Western Civilization: A Brief History (Spielvogel, 2001), explains how "The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a symbol of the success of Great Britain, which had become the leading industrial nation of the world and it is the richest. Additionally, a vast tree inside the building was "a visible symbol of how the Industrial Revolution was said to have allowed man to dominate nature." As a professor of Western civilization at Pennsylvania State University, Spielvogel is a reliable source. The introduction to The Great Exhibition of 1851 (Auerbach, 1999) immediately conveys the scale of the importance of the exhibition, “the first morning since the creation of the world”. that all the peoples of the whole world came together and performed a common act. By the time the exhibition closed in October, there were more than six million paying admissions to the Crystal Palace, which, when foreign and repeat visits are taken into account, represented almost a fifth of the British population . Auerbach is a professor of history at California State University and has published numerous books. This shows that the text is a reliable reference source. Prince Albert was born in 1819 in Rosenau, Germany. Famous for his educational reform and abolition of slavery worldwide, he took on the responsibility of managing the Queen's household, estate and office. His ideas in the 19th century were considered liberal and his mind had a "natural inclination towards art". His main goal was to improve the relationship between creativity and industry, "he was absorbed in the problem of improving the application of art to manufacturing industries" (Beaver, 1970). In 1847 he became president of the Society of Arts and organized three small exhibitions of art machines...... middle of paper ...... the most publicized was a vast hydraulic press. Invented by Stevenson, the press, operated by a single man, was used to lift vast metal tubes weighing 1,440 tonnes for a bridge in Bangor. Another prolific piece on display was a steam hammer with a tolerance so small that it could forge the main bearing of a ship's hull or carefully crack an egg. There was a printing machine capable of reproducing five thousand copies of the most widely distributed London News in less than an hour, an envelope folding machine, a cigarette rolling machine and even an extendable hearse. The ornate horse-drawn carriages that predated the automobile had their own gallery alongside early versions of bicycles, known at the time as velocipedes. Such an abundance of machinery for industry was on display that the Queen concluded after her visit in 1851 that there existed "every invention imaginable ».’.