[Monorail used at the Philadelphia Centennial, 1876]: The elevated railway across the ravine – Antique Wall Art
![[Monorail used at the Philadelphia Centennial, 1876]: The elevated railway across the ravine — antique engraving](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/0b/0b99e1d5eb4e-L.webp)
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this antique engraving of [Monorail used at the Philadelphia Centennial, 1876]: The elevated railway across the ravine. It comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, scanned from the original and carefully restored.
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[Monorail used at the Philadelphia Centennial, 1876]: The elevated railway across the ravine
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The engraving shows the monorail built for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a single elevated track that carried passenger cars across a ravine in Fairmount Park, where the fairgrounds sprawled over the city's western edge. Its appearance in Wilson's *Masterpieces of the Centennial* suggests it was considered one of the fair's notable engineering curiosities. Wood engraving was still the standard method for reproducing such scenes in illustrated books of the period, so the image gives a sense of how visitors encountered new transportation technology at the exhibition.
| Medium | 1 print : wood engraving. |
|---|---|
| Notes | [no date recorded on caption card] |
| Subjects | Illus. in: Wilson, Masterpieces of the Centennial, v. 3. This record contains unverified, old data from caption card. Caption card tracings: Exhibitions--1876; Shelf. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,224 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-128992 |
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