Hey, this is Dave. If you're enjoying the Industrial Revolution so far, and I assume you are since you're now 46 chapters in, I think you will also enjoy Tesla, the Life and Times podcast. Hi, I'm Stephen Cottewich, and I'd like to invite you to join me each month for Tesla, the Life and Times podcast, an in-depth look at the life and inventions of Nikola Tesla. Tesla invented our future.
We can thank him for everything from radio, remote control, and fluorescent lights, to Wi-Fi, smartphones, lasers, x-rays, robotics, and alternating current, the system that electrified the world in which we still use today. But then, after all that, for decades, Tesla was essentially forgotten. He was left off lists of history's great inventors, and his name didn't appear in textbooks. Now that Tesla is being rediscovered, what most people know about his life turns out to be based on rumor or tall tales, has been hijacked by mystics or charlatans, or are just the most sensational aspects of a life that was already remarkable and noteworthy without any embellishment.
So, join me each month for a look at the real life work and personality of the forgotten genius as well as the times that made him. Subscribe to Tesla, the Life and Times, wherever you get your podcasts, or find our episodes at Tesla Podcast.com. Last time, I told you about food production and consumption in the first industrial revolution. One of the topics I did not include in that conversation was how people of means were beginning to grow their own foods, healthier, more exotic foods than the majority of people were eating.
By the mid-19th century, a number of English aristocrats are growing fruits like oranges, pineapples, and along with a variety of flowers and other interesting vegetation. And they did it by building greenhouses. The greenhouse effect had been understood since antiquity. A glass structure would allow sunlight in, warming the interior, with only some of that heat escaping the structure.
This way, plants that require a warmer climate to grow could grow in regions with colder temperatures. However, it wasn't until the industrial revolution that greenhouses became practical. Glass was too expensive. Partly this was because of a prohibitive window tax in Britain, and partly it was because the means of producing glass were somewhat inefficient.
But that began to change with new technological developments. Among them was something called cylinder blown glass, invented by the brothers William and Robert Lucas Chance. Born in the 1780s, the Chance brothers were the sons of a Birmingham glass manufacturer. Lucas started working for their father when he was 12 years old.
Then he started his own glass company in his early 30s. After the owner of the British Crown Glass Company died, Lucas bought it for £24,000, about $3.5 million in modern terms, greatly expanding his business reach. Yet he struggled until his brother William joined the firm, injecting some much-needed capital. The firm was renamed Chance Brothers & Company.
The development of cylinder blown glass allowed the Chance brothers to produce significant quantities of sheet glass. Up until the 1830s, glass makers were mostly making something called Crown Glass. In addition to being more costly to make, Crown Glass was circular with an opaque center. Windows would need to include several pieces of Crown Glass linked together in an iron frame.
These windows allowed light to come in, but they weren't great for looking through. So they also tended to be pretty small as a result, but with sheet glass, buildings could include the flat, transparent windows we know today. Chance brothers also went on to make other innovations in glasswork. They invented new kinds of lenses for microscopes and new kinds of panels for lighthouses, for example.
Their glass was used for the windows of the new houses of Parliament, including the Big Ben clock face. But the Chance brothers are probably best known for producing the glass for a giant exhibition hall in London, a building which could be easily assembled and easily moved later on. And along with this great hall, the diverse and inspired displays inside it would serve as a capstone for all the technological and economic progress made by Great Britain and all mankind during the industrial revolution. This exhibition was made possible thanks to the tireless labors of a German immigrant, an annoyingly serious and inquisitive man, married to the woman for whom this era was named.
This is the Industrial Revolutions, Chapter 46, Victoria and Albert. Okay, a couple administrative notes before we get started. First, listener Rob Enno was catching up on some old episodes and caught a mistake in Chapter 33, industry in the USA. Apparently, Rob used to be a junior ranger at the Lowell National Historical Park.
So when he heard me say that the Lowell Locks and Canal Company was set up by the Boston associates to create water power through the mills, he tweeted me. As it turns out, the company was first set up way back in 1792 as the proprietors of Locks and Canals on the Merrimack River and was bought by the Boston associates much later. And from there they expanded the canals for manufacturing purposes. So thank you, Rob, for clearing that up.
Second, we're going to be wrapping up the first Industrial Revolution very soon now. And when we do, the geographic focus of this podcast is going to shift. It won't be so heavily focused on Britain anymore. However, Britain's great advancement during the history we've covered so far is going to give that country a great deal of power going into the 20th century.
And the figurehead of this period was Queen Victoria. Today, I'm really only going to focus on her early reign, but later this month I'll be interviewing Chris Fernandez-Packam of the Age of Victoria podcast to learn more about her and the period that bears her name. So stay tuned for that. Princess Alexandrina Victoria was born on May 24th, 1819.
She was the only daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, 4th son of the Mad King George III. Due in part to her uncle's terrible marriages, she became air-presumptive to the British throne in 1820 when her father died of pneumonia months before her first birthday. As it turned out, she would remain air-presumptive for the rest of her childhood. Alexandrina was raised by her mother, an out-twiced widowed German princess, along with an attendant named Sir John Conroy.
Together, they devised the so-called Kensington system to raise the future Queen in isolation from the world and under a disciplined routine of study. By the time she was a teenager, Alexandrina hated her mother and Conroy and developed a deep distrust for many around her. Her uncle, King William IV meanwhile, was suspicious of Conroy's ambitions and made it his goal to live long enough for his niece to reach the age of majority, and this way Conroy wouldn't be able to maneuver himself into a regency role. To this end, William succeeded, dying less than a month after Alexandrina turned 18.
Upon his passing, she became the first Queen Regnia in over a century, now styling herself with the regal name, Victoria. She began her reign as a rather strong-headed Queen. Victoria basically banished her mother and Conroy from her site, enjoyed Rocha's parties, okay, Rocha's by 19th century aristocratic standards, and butted heads with politicians. But in these years, she also developed an appreciation for the constitutional norms of the kingdom.
While her Hanoverian ancestors had closer ties with the Tories, Victoria had a strong liking for the Whigs, especially her first Prime Minister and mentor, Lord Melbourne, who she affectionately referred to as her Lord M. Melbourne was a believer in constitutionalism and impressed his beliefs on the young Queen. His successor, the Tory, Sir Robert Peel, effectively did the same. Partisan struggle between Peel and the Queen was inevitable, and it could have all gone very badly for the kingdom had it not been for her marriage in 1840 to her cousin, Albert.
Prince Albert was born in Coburg in modern-day Germany on August 26, 1819. He was the younger son of the sovereign Duke of Saxe-Coburg in Gota. The Duke of the family was not a very happy one, and Albert's parents went through the then unusual process of divorce. He probably never saw his mother again after that.
Albert's father, for all his flaws, was a supporter of education and the arts and culture. He encouraged his two sons to follow these passions, too. After several years of typical princely education in which they were instructed by private tutors, the Duke had the boys taught in school alongside other youths. This was very unusual for the children of a sovereign in those days.
The Duke had been influenced by the age of enlightenment and he passed this influence down to his sons. Albert basked in this education all the way through his time at the University of Bonn, where he studied philosophy, political economy, law, history, art, and more. He was very musical and a believer in liberal economics and enlightened despotism. In 1836, Albert made his first trip to the United Kingdom.
He had traveled across Europe already, but when he arrived in London, it was the first time he had ever seen a city like it. London was huge, with roughly three million inhabitants and growing, both in population and in prosperity. At the same time, he witnessed the urban poverty that typified the first industrial revolution, and he also experienced the polluted air and water, which made several in his entourage horribly sick. He had come to meet his cousin, Princess Alexandrina, but the teenage future queen was not all that impressed with the teenage German prince.
Compared with other young men competing for her heart, Albert was short and she described him a bit stout. At her seventeenth birthday party, they danced together a few times, but he was soon tired and went to bed early, whereas she danced late into the night. She found him a bit dull, he thought her to independent and fond of trivial things. How they wound up together is a bit complicated.
The geopolitics of 19th century Europe, an extricably tied to the complicated web of royal families across the continent, had a lot to do with it. Different Protestant powers, jockey to have their sons marry the queen of the now most powerful nation on earth. So that was part of it. But also, when Victoria met Albert again in 1839, she suddenly fell head over heels for him.
Like other marriages were becoming during this period, their marriage would be a romantic one, built on a foundation of love. Despite some initial pushback from certain politicians, including the Duke of Wellington, the couple was married in February 1840 in St. James's Palace. Together, Victoria and Albert would become the preeminent power couple of the mid-1800s.
For one thing, the royal family became super wealthy in the age of the steam engine. Ever since the Glorious Revolution, the kings and queens of Great Britain had struggled to maintain financial independence from Parliament. It was very expensive to be king, and nobody like a penny-pinging ruler. The British monarchs held the enormous duchy of Lancaster, from which they could collect rent to generate an income, but it was never enough.
That is, until it was tapped for coal. The coal mines in the duchy would make Victoria incredibly rich, giving the monarchy the financial security to survive. For another thing, Victoria allowed the growing democratic and constitutional norms of the kingdom to firmly take root. This began when the threat of a power struggle between her and Peel was neutralized by her marriage to Albert.
You see, Victoria was an extrovert, and she preferred witty conversations to politics. She got along with politicians more for their banter than for their ideas. As a result, prime ministers like Lord Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, and Benjamin Disraeli were among her favorites. Albert, meanwhile, was a deeply serious man who felt a strong urge to solve problems.
He appreciated Peel's reformist ideas, and saw in him a potential ally. Albert believed, initially at least, that the crown needed to be more hands-on. To this end, he sought to inject himself in Britain's political order. But to a lot of the politicians, it was about time now for the monarchy to step to the side.
And besides, Albert might be helping the queen out, reviving papers, meeting dignitaries, etc. But he is still a German outsider, and definitely not the sovereign. So he needed some projects to keep busy. And take on projects to keep busy he did.
It began with the new Houses of Parliament, after the Old Westminster Palace had burned down in 1834. Prince Albert was put in charge of selecting the artwork for the new building, and he held a drawn contest to choose the best artists. He also took a leadership role in the Society for the Extinction of Slavery. In 1847, when the Duke of Northumberland died, there was a vacancy in the position of Chancellor at the University of Cambridge.
Prince Albert was nominated to succeed in Northumberland, although he unexpectedly faced a tough opposition in the University election. Nevertheless, after a bitter campaign and three days of voting, Albert prevailed with 53% of the vote. He got to work, planning a thorough overhaul of the ancient University. The curriculum was, by our modern notions of university education, hilariously limited.
There were some good courses in mathematics and plenty of the classics. But as Albert put it in an angry letter to the Prime Minister, quote, history is entirely excluded. There is not a lecture on history of any kind given out at the moment, and this has been the case for some time. Political economy, constitutional law, law of nations, metaphysics, psychology, comparative philology, modern languages, oriental languages, old languages, with the exception of Greek and Latin.
Geography, chemistry, astronomy, natural history, with the exception of geology, history of art, aesthetics, and counterpoint are quite excluded, end quote. A syndicate of professors was established, and in 1848, the moral sciences and natural sciences were offered as alternatives to the classics and mathematics. They had faced resistance, but Albert managed to push through the new syllabus. Also during these years, Albert teamed up with our old friend, Lord Shaftsbury, to address the state of the poor.
Albert had first first written to Shaftsbury, then known as Lord Ashley, back in 1842, to congratulate him for the Mines and Collaries Act, which, you'll remember from Chapter 41, banned women and young children from mining. Albert then invited Shaftsbury to Buckingham Palace to make his case for supporting the poor to Victoria. For years, Shaftsbury had been leading a group called the Laborer's Friend Society, which advocated for improving the living and working conditions of the masses. As they saw it, life had been turned upside down by the industrial revolution.
Rural agricultural laborers were struggling to survive. Traditional craftspeople were being squeezed out of the market by industrialists, and the urban proletarians were living in deplorable environments. In 1844, they rebranded as the Society for improving the condition of the laboring classes. They began receiving royal patronage, and Prince Albert was made President of the Society.
The Tory paternalism behind an organization like this was derided by the industrial bourgeoisie. But despite the economic liberalism Albert shared with these capitalists, he also believed it was important to nip working class discontent in the bud. As he saw it, easing the transition to economic modernity, with poor relief, improved housing conditions, universal childhood education, and other social innovations was the best way to reduce the growing antagonism between capital and labor, and thus the best way of avoiding the kind of revolutions taking shape on the continent come 1848. That being said though, Albert did believe in that transition to modernity.
Among the new roles he saw for the monarchy was as promoters for the new Britain. Albert traveled to many of the industrializing towns and cities. Unlike the high Tories of the upper class, he embraced technological and economic advancements, and so he sought to advance scientific thought and even industrialization. And in this role, he took on a project that consumed his time and energies like nothing else.
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Search your podcast app now for Ride Home and subscribe to the TEC meme Ride Home podcast. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, French merchants were in need of a new consumer market. The people had guillotined so many of their money to aristocrats, or driven them out of the country as integrals, that the traditional craftspeople of the country had lost many of their loyal patrons. So they began holding exhibitions as a means of showing off their furniture, wares and other goods to a broader audience.
Over the years, these exhibitions in France became more elaborate and more impressive. In Britain, among those who took note of this French trend was the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, better known as the RSA. And since 1843, the president of the RSA was Prince Albert. It was our old friend William Cook, one of the telegraph inventors I told you about in chapter 35, who, in 1845, first recommended a similar exhibition should take place in Britain.
He even put up 500 pounds of his own money, that's roughly $82,000 today, to start the financing of such an event. A number of manufacturers soon joined him, and they also decided that prizes should be awarded for the best products displayed at this hypothetical exhibition. And then they suggested they should build a great hall in London to house all these goods for display. Prince Albert, though, thought this was all very ambitious, and he was slow to get on board with the idea.
But when he did get on board, he totally threw himself into the work of organizing this great exhibition. To pull it off, he teamed up with one of the kingdom's most gifted civil servants, Henry Cole. Henry Cole was born in the ancient city of Bath in 1808. Beginning as a clerk at the age of 15, he had risen to a senior role in the government's records office.
Lowly educated and from an undistinguished family, Cole was a prime example of the new value placed on meritocracy in civil service. He also served as an assistant to Roland Hill, the reformer at the post office, who introduced the adhesive stamp. This penny-black stamp, as it was called, for its cost and color, featured a profile of the young Queen Victoria, and it generally is believed to have been designed by Cole. Henry Cole was also something of an art critic, and a tireless member of the RSA.
In fact, it was thanks to his lobbying efforts that the RSA received its royal charter in 1847, and now he was becoming a major cheerleader of this proposed exhibition. In 1849, a committee was established to organize the exhibition. That same year, the new Second French Republic held yet another successful exhibition of their own. Well, this encouraged the British Committee to announce their plans to hold an industrial exhibition in just two years' time.
So not only were they becoming very ambitious about the scale of this project, but now also in terms of this self-imposed deadline. The most pressing issue was financing. Even under their optimistic projections, they needed to raise about 100,000 pounds to pull it off, and that's about $13 million in modern terms. All committee members expected the treasury to foot the bill.
But Albert believed the government would quickly reject the request while the plans were still so far from being finalized, so moving forward, he insisted he control all interactions between the committee and the government. But while financing was the most pressing issue, it was far, far from the only issue. Over 300 subcommittees had to be set up to address all the questions and needs of the exhibition. And on top of this hierarchy was Prince Albert, who not only oversaw all the paperwork and decision-making, but worked with a small cadre to keep the overall effort nimble and flexible.
The great exhibition of 1851 was now taking all of his time and energy. So this begs the question, why did Albert devote himself so entirely to this project? For one thing, this was sort of Albert's MO. He would take on a new project, come up with plans for it, and push them through as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.
Then move on to the next project. But also, this was a project that really spoke to his beliefs about human progress. He envisioned the exhibition as a means of promoting Britain, but he also wanted it to be an international affair, with all the nations of the world coming together to celebrate the advancements of mankind. On March 21, 1849, a banquet was held at Manchin House.
It featured agricultural and manufactured goods from across the world, the monarchies symbolic embrace of free trade, and or imperialism. There, Albert gave a speech that perfectly captured his mindsets during these years, and the impetus for his labors for the great exhibition. Quote, Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points, the realization of the unity of mankind. The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease.
Thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power of lightning. On the other hand, the great principle of division of labor, which may be called the moving power of civilization, is being extended to all branches of science, industry, and art. Whilst formerly the greatest mental energies strove at universal knowledge, and that knowledge was confined to the few, now they are directed on specialties, and in these again even to the minutest points, but the knowledge acquired becomes at once the property of the community at large. For, whilst formerly, discovery was wrapped in secrecy, the publicity of the present day causes that no sooner is a discovery or invention made than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts.
The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and the cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital. So man is approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world. His reason being created after the image of God, he has to use it to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs his creation, and by making these laws his standard of action to conquer nature to his use, himself a divine instrument. Science discovers these laws of power, motion, and transformation.
Industry applies them to raw matter which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge. Art teaches us the immutable laws of beauty and symmetry, and gives to our productions forms in accordance with them. Gentlemen, the exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions. End quote.
To Albert, the idea that the Industrial Revolution could bring about a united human race was not an abstraction. He was what Donald Trump today would call a globalist. He supported the expansion of the Zolverine in his native Germany, shout out Chapter 40, and wondered if such a customs union could be extended across all of Europe. He even once asked the Prime Minister if a universal currency could be feasible, although the PM suggested it would not given the different prices of bullying in different countries.
A nationwide fundraising scheme was implemented for the exhibition, but the newspapers were critical of the project, questioning whether such an exhibition should take place at all. This was in large part due to another big question that had to be addressed. Where to put the exhibition? Everyone agreed it should be Central London, but no matter where it was in Central London, it was expected that local residents would complain about the noise and traffic and outsiders coming in.
On top of those nimby concerns, they also wanted a steer clear of the poorer parts of the metropolis, so international visitors would not see the challenges of Britain's urban poverty in these final years of the first Industrial Revolution. Hyde Park was just about the only site that was big enough, central enough, and in a neighborhood ritzy enough to accommodate the exhibition. But, as we'll discuss in a few months, these are still years before quality of life becomes a major consideration in urban planning. Parklands were limited in London.
Building in Hyde Park would remove vital green space from the surrounding neighborhoods. Even if they planned to knock the structure down at the end of the exhibition, it was noted they would still need to remove at least 10 historic trees in the park to build it. The newspapers objected in outrage. By 1850, supporters of the exhibition conceded their plans were almost universally unpopular, and at this point they also had less than a year to pull it off.
Further complicating matters were the Building Plans. The Building Committee, which included old friends like Robert Stevenson and Isambard Kingdom Roonell, as well as the heirs of the Dukes of Bucklow in Bridgewater, had wanted to go with an innovative block structure, but it was estimated to cost about three times the approved budget. The committee's second choice was a brick structure, topped by a massive dome designed by Roonell. It was within budget, but was met with derision and horror by the public when the sketches hit the press.
Among those who saw the design and was alarmed by it was one Joseph Paxton. The son of a farm and family from Bedfordshire, Joseph Paxton started working as a teenager as a gardener for the estates of the aristocracy. Over the years, he bounced around from a state to a state making improvements. The big breakthrough in his career came in 1826 when he was hired by our old friend, the Duke of Devonshire, to take over the gardens at his massive chess worth estate.
In the years he spent at chess worth, Paxton re-enched near the landscape around the house and added the famous Emperor Fountain there. But even more famously, Paxton was on the forefront of the greenhouse movement. Beginning in 1832, he built several greenhouses at chess worth, including one for the Duke's Victoria Regia Lily's. As the years went by, he experimented with various greenhouse designs.
The greatest of these was known as the Great Conservatory, a 227-foot-long, 123-foot-wide structure made of cast-iron beams and columns, and the largest slabs of sheet glass available anywhere at the time, sheet glass produced by Chan's Brothers and Company. By 1850, Paxton had made a name for himself as well as a sizable income, a sizable income that did not help Devonshire's financial problems, but I digress. With his savings from this income, Paxton invested in the new Midland Railway, which earned him a considerable return. He even became a director of the railway, and it was while on a trip to London that year on railway business that he saw the design of the proposed hall for the Great Exhibition.
So, while he was in town, he went to an MP named George Ellis, the chairman of the Exhibitions Building Committee, and told Ellis he had some alternative ideas for the hall. He saw Chatsworth's Great Conservatory as a model for what the Great Exhibition Hall should be. Ellis encouraged him to quickly draw up some plans. Over the next few days, Paxton sketched his ideas and worked with the chief engineer of the railway on the feasibility of the design.
At last, Paxton met with the Building Committee on June 20th. He and his drawings were then taken to Buckingham Palace to meet with Prince Albert. The design of this new Crystal Palace was then published in the Illustrated London News. Finally, the response from the public was positive.
They preferred it to previous designs. Built in only nine months and housing over 100,000 displays, the Crystal Palace was at the time the largest enclosed space on earth. The estimated cost of the structure was only £88,000, just 61% of what Brunel's design would have cost. As a massive greenhouse, it could be built around the trees so they wouldn't need to be cut down.
And after the exhibition was over, the structure could be moved to a different location, alleviating the fears of the Nimby's around Hyde Park. Great iron columns were erected in concrete to hold it up, a relatively new innovation in engineering. Over 900,000 square feet of sheet glass were provided by chance brothers. Prince Albert would bring beer to the workers as they built the Crystal Palace.
And as his work ethic was described in the Illustrated London News, quote, compulsory idleness as a greater curse than labor. In other words, Albert had a little something more in common with the working man than he did with his fellow aristocrats. So many doubts had been raised about the Great Exhibition up to this point. But as locals saw the massive Crystal Palace being rapidly constructed, the great promise attached to this exhibition seemed to be coming true.
As a result, the once dreaded structure was wildly popular by the time the exhibition began. In May 1, 1851, the Great Exhibition opened to the public. With Albert and her children by her side, Queen Victoria led the opening ceremony. Seating to pressure from the press, she allowed the exhibition's ticket holders, members of the general public, to attend.
It was the first time in British history that a monarch put themselves in front of ordinary people like that. Huge crowds cheered and trumpets played as she arrived. Flags from all the nations across the planet lined the Great Hall. A beautiful, crystal fountain greeted attendees at the entrance.
Over the next five and a half months, the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed off incredible achievements in art, culture, and industry from all over the planet. Indian jewelry, including the world's then largest known diamond, American firearms, including Sam cults, and Russian porcelain and furs, were just among the many, many interesting displays. But of course, no one quite outdid the British, who used the event to show off their industrial superiority. Among their most impressive showings was an envelope folding machine, operated by two little boys, a portable cleansing machine, a pile driver, an oscillating cylinder, a pen knife with 80 blades, produced by a major Sheffield metalworking company.
It was hardly a great product, but showed off what they were capable of. A paper-mache piano, hollow bricks, which it was thought could potentially serve as a building material for the dwellings of the poor. A steam hammer, built by our old friend, James Naismith, a vertical press on which the Times was printed, and pay toilets, which weren't just interesting, but also very practical for a great exhibition. And like everybody went to it, attendance was over 6 million.
Among the more famous visitors were Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, George Elliott, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte, and Lord Tennyson. Tickets were sold at different prices for different days, both to optimize attendance and to give the working class a way to see it. And throughout the summer of 1851, many working class families, from across the kingdom, boarded the new trains, heading to London, most of them visiting the capital city for the first time, to attend this historic exhibition. You know, as I was researching this episode, it occurred to me that maybe this event should mark the end of the first Industrial Revolution.
Different historians placed that endate at different times, but few place it later than 1848. Yet the great exhibition is just a few years later, and it's a much more positive point. It was a celebration of the incredible technological and economic advancements in Britain over the course of the first Industrial Revolution, and it was simultaneously a predictor of the incredible technological and economic advancements about to come across the rest of the world. The great exhibition of 1851 was also the grandest accomplishment of Prince Elbert in what was becoming an illustrious legacy, shared with and promoted by his wife, Queen Victoria.
The legacy of the great exhibition can still be seen in London today. The Crystal Palace was moved, as promised, out of Hyde Park. It was rebuilt in South London, with Crystal Palace Park surrounding it. The building itself was lost in a great fire in 1936, but the park remains, and soccer fans will know the Premier League team that played at the park, Crystal Palace FC.
Meanwhile, the neighbourhood adjacent to Hyde Park, South Kensington, was totally redeveloped thanks to the incredible profits generated by the exhibition, which totaled £186,000, about £34 million today. The Victoria and Elbert Museum, or B&A, and the Science Museum were built there in the years following the exhibition. Over the next half century or so, other institutions joined them, including the Natural History Museum, Imperial College London, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Albert Hall, and more. The charge was led by Prince Elbert himself.
In the end, more than 130 acres of prime London real estate was purchased to house these institutions dedicated to learning and culture, further propelling British art and industry into the future. Officials jokingly referred to this new section of the city as Elbert Topless, a name that stuck. And as someone who did his study abroad in London, in South Kensington, and spent about half his time in Elbert Topless, I have a great deal of appreciation for the Prince Consorts efforts. But most of it would be built without him.
After years of workaholism, Elbert was fighting a terminal illness, possibly ulcerative colitis, possibly crowns disease, possibly stomach cancer, possibly something else. He died in December 1861, officially of typhoid fever at the age of 42. The queen was devastated by the loss of her angel, as she called him. She adored Elbert and was seemingly lost without him for the remaining 40 years of her life.
Within weeks, she commissioned the spectacular Elbert Memorial, which finally opened in 1872 in Hyde Park, right across the street from Elbert Topless. Those next 40 years would see Britain's Empire expand in Asia and Africa, a topic we will get to in some future episode I imagine. But Victoria's legacy was shaped first and foremost by her years with Elbert. While other European powers struggled with the changing economic and political order, Britain embraced it.
In the age of Victoria, they not only tolerated industrialization, they promoted it and sought to advance it further. They began to open the franchise to work in them. They made major strides in public health, urban planning, and other fields we now take for granted. By 1837, the British monarchy was unpopular.
Not many were hoping for a republic exactly, the experience in France being a bit too jarring, but the public did not look favorably on the excesses and loose mortals of George IV or William IV. Victoria and Elbert turned that around. They did it by embracing the Puritan values of the rising middle class. They kept sex scandals far away from the royal court, they dressed more modestly than the typical royal family, and they crafted public images of themselves as temperate, Godfearing, respectable people.
Many British subjects, from aristocrats to working-class Methodists, sought to follow their lead. Alcohol consumption started to fall. Conservative sexual morays became more common. The value of hard work became gospel.
Gender roles and child rearing became much more, eh, Victorian. In the early years of their reign, the royal couple was not popular. Victoria fumbled on many political issues and Elbert was seen as a stuck-up German interloper. But by the time of his death, that had started to change.
Critical to this project was the further entrenchment of the norms of constitutional monarchy. The glorious revolution established a constitutional monarchy, but kings and queens still got involved in politics. Even the young Victoria openly sided with the Whigs, making personal financial contributions to their election campaigns, which in those days meant money for bribing electors. But Elbert inadvertently helped change that.
Technically, he was just the subject of the queen, but since she was pretty much constantly getting pregnant throughout their marriage in an age when pregnant women were expected to keep out of sight, he took on many of the roles of state, the political issues of the day, and worked promoting the new economic order. This gave Victoria the space to fall back as a neutral, magisterial figurehead of the kingdom. This was further helped along by the repeal of the Corn Laws. With the Pylites departing from the Tories, a political realignment took shape.
The conservative and liberal parties formed. And this realignment gave the crown an opportunity to opt out of politics. They could effectively be a third and neutral force, while still technically, or at least theoretically, a higher power in the British political order. As a result, it's unthinkable for the queen to interfere in politics today.
Victoria and Elbert wanted to spread their public values across Europe too, and this, they hoped, would be their most lasting legacy. In all, they had nine children, most of whom were married off to other royal families across the continent. The hope was, these children would have their own children who would one day rule their respective countries. And these grandchildren would then be molded by the values of their sex-coburg-go-to-parents, moderate politics, constitutionalism, and Protestantism.
For the record, it didn't work. Most famous was the case of their grandson, Geyser Wilhelm II, possibly because of his rather eyebrow-raising relationship with his mother Vicky, Victoria, and Elbert's eldest child. And it is on the continent where we will ultimately end the first industrial revolution. Because while Britain passed through the tumult of 1848 to experience the high point of the Great Exhibition in 1851, the rest of Europe was not so lucky.
There they faced a food shortage which quickly spun out of control into an economic crisis, and ultimately a year of revolt. Next time on the Industrial Revolutions. Don't forget to come back later this month for the bonus episode with Chris Fernandez-Packamom of the Age of Victoria podcast. I'm planning to release it Monday, September 21st.
Thanks as always to everyone supporting the Industrial Revolutions on Patreon, including New Patrons, Jeremy Hoffman, and Emica Okoford, as well as John Bartlett, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Wrecking, Yepa Burkhat, Tara Carlson, Molly Desjardin, Kirby Irby, Eric Ogensen, Peter Kirk, Brian Long, Christian Sebastian, Brandon Stansbury, Ross Templeton, and Walter Taurus. You are simply the best.