Text 1: More inventions than hours in the day, by Leon Briggs

An original contemporary blog.

I booked the first entry time for the annual inventions exhibition because I wanted to avoid the crowds. This plan failed before I reached the doors. The queue curled around the exhibition centre, and it took forty minutes to reach the ticket desk, where my pre-booked £17 admission was finally scanned.

Inside, the building seemed to contain several different worlds. In one area, a rescue robot climbed over broken concrete. In another, visitors explored a model house where the windows closed automatically when it began to rain. At the driving display, I attempted to guide a virtual bus through a crowded town and knocked over six digital traffic cones.

The best exhibits were also the busiest. I waited twenty minutes to control a mechanical arm, only for my turn to end after two minutes. By lunchtime, every bench was occupied and the food stalls were charging £8 for a filled roll and a drink. I ate standing beside a waste bin while an announcement asked visitors not to block the walkways.

The noise was constant: recorded voices, public demonstrations and children striking the same metal panels to discover what sound each one made. After five hours, my feet ached and I had covered only two of the four halls. I left with a bag full of leaflets and the uncomfortable knowledge that I had missed half the exhibition. Even so, on the journey home I was already making a list of the displays I would visit first next year.

Text 2: Clara visits the exhibition hall

An original diary entry written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Text 2 is a diary entry written in the 1880s by a visitor to a public exhibition of machinery and manufactured goods.

Thursday evening

Cousin Margaret and I have spent the whole day at the great exhibition and are now quite exhausted. We paid one shilling each at the entrance, where such a multitude had gathered that we were pressed forward without choosing our own pace. For several minutes I lost sight of Margaret's green bonnet and feared I should spend the day alone.

The hall was longer and higher than any building I had entered before. Beneath its roof stood working looms, small engines, polished tools and ingenious household contrivances. Every manufacturer claimed that his machine was the fastest or finest. The clatter of the looms and the hissing of steam made ordinary conversation almost impossible, while the demonstrators called out explanations which few could hear.

At one stand, a machine folded sheets of paper with such speed that I watched it three times. Elsewhere, we saw a device which filled bottles and fixed their stoppers. We could not operate these wonders ourselves, but the attendants repeated their demonstrations whenever a fresh crowd arrived.

By two o'clock, we were hungry. Sixpence purchased two small cakes and a pot of tea, though there was nowhere to sit and we balanced the cups upon a railing. We remained until closing, yet did not reach the far end of the hall. My head still seems full of wheels turning and belts flying, but I would gladly return tomorrow if my feet would permit it.