Steampunk - Quite a fitting display 1876 Mouse Mat

Colourized photo from 1876 Original title: Walworth Manufacturing Co.'s exhibit Photographer: Centennial Photographic Co. Location: 4231 Avenue of the Republic, Philadelphia PA This is the Centennial Expo of 1876 in Philadelphia, PA, it was the first worlds fair held in the United States. They saw over 10 million people in a 6 month span. They had huge buildings made for the event that held boats and full sized locomotives. Showing the latest in technology and they had some of the most interesting exhibits displayed from private businesses. They had over 14,000 businesses here, from 37 countries. What an interesting display right? As you can see its made of all the pipe fittings this company makes. And I think it whistles, there is water on the floor and a rope. I don't know if they ran steam through it or not, I would imagine it would be quite hot if it did. And people would probably be burned if they touched the pipes... But it would limit fingerprints and wandering children. This is the exhibit made by the Walworth Manufacturing company. They made all kinds of plumbing fittings of all different sizes, using brass pipe, as copper didn't really come into fashion till 1930-1960. But their fittings wasn't what put them on the map, it was the invention of the pipe wrench or in this case the Stillson Wrench. Basically the story goes, a man named Dan Stillson worked for their company over a number of years. He whittled some wood to create a wrench prototype, and asked their metallurgist if he could make it. He wanted it to be all steel. At this time there was no good way to wrench a pipe, they had different kinds of pliers but nothing really to grip onto it. The first Stillson wrench was made, and they showed their boss what it can do. Proving how well it worked, Dan took his wrench and twisted a 1 1/4" pipe in half, and the wrench didn't break. It was adjustable, gripped the pipe and had an almost ratchet like mechanism built in. Walworth told him to patent his design and he did. Dan came back and offered to sell Walworth the design for a cool $2500 (about $51,000 today). They said, we could do that, but I think you really should consider selling it on royalty, he agreed with the condition that this company should be the only ones allowed to make it. The salesmen brought samples but people rejected it on price because Dan set the amount he wanted too high. They worked out better numbers and made it lower. After that it sold, in fact it sold so well that it went world wide and made a name of both Walworth and Stillson. Dan made a lot of money off of this, during the course of his patent he made between $80,000-$100,000 (about $1.6 to $2 million today). I can't say that there were any of these wrenches in this dynamic display, but I thought it would be more interesting to learn about than a bunch of bronze fittings.