The Crystal Palace

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was something to behold for the 6 million Victorian patrons who travelled to London's Hyde Park to see it. It was a triumphant showcase of the most extraordinary achievements of the Victorian age from industry, culture and engineering - gathered from all four corners of the globe. As visitors walked the 8 miles of exhibitions, they would have seen everything from the sublime to the absurd: the world’s largest diamond, a contraption to predict the weather using leeches, the world's first public flushing toilets and a two-person piano.

The enormous glass and iron building that housed the exhibition was big enough to house four St Pauls Cathedrals and its construction involved some of the most famous engineers of the Victorian age - Brunel, Faraday, Stephenson and Paxton.

To tell Dan the story of the Crystal Palace is historian and conservationist Steven Brindle.

Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Tim Arstall.

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Transcript

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1:03.6	Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. It was the biggest international exhibition to that point in history,
1:15.8	housed in a building of unimaginable size,
1:19.9	in the very heart of the world's biggest city,
1:24.7	the capital of Earth's most dynamic economy, one in the throes of a revolution
1:31.1	in how things were made and powered and moved. It was the great exhibition of 1851. An unambiguous
	...

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