| Chapter 1: | A Matter for Serious Regret |
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In 1862 London tried to use the French experience to good effect when it formulated its own plans to stage another international exhibition, but it still made a loss of nearly £12,000. This was mainly borne by a single investor.2 Dublin hosted another industrial exhibition in 1865, which attracted a million visitors and, for the first time, made a small profit of £10,000. Regardless of their earlier experience, the French decided to organize a second Exposition Universelle in 1867. Coincidentally, the Schools Inquiry Commission, under the guidance of Lord Taunton, was also finalizing its work at the same time. This unplanned concurrence had deep significance for the development of technical education in England. The Paris Exhibition appeared to signal a relative decline in British industrial performance, which the technical educationists claimed was linked to a dearth of technical education. The challenge to the notion that the British had an unassailable lead at the head of the industrial world shocked the establishment and generated a flurry of activity to find out if the claim was true and what to do about it. Taunton, in an extension to his original brief, started the first of many inquiries into this issue, which were undertaken in a relatively short period of time after the results from Paris were made public.
The Paris Exhibition (1867)
The Event
The organizers of the Paris event, who were determined to avoid the mistakes made in 1862, used the Crystal Palace Exhibition as a template upon which to build. It was, however, more than a simple clone of the original. The French were not afraid to recognize that the exhibition offered many commercial opportunities, and they organized their exhibits accordingly.3 They adopted the history of work as a central theme and planned for an event at least four times larger than anything held before. It was designed so that it did not simply represent the manufacturing process, but also included the