America’s 100th anniversary put country’s progress on display

If you were around in 1976 for the Bicentennial celebration, you know how just about everything that year was drenched in shades of red, white, and blue.

A century before that, when our country marked its first 100 years of existence, similar celebrations sprung up around the country, but the themes of growth and change were much more pervasive. That makes sense in an historical context. In 1876, a presidential election year, Americans showed their patriotism at the polls, with a staggering 82% of the voting-age population coming out to vote. It remains the highest voter turnout in our history.

The country’s Centennial anniversary overlapped with the very first World’s Fair. For the fair, it only made sense that Philadelphia be selected as one of the exhibition cities. Outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant decreed that the original Declaration of Independence, housed in Washington, D.C., be displayed in Philly for the occasion.

When it arrived, visitors to the exhibit couldn’t help but notice the document’s poor condition. Public reception to its decay was so noticeable that the heads of the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Depart-ment of the Interior convened and eventually created the National Archives, tasked with the collection and preservation of the country’s most precious and historically significant treasures.

Meanwhile, new inventions from some of America’s greatest minds were on display, too, such as the first telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, as well as Thomas Edison’s automatic telegraph. These giants of technology showed us the best our country had to offer the modern world a century after its founding.

The invention that had the lion’s share of the attention – and stood as a testament to American industrialism and craftsmanship -- was the Corliss steam engine; though it had been invented more than two decades prior, a special Corliss Centennial Engine had been produced by the Corliss Steam Engine Co. This special engine with rotative beams powered nearly all of the exhibits on display; President Grant and the Emperor of Spain switched on the engine during the fair’s opening ceremony, and the device stayed on display for the entire duration of the six-month event.

By the time of America’s 100th birthday, the Civil War had been over for more than a decade, and many saw the celebrations that popped up around the country as symbols of an America on its continued path to healing. The fair’s exhibitions, too, were proof of America’s forward movement in the aftermath of its darkest days.