How London’s Crystal Palace was built so quickly

London's Great Exhibition of 1851 attracted some 6 million people eager to experience more than 14,000 exhibitors showcasing 19th-century marvels of technology and engineering. The event took place in the Crystal Palace, a 990,000-square-foot building of cast iron and plate glass originally located in Hyde Park. And it was built in an incredible 190 days. According to a recent paper published in the International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology, one of the secrets was the use of a standardized screw thread, first proposed 10 years before its construction, although the thread did not officially become the British standard until 1905.

“During the Victorian era there was incredible innovation from workshops right across Britain that was helping to change the world," said co-author John Gardner of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). "In fact, progress was happening at such a rate that certain breakthroughs were perhaps never properly realized at the time, as was the case here with the Crystal Palace. Standardization in engineering is essential and commonplace in the 21st century, but its role in the construction of the Crystal Palace was a major development."

The design competition for what would become the Crystal Palace was launched in March 1850, with a deadline four weeks later, and the actual, fully constructed building opened on May 1, 1851. The winning design, by Joseph Patterson, wasn't chosen until quite late in the game after numerous designs had been rejected—most because they were simply too far above the £100,000 budget.

Patterson's design called for what was essentially a giant conservatory consisting of a multi-dimensional grid of 24-foot modules. The design elements included 3,300 supporting columns with four flange faces, drilled so they could be bolted to connecting and base pieces. (The hollow columns did double duty as drainage pipes for rainwater.) The design also called for diagonal bracing (aka cross bracing) for additional stability.

The cross braces were bolted, which could have been a major headache, since screws were traditionally made by skilled craftsmen, such that no two were exactly alike and it was nearly impossible to replace lost or broken screws. Patterson's design called for 30,000 nuts and bolts; screws with a consistent thread form would have streamlined the construction process considerably. James Whitworth had proposed a common standard thread in an 1841 paper, based on his analysis of an extensive collection of screw bolts from the main British producers. And thanks to the invention of Henry Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe around 1798, the technology needed to create standard screws already existed.

The finished Crystal Palace earned Paxton worldwide acclaim and a knighthood from Queen Victoria. Once the exhibition had ended, the entire structure was relocated to the affluent suburb of Sydenham. (Also relocated to the surrounding Crystal Palace Park: the life-sized concrete dinosaur models created for the exhibition by English sculpture and natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.) Alas, in November 1936, a fire broke out after an explosion in the women's cloakroom. The Crystal Palace was destroyed; the only surviving structures were two water towers and a part of the main nave. The South Tower was dismantled soon after because it was too unstable, while the North Tower was demolished with explosives in 1941.

Nuts and bolts

Gardner was intrigued by the question of how the Crystal Palace was constructed so quickly and thought the thread form question might be relevant. So he enlisted the help of co-author Ken Kiss, curator of the Crystal Palace museum. Kiss had excavated the original columns at the Sydenham site (which were also used at the original Hyde Park site) and the men were able to take relevant measurements for their research.