Famous people of the time attended the Great Exhibition, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Michael Faraday (who assisted with the planning and judging of exhibits), Samuel Colt, members of the Orléanist royal family and the writers Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

The future Arts and Crafts proponent William Morris, then a teenager, later said he refused to attend the Exhibition on the grounds of taste.

Europe had just emerged from "two difficult decades of political and social upheaval," and now Britain hoped to show that technology, particularly its own, was the key to a better future.

It was designed by Joseph Paxton with support from structural engineer Charles Fox, the committee overseeing its construction including Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and went from its organisation to the grand opening in just nine months.

From the interior, the building's large size was emphasized with trees and statues; this served, not only to add beauty to the spectacle, but also to demonstrate man's triumph over nature.

[4] The Crystal Palace was an enormous success, considered an architectural marvel, but also an engineering triumph that showed the importance of the exhibition itself.

[6] The building was later moved and re-erected in 1854 in enlarged form at Sydenham Hill in south London, an area that was renamed Crystal Palace.

The remaining surplus was used to set up an educational trust to provide grants and scholarships for industrial research; it continues to do so today.

[12] The English-born King Ernest Augustus I of Hanover, shortly before his death, wrote to Lord Strangford about it: The folly and absurdity of the Queen in allowing this trumpery must strike every sensible and well-thinking mind, and I am astonished the ministers themselves do not insist on her at least going to Osborne during the Exhibition, as no human being can possibly answer for what may occur on the occasion.

Those too poor to travel lined up by the rail tracks to watch the long trains of open carriages steaming past.

These paper souvenirs were printed lithographic cards which were hand-coloured and held together by cloth to give a three-dimensional view of the event.