The 1939-40 New York World's Fair, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (also the location of the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair), was one of the largest world's fairs of all time. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons. The NYWF of 1939-1940 allowed all visitors to take a look at "the world of tomorrow". According to the official New York World's Fair pamphlet,
"The eyes of the Fair are on the future - not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines.
To its visitors the Fair will say: "Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made. They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.'"
In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of New York City retired policemen decided to create an international exposition to lift the city and the country out of depression. Not long after, these men formed the New York World's Fair Corporation, whose office was placed on one of the higher floors in the Empire State Building. The NYWFC elected former chief of police Grover Whalen as the president of their committee. The whole committee consisted of Winthrop Aldrich, Mortimer Buckner, Floyd Carlisle, John J. Dunnigan, Harvey Dow Gibson, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Percy S. Straus, and many other business leaders.
Over the next four years, the committee planned, built, and organized the fair and its exhibits, with countries around the world taking part in creating the biggest international event since World War I. Working closely with the Fair's committee was Robert Moses, New York City Parks Commissioner, who saw great value to the City in having the World's Fair Corporation (at its expense) remove a vast ash dump in Queens that was to be the site for the exposition, and turn the area into a City park after the exposition closed.
Grover Whalen, a public relations innovator, saw the Fair as an opportunity for corporations to present consumer products, rather than as an exercise in presenting science and the scientific way of thinking in its own right, as Harold Urey, Albert Einstein and other scientists wished to see the project. "As events transpired," reported Carl Sagan, whose own interest in science was nevertheless sparked by the Fair's gadgetry, "almost no real science was tacked on to the Fair's exhibits, despite the scientists' protests and their appeals to high principles."
Promotion of this great event took many forms. In 1938, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees did their part to promote the upcoming fair with their jerseys. All players on those teams wore patches featuring the Trylon, Perisphere, and "1939" on their left sleeve. Howard Hughes flew a special World's Fair flight around the world to promote the fair in 1938.
While the main purpose of the fair was to lift the spirits of America and drive much-needed business to New York City, it was also felt that there should be a cultural or historical association. It was therefore decided that the fair opening would correspond to the 150th anniversary of George Washington's first inauguration as President of the United States.
On April 30, 1939, a very hot Sunday, the fair had its grand opening, with 200,000 people in attendance. The April 30 date coincided with the anniversary of George Washington's inauguration as President in New York City. Although many of the pavilions and other facilities were not quite ready for this opening, it was put on with pomp and great celebration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the opening day address, and as a reflection of the wide range of technological innovation on parade at the fair, his speech was not only broadcast over the various radio networks but also was televised. NBC used the event to inaugurate regularly scheduled television broadcasts in New York City over their station W2XBS (now WNBC). An estimated 1,000 people viewed the Roosevelt telecast from about 200 television sets scattered throughout the New York area.
One of the first exhibits to receive attention was the Westinghouse Time Capsule, which was not to be opened till 6939 A.D. The time capsule was a tube containing writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, copies of Life Magazine, a kewpie doll, a dollar in change, a pack of Camel cigarettes, millions of pages of text on microfilm, and much more. The capsule also contained seeds of foods in common use at the time: (wheat, corn, oats, tobacco, cotton, flax, rice, soy beans, alfalfa, sugar beets, carrots and barley, all sealed in glass tubes). The time capsule is located at, at a depth of 50feet. A small stone plaque marks the position.
Other exhibits included a streamlined pencil sharpener, a diner (still in operation as the White Mana in Jersey City, New Jersey), a futuristic car based city by GM and early televisions. There was also a huge globe/planetarium located near the center of the fair. Bell Labs' Voder, a keyboard-operated speech synthesizer, was demonstrated at the Fair.
The copy of Magna Carta belonging to Lincoln Cathedral also left Britain in 1939 for the first time to be in the British Pavilion at the fair. Within months Britain joined World War II and it was deemed safer for it to remain in America until the end of hostilities. It therefore remained in Fort Knox, next to the original copy of the American constitution, until 1947.
The fair was also the occasion for the 1st World Science Fiction Convention, subsequently dubbed Nycon 1.
Exhibition in the USSR Pavilion included the life-size copy of the interior of Mayakovskaya station of the Moscow Metro. Designer of the station, Alexey Dushkin, was awarded Grand Prize of the 1939 New York World's Fair.
On July 4, 1940 the fair hosted "Superman Day." Notable was the crowning of the "superboy and supergirl" of the day, and a public appearance by Superman, played by actor Ray Middleton; the first time any had played the role.
The Jewish Palestine Pavilion introduced the world to the concept of a modern Jewish state, which a decade later would become Israel. The pavilion featured on its façade a monumental hammered copper relief sculpture entitled "The Scholar, The Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil" by the noted Art Deco sculptor Maurice Ascalon.
Although the United States would not enter the Second World War until the end of 1941, the fairgrounds served as a window into the troubles overseas. The pavilions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example, did not reopen for the 1940 season. Also on 4 July that same year, two New York City Police Department officers were killed by a blast while investigating a time bomb left at the British Pavilion.
The Fair was themed. It was divided into different "zones" (the Transportation Zone, the Communications and Business Systems Zone, the Food Zone, the Government Zone, and so forth). Virtually every structure erected on the fairgrounds was extraordinary (in a literal sense: "out of the ordinary"), and many of them were experimental in many ways. Architects were encouraged by their corporate or government sponsors to be creative, energetic, and innovative. Novel building designs, materials, and furnishings were the norm.
Many of the zones were arranged in a semi-circular pattern centered on the "Theme Center". The zones were distinguished by many color cues, including different wall colors and tints and differently colored lighting.
The "Theme Center" consisted of two all-white, landmark monumental buildings named the Trylon (over 700feet tall) and the Perisphere which one entered by moving stairway and exited via a grand curved walkway named the Helicline. Inside the Perisphere was a model city of tomorrow that visitors viewed from a moving walkway high above the floor level. The Theme Center was designed by the architect Wallace Harrison and his associate Max Abramovitz.
Only the Trylon and Perisphere were all white; avenues stretching out into the zones from the Theme Center were designed with rich colors that changed the further one walked from the center of the grounds. For example, the exhibits and other facilities along the Avenue of Pioneers were in a progression of blues, starting with pale tints and ending in deep ultramarine. At night, with the latest in lighting technology switched on, the effect was felt by many visitors to be a "magical" experience. (Outdoor public lighting was at the time of a very limited and pedestrian nature, perhaps consisting of simple incandescent pole lamps in a city and nothing in the country. Electrification was still very new and had not reached everywhere in the US. The Fair was the first public demonstration of several lighting technologies that would become common in future decades.)
With its vast area and prominent location just south of the Theme Center, the Transportation Zone pavilions attracted widespread attention. Perhaps the most popular of the Transportation Zone pavilions was the one built for General Motors. There the36,000 square foot (3,300 m²) Futurama exhibit, designed by famed industrial designer and theater set designer Norman Bel Geddes, transported fair visitors over a huge diorama of a section of the United States that was designed with a stunning array of miniature highways, towns, 500,000 individually designed homes, 50,000 miniature vehicles, waterways, and a million miniature trees of diverse species. These elements of the diorama gradually became larger as the visitors (who were seated in moving chairs overhead) moved through the exhibit, until the cars and other elements of the exhibit became life-size. At the conclusion of the ride the visitors to the pavilion exited into an area that was constructed as a life-size city intersection with multi-story buildings and stores on all sides. The stores included an auto dealership and an appliance store where visitors could see the latest GM and Frigidaire products. As with almost all pavilions in the fair, these showcases were not only intended to get people to buy the sponsor's products, they were also intended to educate and inform the populace about basic materials and processes that were then very new and not well known. Many experimental product concepts and new materials were shown that were not currently available for purchase, but would become available in various ways over the next few years. In many ways the fair pavilions more resembled a modern-day government-sponsored science fair exhibit or a Discovery Channel program than they would resemble modern corporate advertising and sales promotions.
Adjacent to the GM pavilion was the Ford Pavilion, where race car drivers drove on a figure eight track on the building's roof endlessly, day in and day out. Not far from GM and Ford was the Chrysler exhibit group, where an audience in a theater with air conditioning, then a new technology, could watch a Plymouth being assembled right before their very eyes. (GM had used this same premise at the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago a few years earlier. A visitor could go to the fair and buy his new GM in the morning, watch it being assembled, and drive it home that night.)
Railroads were a major form of transportation for both passengers and freight in 1939, as airlines are for passengers today in the United States. Many visitors to the fair would have arrived in New York by railroad, and most visitors had at least a moderate interest in the area. The centerpiece of the Railroad Conference exhibits (on seventeen acres) was "Railroads on Parade," a spectacular live drama re-enacting the birth and growth of railroads. In addition to the show, there were important historical objects on display by the various railroads and manufacturing companies, such as the Tom Thumb (locomotive) engine. The Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) had their S1 engine on display. This engine was mounted on rollers under the driver wheels, and ran continuously at 60mi/h all day long. The British London Midland & Scottish Railway sent their Coronation Scot express train with a locomotive LMS Princess Coronation Class 6229 Duchess of Hamilton, (disguised as sister locomotive 6220 Coronation), to the fair   . GMs Electro-Motive Division had a Display of their then new streamlined Diesel-Electric passenger locomotives.
A visitor walking to the left of the Theme Center on the Avenue of Patriots would visit the Communications and Business Systems focal exhibits. At the AT&T Pavilion the Voder, a mechanized, synthetic voice, spoke to fairgoers, foretelling the widespread use of electronic voices decades later. (The Voder itself would be used in part of one of the most secret voice communications systems of World War II between Washington and London only a year or two after at it appeared at the fair.)
At the IBM pavilion, electric typewriters, and a fantastic machine called the electric calculator that used punched cards, were on display. IBM also had a fine art gallery with hundreds of artworks from 70 countries around the world. The exhibit for Firestone Tires featured the famous pygmy hippo, Billy, who had been a pet of U.S. President Calvin Coolidge.
Next door to these business exhibits was the "Masterpieces of Art" building housing 300 priceless works of the Old Masters, from the Middle Ages to 1800. This was no sideshow; thirty five galleries featured great works from DaVinci and Michelangelo to Rembrandt, from Hals to Caravaggio and Bellini. Whalen and his team were able to borrow priceless paintings and sculptures from Europe and hang them in a graceful, understated building in Queens for two years.
Continuing outward from the Theme Center one saw the Food Zone. Among the many unique exhibits was the Borden's exhibit, that featured 150 pedigreed cows (including the original Elsie) on a "rotolactor" that mechanically bathed them, dried them, and milked them. While no such complete system has ever become common in milk production, many of the features of the system are in everyday use today.
Next door was the Continental Baking exhibit, presenting a vast, continuous process of baking breads and other products. Consistent with the representative design sense of the Fair, this building was fashioned in the shape of a huge packaged bread loaf, white with red, yellow, and blue balloons on its curved facade. People today will recognize this as the packaging for Wonder Bread. Behind the exhibit was a bona fide wheat field from which wheat was harvested and used in the baking process. There was a sign in the field that noted that this was the first time in over 100 years that wheat had been grown within the incorporated bounds of New York City.
The sixty foreign governments that participated in this fair contributed a wide diversity of creatively designed pavilions housing a stunning array of cultural offerings to fairgoers. The Italian pavilion attempted to fuse ancient Roman splendor with modern styles, and a 200feet high water fall defined the pavilion's facade. Its popular restaurant was designed in the shape of the nation's luxury cruise line ships. The French pavilion, on the Court of Peace that was the grand open space northeast of the Theme Center, ran such a celebrated restaurant that after the fair closed and World War II ended, the restaurant remained in New York City - and soon established itself (as Le Pavilion) as one of the finest French dining establishments in the city.
Beyond the corporate and government zones, the wildly popular but less uplifting Amusements Area was not integrated into the thematic matrix, and was a mere Area rather than a Zone. Despite the high-minded educational tone that Grover Whalen attempted to set, the "Amusements Area" was the most popular part of the Fair and included roller coaster, the Life Savers parachute jump (which was later moved to Coney Island where it still stands), and carnival acts such as a collection of performing midgets. A number of the shows provided spectators with the opportunity of viewing women in very revealing costumes (for all intents and purposes topless) for instance the Frozen Alive Girl, the Dream of Venus Building, and the Living Pictures. While there were a number of protests by prominent politicians over the course of the fair about the "low minded entertainment", and the New York Vice Squad raided shows in the area on several occasions, the public generally accepted this form of entertainment. The Billy Rose Aquacade, was a spectacular musical and water extravagnaza, foreshadowing the form of many popular Hollywood musicals in the ensuing years. The Aquacade facility itself served as an entertainment venue in the park for many years and was finally demolished in 1996.
The Bendix Lama Temple was a replica of the 1771 Potala in Jehol, Manchuria brought back by the explorer Vincent Bendix.
The Temple contained a girlie show. The 19-year-old barker Herbert I. Taffae delivered the following spiel at the 1939/1940 World’s Fair and repeated for recording in 2007. Mr. Taffae went on to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942-1945.
It might sound strange and a trifle incongruous having lovely girls in front of the million dollar temple of Jehol whose gold leaf roof you can see over the top of this façade, but the fact is that we have a girlie show in here and a good one.
The author of the book, Forbidden Tibet, Horizon Hunters and technical advisor of the picture, Lost Horizon, he doesn’t want his good name associated with this scandalous enterprise as brought back from the land of the lost horizon, those Terpsichordion aphrodisiacs, the love temptation dancers from the lamaseries of Tibet. A lama is a Buddhist priest and as such he must remain celibate. He must be deaf to the calls of the flesh, immune to the pangs of passion, and adverse to the charms of beautiful women. In other words he must not marry or anything.
Once each year he is given a test. The questions of which are the unquestionable figures of questionable young ladies, courtesans brought from the outside world to corrupt the young lama and seduce him from his holy way of life.
Now ladies, this show has been approved by Good Housekeeping, but in case a stray moron seeking a racy spicy girl show is in this otherwise obviously intellectual audience, he too can go in there and not know the difference, but you, you lovers of art will surely recognize this show to be the apogee of oriental choreography.
The whole thing rises to a climax when Sasha and her hilarious horde of vivacious vestal virgins unite in that unclad climax, that orgiastic ecstasy at the tail end of our performance, the passion dance of love. It’s terrific. Now once inside sit down as long as you like and admire the bare beautiful temple but those beautiful bare forms and they I say are not too formal. Go on right away. This being the first show of the afternoon I am going to cut the price of admission in half.
The Aquacade was put on in a special amphitheater seating 10,000 people and included an orchestra to accompany the synchronized spectacular swim show. It featured Johnny Weismuller and Eleanor Holm, two of the most celebrated swimmers of the era, and dazzled fairgoers with its lighting and cascades and curtains of water, pumped in waterfalls at 8,000 gallons a minute. The cost of admission: eighty cents.
A special subway line, the IND World's Fair Railroad, was built to serve the fair. World's Fair (now Willets Point-Shea Stadium) station on the IRT Flushing Line was rebuilt to handle fair traffic on the IRT and BMT. A Long Island Rail Road station (now Shea Stadium) was built next to the Flushing Line station.
The fair was open for two seasons, from April to October each year, and was officially closed forever on October 27, 1940. To get the Fair's budget overruns under control before the 1940 season and augment gate revenues, the fair management in the second year replaced Whalen with a banker, Harvey Gibson, and placed much greater emphasis on the amusement features, and less on the educational and uplifting exhibits. The great fair attracted over 45 million visitors and generated roughly $48 million in revenue. Since the Fair Corporation had invested 67 million dollars (in addition to nearly a hundred million dollars from other sources), it was an economic failure, and the corporation declared bankruptcy.
Countries under the thumb of the Axis powers in Europe, e.g., Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France, ran their pavilions in 1940 with a special nationalistic pride. In both seasons, the only major world power that did not participate was Germany. When the fair closed, many among the European staff were unable to return to their home countries, so they remained in America and in some cases exercised a tremendous influence on American culture. For example, Henri Soulé moved from the French Pavilion at the fair to open Le Pavillon, taking Pierre Franey along as head chef. 
The 1939 World's Fair made a strong impression on attendees and influenced a generation of Americans. In the film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) a comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Carole Lombard and Gene Raymond visit the fair after a dinner date and find themselves stuck high in the air on the fair's popular parachute ride when it malfunctions. In the Charlie Chan Movie, Murder over New York, there is a reference to the World's Fair.
Later generations have attempted in to recapture the impression it made in fictional and artistic treatments, sometimes seriously, as in 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, a mixed non-fiction and fictional book by David Gelernter, or World's Fair, by E. L. Doctorow, but often with ironic intent, notably in Matt Groening's show Futurama which was named after the GM exhibit. The first episode has a cryogenicist say, "Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!":