Every time you chew a stick of Juicy Fruit, eat a hamburger, slip on a nylon, plug your phone into a wall socket, flick on a TV, lick an ice-cream cone, press a touchscreen, ride an escalator, watch a movie about dinosaurs, pay at the pup for gas, or get fingerprinted, you’re doing something that originated at a world’s fair or hit a tipping point of popularity there.
More than just promoting material things, however, expos popularized and evangelized every social movement and cultural concept, too, including Manifest Destiny, the closing of the frontier, Nudism, female suffrage, temperance, and technocracy.
"Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, & Robot Overlords" covers, for example, the World’s Fairs that featured a nudist colony (1935); Salvador Dali’s half-naked lobster women, their virtue barely secured by well-placed crustaceans (1939); the X-ray machine and the thousands who happily blasted themselves with it(1898): and even the vibrators displayed by health advocates (1900).