Voices: San Francisco, once and future tech hub
SAN FRANCISCO — Before the World Wide Web, there was the Panama Pacific International Exposition.
Instead of clicking a mouse, 19 million visitors from around the world clicked through a turnstile and browsed a 635-acre high-tech world that promised a future filled with mind-bending devices such as a steam-powered locomotive, a coast-to-coast telephone connection and single-winged planes.
Crazy, futuristic stuff in 1915. But 100 years later, the vibe of that brash expo still echoes through this city's canyons of innovation, whether in the halls of tech-age monoliths such as Twitter and Uber or in the busy hives incubating the next new, new thing.
"San Francisco never really looked back after that world's fair," says Anthea Hartig, CEO of the California Historical Society, which just opened a year-long exhibit to commemorate the expo. "We've had our booms and busts of course, but that event established this city as the place to be in the far West."
Today's app-fueled sizzle admittedly has many here feeling burned lately.
Tech companies are being pressed by activists to help stem the gentrification of what once was a proudly bohemian city that nurtured the Beat Movement and the Summer of Love. But so far the lucre seems to be flowing only one way, with rents soaring, restaurants trending and private buses trolling the hilly streets.
What's particularly interesting about the 1915 world's fair is how many of the city's most powerful last names — Hearst, deYoung, Crocker — had to set aside personal and business differences in order to bring the event to life, a for-the-greater-civic-good attitude that occasionally surfaces in modern times.
"San Francisco can seem like a fractious place where no one agrees, but people came together for the expo much the way they did to help bring the America's Cup" yacht race to the city in 2014, says Laura Ackley, author of San Francisco's Jewel City: The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915.
The 1915 effort was impressive. Eschewing federal funding and in a nod to today's venture capital rounds, some $4 million of private money was raised in 1910 — about $200 million in today's currency — and acres of dirt were dredged from the bay to level off an area that today is known as the tony Marina District.
The financial lure? Investors were given plots of land on the expo's site, which they could develop as soon as the fair ended.
Around $45 million in 1915 dollars poured into state coffers over the course of a year from visitors, who ranged from etiquette maven Emily Post — she brazenly drove cross-country to attend — to a budding photographer named Ansel Adams. His parents bought him a $10 annual pass and told him that as long as he kept up his studies, he could roam the grounds to his heart's content.
And what grounds they were, an imposing collection of elaborately lit Beaux-Arts buildings that housed a Ford Model T assembly line and a model bungalow whose every fixture glowed thanks to electricity. There was a Grand Canyon display with Hopi Indians, and a telegraphone that could record sounds onto a magnetic wire or plate decades before the advent of cassette tapes.
Outside, anyone who dared shrug off the apparent security of a biplane for a mono-winged prototype could, for a princely $10, hop aboard a plane flown by two brothers with the name Lougheed. The attraction was so popular that the siblings made $4,000 off their concession and started an aviation company they renamed to help people pronounce their name correctly, as in Lockheed.
The expo was a huge hit, both financially and emotionally. Many residents lobbied to keep the grand buildings, but in the end the fair's landowners had their own plans.
Today, you can see one sole remnant of this glorious affair on the far western edge of the Marina. It's called the Palace of Fine Arts, and its towering, rotund grace speaks directly to a time when San Francisco rose from the literal ashes of the 1906 earthquake to permanently etch its name into a roster of great global capitals.
That 1915 event is a great touchstone to revisit whenever discussion turns to the equalitarian imperative of all technological advancements. Perhaps today's big names — Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg — will band together to put on a modern expo that could showcase not just the city's cutting-edge gadgetry, but also its enduring humanity.
Della Cava covers technology and culture for USA TODAY out of San Francisco.