Microscopes and the Great Exhibition

Today’s mini project fit into class this morning so that it was clear that we were supposed to have found ads for various medical tonics and quack’s schemes that may or may not have helped patients seeking a panacea. Yet, while researching it last night, this was not clearly the goal. So, I ended up with a document that caught my eye for a different reason: an advertisement for the “Microscopal Exhibition” at the Crystal Palace. An ad necessarily from 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, it describes the things that can be seen magnified far beyond their normal size, including a frog’s circulatory system, insects in water, and ‘the lively flea, chained by the neck with a silver chain.” Despite (or because of?) the fact that I failed horribly last time I tried to put a collar on a flea, even today this sounds pretty cool, if a tad 6^th-grade-science-lab.

Yet, at the time, this was the cutting edge of technology and a clever business man was charging two pence for the spectacle of seeing live mites in cheese which looked “as large as black beetles” despite the fact there were probably a lot of live mites in a lot of hunks of cheese sitting in non-refrigerators all over London. The Great Exhibition was meant to be a display of power by Albert and England, featuring wonders and cutting-edge technology from around the world, and then even better things from the Brits. Although this ad doesn’t give any information about how many people actually paid the money to see this particular exhibit, it is safe to say that of the 6 million people who went to the Exhibition, quite a few did. It is pretty remarkable, therefore, to consider how much of what was once spectacle has become common and what was once a rarity in an exhibit is now an expected feature of every science lab.