Western Civilization: A Brief History (Spielvogel, 2001), explains how "The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a symbol of the successes of Great Britain, which had become the world's first industrial nation and is richer." Furthermore, a large tree inside the building constituted "a visible symbol of how the industrial revolution had supposedly achieved human dominance over nature". As a professor of Western civilization at Pennsylvania State University, Spielvogel is a reliable source. The introduction of The Great Exhibition of 1851 (Auerbach, 1999) immediately conveys the scope of the exhibition's importance, "the first morning after the creation of the world" that all peoples gathered from all parts of the world and accomplished a common act. By the time the exhibition closed in October, there had been more than six million paid entries to the Crystal Palace, which, taking foreign and repeat visits 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 highlights that the text is a reliable reference source. Prince Albert was born in 1819 in Rosenau, Germany. Famous for his education reform and the abolition of slavery throughout the world, he took on the responsibility of managing the Queen's household, estate and office. His ideas during the 19th century were considered liberal and his mind had a "natural inclination towards the artistic". His main goal was to improve the relationship between creativity and industry, "he was absorbed by the problem of improving the application of art to manufacturing industries" (Beaver, 1970). In 1847 he became president of the Society of Arts and mounted three small art exhibitions but......middle of paper......the one which gained the most publicity was a large hydraulic press. Invented by Stevenson, the press, operated by a single man, was used to lift enormous metal pipes weighing 1 440 tonnes for a bridge in Bangor. Another prolific find on display was a steam hammer that had such a small tolerance that it could forge the main bearing of a ship's hull or carefully crack an egg. There was a printing press capable of reproducing five thousand copies of the London newspaper in less than an hour, an envelope folding machine, a cigarette rolling machine and even an expandable hearse. The decorated carriages that preceded the automobile had their own gallery alongside the first versions of bicycles, known at the time as velocipedes. Such an abundance of industrial machinery was on display that the Queen concluded after a visit in 1851 that there was 'every invention imaginable"’.