Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle Over the Presentation of Science at the 1939 New York World's Fair

Abstract

IN EARLY 1937, WATSON DAVIS, DIRECTOR OF SCIENCE SERVICE, America's leading science news service, expressed the hopes of many members of the scientific community' when he stated: The coming [1939] New York World's Fair should be a major opportunity for ... science popularization.2 That a fair with the stated theme of Building the World of Tomorrow could be predicated on anything but science seemed inconceivable to many scientists. But Davis's public optimism masked scientists' growing apprehension that fair officials intended to devalue science's contributions to social progress and deny scientists a meaningful role in planning the fair. Subsequent developments partially confirmed these forebodings. Although the fair did ultimately venerate science, those scientists most committed to popularization battled ineffectually as their understanding of the meaning and social uses of science and consequent approach to its popularization were ignored by corporate exhibitors, who narrowly defined science in terms of gadgets, commodities, and magic.3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.