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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co. UK forward slash radio for. I hope you

enjoy the program. Hello quote, its grandeur does not consist in one thing but in the

unique assemblage of all things.

Whatever human industry has created you find there.

It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth."

So wrote Charlotte Bronte in 1851 after visiting the great exhibition set in the Vast Crystal

Palace in London's Hyde Park.

By the time the exhibition closed one quarter of the entire British

population had visited Crystal Palace, the first prefabricated building of its

kind, to marvel at an extraordinary array of exhibits amongst which were the biggest diamond in the world,

a lighthouse, a huge microscope, a carriage drawn by kites, furniture made of coal, and a set of artificial

teeth fitted with a swivel device which allowed the user to yawn without

displacing them. Its impact was great in terms of the growth of British

manufacturing, the burgeoning of a global consumer market, the development of museums, and the international

standing of Britain culturally and technologically. So how did the exhibition, as it

...