The first world's fair was held in Prague, sixty years before London's
London's Crystal Palace usually gets the credit, but in 1791 Prague staged an industrial exhibition in the Clementinum to mark Leopold II's coronation as king of Bohemia. Since then these fairs have shifted purpose twice: from showing off machines, to celebrating cultural exchange, to acting as giant national advertising campaigns.
France ran a string of national exhibitions that peaked in Paris in 1844, and in 1851 Prince Albert's Great Exhibition filled the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. From roughly 1850 to 1938, fairs were trade shows for the latest science and engineering; the telephone was among the inventions first unveiled in that period, with Philadelphia in 1876 and Chicago in 1893 among the landmark hosts.
New York's 1939 to 1940 fair turned towards social progress under the banner "Building the World of Tomorrow". Montreal's 1967 exhibition, branded Expo 67, helped retire the English phrase world's fair in favour of expo, a word already used at Brussels in 1958; a Major League Baseball team, the Montreal Expos, took its name from the event.
From Brisbane's Expo 88, pavilions became tools for polishing national image. A study by Tjaco Walvis found that 73 percent of countries at Expo 2000 in Hanover named image as their main goal, and pavilions there cost around 12 million euros on average. The Dutch pavilion, at roughly 35 million euros, was estimated to have generated about 350 million euros of potential revenue. Branding expert Wally Olins argued Spain used Expo '92 alongside the Barcelona Olympics to present itself as modern and democratic.
Since the 1928 Convention, the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions sanctions the events. World Expos, where participants design their own buildings, run up to six months and have been spaced at least five years apart since 1995. Specialised Expos are capped at 25 hectares, with hosts supplying pavilions rent-free. Osaka hosted the latest World Expo in 2025.
Source: World's fair
