On 1 May 1851, the first World Exhibition was held in London England.

As a fully industrialised nation, no one doubted the strength of Great Britain as a significant world power. With this obvious strength, Britain easily won the hosting rights to the first World Exhibition.

Queen Victoria issued a letter of invitation accepted by ten countries. The conscientious British people drew on the economic power of the whole country to prepare for the momentous event.

The architectural style of the Victorian age emphasised size and weightiness in stone. Contrary to such fashion, a "rystal Palace" of light and strength was constructed for the Exhibition, 1700-feet wide and 100-feet high,manufactured from 4500 tons of steel and 10 hectares of glass, providing a show area of 96,000 square meters, with a total length of exhibition tables reaching roughly 13 kilometers. During the twenty-three weeks it was open, a total of 6.3 million people visited the Exhibition. Amongst the 14,000 exhibited items, there was a 24-ton block of coal, a great diamond drilled from India and a specimen elephant, while engines, hydraulic printers and textile machines displayed the development of modern industry and the boundless imagination of human beings.

People viewed the products of industry with great excitement, but they were blind to the enormous environmental costs that industrialisation imposed.

Indeed, they paid little attention to the gradual accumulation of dense filth in the nearby River Thames, caused by this industrial culture. Later, it took approximately a century for Britain to remove this rubbish and restore the Thames back into a river.

The 19th century of modernity was the century of the Europeans. In the view of eastern people, the first World Exhibition was showy and arrogant and they looked upon the strange exhibits with a mixture of surprise and horror.

To the Europeans, this said more about such people themselves than the objects. Lacking any perspective of the development of knowledge over the three previous centuries, it was impossible for them to apprehend the importance of such individual inventions, let alone appreciate the overblown grandness of the first World Exhibition. The fifteenth century was the age of discovery; the sixteenth century was the age of humanity; the seventeenth century was the age of science. With the progression of these three centuries as its foundation, the London Exhibition was the stage for invention.