part of

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the fair's Eunice Sef Pavilion, which was sponsored by Pepsi
that year. Next, there was the Carousel of Progress, designed
for the General Electric Pavilion, still running at the Magic
Kingdom in disney World. The attraction is a rotating theater
that switches between scenes of audio animatronics acting out scenes
of domestic life through the decades and showcasing a bunch

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of ge products in the process. Lastly, and probably best
of all, if you ask me, there was the Magic
Skyway at the Ford Pavilion. Ford debut a brand new
sports car at the fair that year, the Mustang. To
help sell the public on the new design, the company
teamed with Disney to build a ride system where fair

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goers could board motorless Mustang convertibles and be slowly pulled
along a conveyor bell. If that sounds a little dull, well,
that's where the robots came in. The idea was that
writers would be sent on a trip back in time
to the Jurassic Age, where they'd encounter intricate scenes of
dinosaurs caring for their young or squaring off in battle.

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In other words, Disney basically used the Ford partnership as
an excuse to make awesome robot dinosaurs, and really, who
can blame him, especially when in the end everyone was happy.
Disney was able to relocate the dinosaur scenes to Disneyland,
where they were incorporated as the Primeval World section of
the park's railroad. And as for Ford, it went on

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to sell four hundred thousand of the new Mustang model
in just its first year on the market, four times
the company's initial projections in business. That's known as the
robot dinosaur effect, or at least it should be. Of course,
the fair had some other non Disney high points as well.

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For instance, there was an exhibition where a person flew
around wearing a jet pack that was originally built for
the U. S. Army. It could reportedly fly a distance
of eight hundred and fifteen feet and go as fast
as sixty miles per hour. The pilot at the fair
didn't get to do anything quite that cool, but he
was a star performer in the fairs Wonder World Musical,

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and that's nothing to sneeze at. The sixty four fair
was also many Americans introduction to Belgian waffles. Technically, the
waffles made their first state side appearance at the sixty
two World's Fair in Seattle, but they didn't make much
of a splash at that one. However, in New York
fair goers couldn't get enough of them, or, as The

(10:42):
New York Times reported in nine six, quote, Belgian waffles
sold like hotcakes at the World's Fair. In fact, they
were such a hit that waffle makers sales spiked all
across the country. It wasn't the most culturally enriching part
of the fair, but sparking a nationwide waffle craze is
still another well earned feather in the sixty four fairs

(11:05):
cap Most of the exhibits and attractions featured at the
fair were knocked down by nineteen sixty six, and the
former fairgrounds are now the Flushing Meadows Corona Park. It's
a pretty standard city park except for the presence of
a few remnants of the fair, the attractions that were
too permanent or too unassuming to be destroyed. These leftover

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bits are monuments to our past, visions of the future,
and to a sense of curiosity and optimism that both
our country and the world could stand to remember more often.
I'm Gay Blusier and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. You can
learn even more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook,

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you can write to us directly at this day at
I heart media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for
producing the show, and thanks to you for listening I'll
see you back here again soon for another day in
history class.