Imagine if San Francisco were to host today’s equivalent of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE). It’s safe to bet that many of us would be there, live-Tweeting, Instagramming, and Facebooking about it. But how did the PPIE’s visitors share their experiences in 1915?
In this blog post, we take a look at some postcards and photographs that could be thought of as early 20th century “social media” from the Fair. These examples not only hint at the differences between communication then and now; they also underscore how the PPIE, with its introduction of technology such as the first transcontinental telephone call, heralded the ways in which we communicate with each other today.
“Posting” about the PPIE
Without cellphones, visitors to the PPIE did not call, text, email or tweet family and friends with quick updates on their day’s activities. Instead, they relied on an easy and affordable form of communication: the postcard.
Though postcard images were mass-produced (and sometimes unrelated to sender’s messages), the postcards themselves were an individual, personal format for Fairgoers to quickly record and share what they saw and did at the Exposition. We owe our glimpses into everyday people’s memories of the PPIE to gems like this one:
Front and back, “1950. Half Dome in Court of Four Seasons. Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915.” San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
The postcard reads:
“Dear Friend,
Have just returned from the Exposition. Mr. Eddy played to-day. I like him better than Mr. Dobin[?]. At 3 there was a concert by Exposition Symphony Orchestra. Max Bendix of Boston conductor. It was the finest music I have ever heard. It is a perfect day[…] ”
It’s fun to imagine the emoticons that could punctuate that report!
Take a look at this next postcard, which expresses a hope to visit another exposition in 1925. The writer has obviously taken pains to fit a message into the available space. Perhaps you could use more than 140 or 160 characters in writing a postcard, but you still had to work within a character limit!
Front and back, “Y.W.C.A. Building, Pan.-Pac. Int. Exposition San Francisco, 1915.” San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
Snapchat
With a short note scribbled on the image, this postcard of the Palace of Horticulture looks a bit like pictures exchanged over the photos-sharing app Snapchat. This social media platform lets users place text on their pictures as captions and send them instantly to friends. The lines on this postcard read: “We were in this Palace yesterday. It was just grand.”
“Palace of Horticulture, Pan.-Pac. Int. Exposition San Francisco, 1915.” San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
Yet Snapchat is also unique in that it removes sent images from recipients’ phones within seconds of delivery. Its point is to leave no record of pictures shared—to keep digital photographs truly ephemeral. Contrast that with postcards, which, in addition to serving as a quick way to send messages, were meant to be keepsakes as well. The difference illustrates an intriguing point of difference between communication technologies in 1915 and 2015.
What if a similar exposition were held today and the San Francisco History Center hosted an exhibit about it one hundred years from now? We might not even have the technological tools to extract the 21st century digital postcards from the archives.
Instagram
As you might have inferred from the postcards above, the PPIE had no shortage of picturesque views. It’s fair to ask: If Instagram had existed contemporaneously with the PPIE, would images of the Exposition have filled up its feeds?
It’s a hypothetical question, so it can’t be definitively answered; however, we did find a number of Exposition images that look as though they’ve been run through Instagram. The six postcards in the composite below depict the main façade of the Palace of Machinery. Note that while every pair from top to bottom shows the exact same scene, no two images side by side are exactly alike. The differences in framing, saturation, and color gradation evoke the effects achieved using Instagram’s filter editor.
“Machinery Palace in the Pan.-Pac. Int. Exposition San Francisco, 1915”; “Machinery Palace”; “Palace of Machinery, Pan.-Pac. Int. Expo, San Francisco.” San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
Album Sharing
If postcards have parallels with texts, Snapchat, and Instagram, do they resemble Facebook in any way? In terms of album sharing, they just might.
Souvenir-makers at the Fair produced ready-to-mail postcard sets like the one shown here, which contained several different postcard views. Each piece was attached to another and could be easily folded back into the envelope—hence earning the name “folding postcards.”
“Folding Post Card Views of the Jewel City.” San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
Although less personal than today’s individually shot-and-shared photographs, these folding postcard sets served as the publicly-shared albums of 1915.
Of course, there were also people who took their own photographs of the Fair. These included members of the California Camera Club, who often shared the images they captured as lantern slides.
Simply put, a lantern slide is a positive print of a photograph on a glass slide, viewed by means of an early kind of projector. (An introductory blog post on lantern slides and lantern slide technology can be found on the Smithsonian Institution Archive’s website.)
It’s not hard to imagine people gathering in front of projected images, much the same way we nowhuddle around screensboth large and small to watch slide shows or click through photo streams. It would be apt to think of lantern slides as a distant precursor to Flickr -- not only because of their similar function, but because of the photo sharing website’s name.
A lantern slide of a woman in the PPIE Joy Zone’s Streets of Cairo. “Streets of Cairo.” San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
To explore more materials that reveal people’s memories of the Fair, visit Company’s Coming: San Francisco Hosts the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at the Main Library’s Skylight Gallery. The exhibit will be on view until December 31, 2015. Who knows? You might like it so much, you’ll take to Instagram, Snapchat, or Flickr to tell all the world about it.
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