Victorian visitors to Crystal Palace met life-sized dinosaurs built on a New Year's Eve dinner inside one

historyThe Public Domain Review1854 · Sydenham, London, England

Victorian visitors to Crystal Palace met life-sized dinosaurs built on a New Year's Eve dinner inside one

the gist

In 1854 Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins unveiled more than thirty life-sized prehistoric animals outside the Crystal Palace in south London, the first full-scale reconstructions of extinct life made for a public audience. They were built from iron, brick and cement over skeletons, and Richard Owen, the leading British anatomist, pushed the project forward. To celebrate, Owen and twenty guests dined inside the hollow body of a concrete iguanodon. The statues are still in Crystal Palace Park today.

how it works

Hawkins built the figures on iron frames with brick and stone bodies, encased in cement. Owen, who relied on the idea that a whole animal could be reconstructed from a single fossil bone, shaped their stance and appearance. Because he believed ancient animals were not primitive, the models look heavier and more mammalian than modern restorations.

so what

The park's sculptures show how Victorian science presented the deep past as a spectacle, and how early palaeontology was shaped by its era's ideas. Owen believed ancient animals were already advanced, which is why his beasts look more mammal-like than modern restorations.

fun fact

The Crystal Palace dinosaurs survived the palace itself, which burned down in 1936.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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