NARRATOR: Maybe you’ve been to a Design or Tech Expo, to marvel at what’s new and cutting edge? This desk set, by the Asprey company, won awards at a Victorian equivalent: The Great Exhibition of 1851. It includes daily necessities: a calendar, candlesticks, pen tray and paper cutter—all rendered in gilt bronze and malachite. The show was held in a huge glass structure known as the Crystal Palace, in London.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE: Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace . . .

NARRATOR: That’s Charlotte Brontë, the novelist, writing to friend.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE: It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe.

NARRATOR: The Great Exhibition was a grand fair, the ultimate tradeshow. The objects on display were chosen with a larger, political agenda: to trumpet not just the industrial supremacy of the British empire, but its overwhelming colonial power. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, was the instigator.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE: Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith . . .”

NARRATOR: The exhibition prompted animated conversation about design, since it gave the British makers and the middle class alike a chance to respond to luxury, taste-making, pose questions—and even make decisions—about what comes next.