World's Fairs and the End of Progress: An Insiders View

World's fairs were created to show off the wonders of the industrial revolution. Great engines, presses, steel cannons, the typewriter, television, the elevator, even the Statue of Liberty first appeared at expos. But industrial progress has led to a polluted planet, and the very idea of progress needs to discover new direction. Can our society now find paths to sustainable development? World's fairs are flourishing, says the author. They are in a position once again to define an era. And it's actually happening.

This book provides an overview of world's fairs at the turn of the millennium. It describes the nature of fairs, shows how they have evolved, and considers where our fairs may be headed. The author demonstrates how in varying degrees fairs have tried to cope with the progress/environment issue, and suggests how they (and by implication the society as a whole) can do a better job of it in the future.

Because he has attended fifteen world's fairs, beginning with the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, and has written extensively about recent ones, Alfred Heller brings new perspectives to the subject. For example, he has been in a position to observe the evolving connection between expos and the themed entertainment industry, including world's fair shows that use film-based, multimedia techniques. For better or for worse, these have given world's fairs a new lease on life. In his book, he probes this development, not least in a chapter that compares Walt Disney's Epcot to a world's fair.

Other highlights: a chapter entitled "World's Fairs in a Nutshell," in which the author distills almost sixty years of fairgoing experience into a few essentials for understanding the medium; a chapter on his fascination with "reconstructing" fairs at the sites where they took place, with the aid of materials from his collection; and chapters on fairs of the Twentieth Century, entitled "Futurama and Future" and "Turn of the Millennium." The final chapter imagines a world's fair of the future, Expo 2015 in San Francisco.

Alfred Heller's first world's fair was the prewar Golden Gate International Exposition, on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. In 1998 he visited Lisbon Expo 98, his fifteenth international expo.

After graduating from Stanford in 1950 with a degree in English, he served as an army officer in Korea, taught high-school English and published a small-town weekly in the Mother Lode country of his native state. In the 1960s he founded the California Tomorrow organization, an early and influential voice in the state's environmental movement. His first book, The California Tomorrow Plan, was published in 1972 by William Kaufmann, Inc.

From 1981 to 1995, Heller was the publisher and editor of the quarterly magazine World's Fair. In the process of reporting on fairs for the magazine, he became closely acquainted with their managers and exhibitors, their workings and their complex purposes. The current volume combines his lifelong interest in the two pursuits-international expositions and the environment.