Technological Failure at the 1900 Exposition Universelle

           Like many Paris fairs before it, the 1900 exhibition hoped to showcase the modernity of Paris through technological innovations installed in both the fair grounds and the city itself.  Although its immediate predecessor, the 1889 Exposition, demonstrated the ingenuity of French engineering with the construction of the largest (Galerie des Machines) and tallest (Eiffel Tower) buildings in the world, the 1900 Exposition largely aimed to demonstrate French technological improvements to the social sphere, particularly in urban infrastructure.

            Improvements to transportation logistics were a major Parisian contribution to the exhibition, particularly with the opening of the underground Metro several months into the exhibition on July 19th, 1900.  This technological advance was greeted with consumer and critical enthusiasm, and treated as the "ultimate symbol of the new means of transport" and even tied to "France's civilizing mission" as an "agent of moral and material progress." (Soppelsa 282) Hoping to preemptively alleviate the traffic congestion of the 1878 and 1889 expositions, Parisian engineers additionally constructed twenty new streetcar lines, installed a new bus system, added numerous trains to extant lines,  and opened a new train station.  (Soppelsa 280) A British guide to the exposition stresses that these advancements had been anticipated in the layout and design of the fair. The gateway, he notes, stood over 45 meters, and through its fifty-eight passages was capable of admitting almost sixty thousand guests per hour. (xxi) 3,152 electric lights illuminated the gate's facade, which was bedecked with statues symbolizing labor and electricity.  Electric lighting was also installed throughout the exposition to illuminate nighttime events, although its installation was not complete for several months into the fair.

Paris Metro Under Construction

            Of the eighteen departments at the fair, twelve were dedicated to particular national products, branches of the French military, and the general fields of "Mechanics," "Electricity," and "Civil Engineering."  Additionally,  the two categories of "Colonization" and "Social Economy" suggest a technological planning of the social sphere and indicate a status as particularly French accomplishments.  
                   Where its predecessors succeeded, however, the 1900 Exposition's displays of technological innovation experienced catastrophic failure. Although they may have demonstrated the newness of Parisian transportation infrastructure, their many failures revealed a contradictory lack of resiliency and sustainability.

            Parisian transportation infrastructure was struck with a seemingly unending barrage of minor accidents, electrocutions, and massive delays. The Metro was afflicted with an accident on its first day of operation, when an iron bar left on the tracks disabled a train and caused numerous delays. The additional passenger trains, despite the hope that they would speed transport, caused hours of congestion-related delay in the Parisian train stations. Exposition infrastructure likewise proved extremely dangerous, with thousands of workers dying in the process of construction and several guests perishing after being thrown into the Seine by two collapsing footbridges. Soppelsa argues that rather than showcase progress, these tiny, persistent disasters were imagined as a constant "culture of risk" that now plagued modernized Paris.

Foreign Pavilion Under Construction

            Despite these setbacks, exposition organizers were able to prevent their greatest fear- an urban fire- by installing water cisterns underneath the exhibition buildings. Any fires that caught, caused either by guests or the flawed electrical lighting systems, were swiftly extinguished. However, the demands of the cooling systems for the transportation machinery, electrical plants, cisterns, and exhibition displays, combined with a heat wave that summer, exhausted the municipal water system. Constantly safeguarding against the risk of fire, officials decided to augment the water supply with water straight from the Seine. This resulted in a highly visible and olfactory disaster: the draining of the Seine to create a "slow-moving  'blackened sludge'" that turned over decaying substances from the bottom in an infectious, roiling mass. Methods of sewage disposal were likewise overwhelmed, and the waste floated down the Seine to contaminate the water supply of downstream towns. Tragically, Parisians still consumed this water, which caused a typhoid epidemic that killed thousands of Parisian citizens.

The Seine, before the sewage overflow.

            Despite the efforts of the Exposition organizers, rushed construction and unexpected contingencies led to constant accidents, occasionally with fatalities. The environmental pressures of the Exposition overwhelmed Parisian infrastructure and caused highly visible and pathological failures. These twin dilemmas contradicted the exposition ideal of improvement to social technology, and were touted by political opponents of the current administration and thus immortalized as indictments of the extant regime. Thus, the 1900 Exposition paradoxically became known for technological failure.