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Exposition Internationale des Applications de l’Électricité, Marseille 1908

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Exposition Internationale des Applications de l’Électricité, Marseille 1908

The Exposition Internationale d’Électricité was an exhibition held in Marseille from April to October of 1908, held to popularize what electricity could do across industry, agriculture, medicine, communication, and the home. The exhibition was loosely associated with a series of meetings of international electrical congresses that occurred between 1881 and roughly 1915, with the goal of standardizing units and terminology. Electricity was still new and exciting to many at this time, and the exposition received a tremendous amount of attention in the French press. It occupied the Parc du Prado (the Rond-Point du Prado grounds, off boulevard Michelet and boulevard Rabatau), on the same fairground that had hosted the 1906 Colonial Exposition and would later host that of 1922. The opening was staged: the gates opened around 19 April, but the exhibition palaces themselves were not finished until Pentecost in early June, the delay blamed on bad weather and the late arrival of exhibits. The enterprise was driven by two commissaires généraux, H. Dubs (head of the Compagnie générale française de tramways) and M.G. Cordier, director of the coastal electric energy company (Société d’Énergie Électrique du Littoral).

The grounds were organized around a set of named palaces: the Palais de l’Énergie (generation, transmission and distribution, with industrial, naval, chemical and metallurgical applications); the Palais de la Traction et des Mines (which doubled as the venue for temporary shows and special competitions); the Grand Palais (telegraphy, telephony, lighting, medicine, surgery, measuring instruments, teaching, and a “documented history” of electrical progress); the Maison Moderne (a fully electrified show house); a Palais des Beaux-Arts; and the Pavillon de l’Agriculture with its much-publicized annexe, the electrified Mas provençal: a working Provençal farmhouse with a tuberculin-tested dairy herd and a full range of electrically driven farm machinery. Set-piece technical exhibits included a radiotelegraph station that exchanged wireless messages with Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Casablanca, Algiers and passing ships, and let the public send paid radiotelegrams.

Ringing the serious content was a dense fairground along the avenue Richard — the Palais du Rire, the “femme volante,” a waxwork Grotte, the electric swings crowned by a 35-metre lighthouse tower with an American bar and orientation table, a luminous moving walkway (trottoir roulant lumineux), spinning aeroplanes, several theatres and a cinematograph at the International-Théâtre, a captive balloon, a fortune-teller (“Miloska la voyante”), and a Touareg camp of roughly 150 people with a dozen camels staging desert fantasias. The exposition leaned hard on the spectacle of electric light, with thousands of lamps across the palaces and gardens, luminous fountains at the Château d’Eau, and nightly illuminations and fireworks. There was also \a continuous calendar of fêtes: concerts by the tramway company’s Harmonie and by the exposition orchestra, night festivals, flower battles, children’s costume balls, and a steady run of diverse competitions. The tramway network was itself treated as an exhibit, Dubs’s company having multiplied lines and departures to feed the site.

Attendance was good at its peaks: about 40,000 on a fine Sunday in late April, which the press compared to the Colonial Exposition’s best days. It then settled to a daily 15,000–16,000 through the summer, building toward the September Congrès international des applications électriques. The exposition’s run was marred by a grim event: a young electrician, Émile Couchet, was electrocuted in an on-site transformer substation in June, and the exposition paid for his funeral. The exposition closed on 1 November 1908, deeply in the red; the closing coverage praised Dubs and his collaborators, but conceded that “pecuniary success did not crown these efforts,” and sent Dubs back to running the Marseille tramways. The Prado grounds ultimately passed into municipal control and became the Parc Chanot. Ironically, the best-known artifact of the 1908 exposition is a poster by David Dellepiane (top of page), which is found today on many auction and art sites.

The Incubator Exhibit

The baby incubator pavilion stood beside the Palais de la Traction, on the walk out toward the wireless-telegraphy polygon, and was open permanently with free admission. It was run by Alexandre Lion, described in the local press both as a well-known philanthrope and as the inventor of the apparatus, credited with rescuing numerous premature infants each year from otherwise certain death. The Guide Officiel, Catalogue des Exposants contained an enthusiastic and flowery description of Lion’s incubator on p. 158.

“The Couveuse

“The work of incubators is not only a philanthropic work, worthy of the most benevolent interest because it is eminently charitable. It is also a scientific work which, as such, had the right of citizenship in the current Exhibition.

“Isn’t the latest progress in the incubator just one application, beneficent among many others, of Electricity, that adorable fairy that is decidedly as good as it is beautiful?

“These little infants so cute, so delicate resting in their tiny crystal houses, like delicious jewels in transparent cases, these frail creatures, whose life is only a breath at the mercy of the slightest imprudence, the slightest forgetfulness, fortunately have a vigilant guard who never sleeps on duty: Electricity watches over them with jealous care to ensure that the temperature of the small room is adequate for their needs. If this temperature changes, it automatically activates an indicator — a needle moving between two contacts close to each other. The slightest variation in heat, either more or less, closes the contact and activates the alarm bell.

“A dreamed-of cordon bleu, a docile and well-styled maid, here is the excellent Fairy [Electricity] transformed into an accomplished dry nurse, perfect in her new function as in all those that we have asked her to fulfill.”

The Revue Pratique de l’Electricité reported the awards given at the Exposition in its issue of November 20, 1908. Lion received a bronze medal, listed under Groupe XIII (Télégraphie–Téléphonie) as “M. Alexandre Lion, directeur de l’Œuvre Maternelle des couveuses d’enfants, 5, rue Cart, Saint-Mandé (Seine).” The placement under telegraphy-telephony rather than the adjacent Groupe XIV (Électricité médicale) seems odd, but Group XIII on that page is a catch-all — the entry immediately after Lion is an unrelated industrialist — so it may reflect only reflect sloppy classification. Another plausible explanation is that the jury may have classed the exhibit by its alarm apparatus (a low-voltage contact-and-bell signalling system, functionally similar to a telegraph) or by the pavilion’s physical location near the wireless polygon, rather than by medical purpose.

Lion’s pavilion is behind the Patisserie on the corner, you can see a sign on the rooftop. Source: Author’s collection.
Lion’s pavilion is on the corner on the right. Source: Personal collection of T. Gras.
Source: Author’s collection.
Map of the exposition. Source: Guide Officiel, Catalogue des Exposants.
Sources
  • Erard, H. Guide Officiel, Catalogue des Exposants. Exposition Internationale des Applications de l’Electricité. Marseille, 1908, page 158. Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1421343s?rk=150215;2
  • Revue Pratique de l’Electricité, November 20, 1908, page 24. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bd6t58337070
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 26 April 1908 — dog show and palmarès; opening banquet
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 27 April 1908 — “La journée d’hier”: ~40,000 entries, Grand-Palais concert, tramway service
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 7 May 1908 — attractions program (Touareg camp, Grotte, femme volante, couveuse pavilion, Palais du Rire, boxing at the parc aérostatique)
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 8 May 1908 — radiotelegraphy station description
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 15 May 1908 — radiotelegraph inauguration; couveuse listing (Lion named)
  • Le Petit Provençal, 24 May 1908 — Mas provençal, electrified farm machinery incl. agricultural couveuses/éleveuses
  • Le Petit Journal, 25 May 1908 — palais structure; 23 April mayoral opening
  • Le Courrier du soir, 27 May 1908 — Journal officiel announcing 6 June palais opening
  • L’Avenir des Hautes-Pyrénées, 31 May 1908 — syndicated overview (palais list)
  • Le Gaulois, 4 June 1908 — Paris-press notice
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 5 June 1908 — Mas provençal (dairy herd, farm machinery)
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 8 June 1908 — Pentecost opening of the halls
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 23 June 1908 — funeral of Émile Couchet (transformer accident)
  • Paris, 29 June 1908 — daily attendance ~15,000–16,000; aviculture show; tramway network
  • Le Courrier du soir, 30 June 1908 — reprint of the above
  • L’Avenir agathois, 5 July 1908 — syndicated overview
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 25 July 1908 — summer overview; attractions and night illuminations
  • Le Mistral, 29 July 1908 — Fête des Fleurs, bataille de fleurs, attractions (Mondain-Théâtre)
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 25 August 1908 — full attractions inventory; couveuse (free, permanent)
  • Le Petit Provençal, 30 August 1908 — attractions inventory; couveuse listing
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 4 October 1908 — “Que deviendra le Parc?”: financial deficit, société anonyme proposal, budget figures
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 11 October 1908 — baby contest (402 entries); concerts
  • Le Petit Marseillais, 21 October 1908 — “Les derniers jours”: 1 November closing, financial retrospective, tribute to Dubs
  • tourisme-marseille.com and marsimperium.org (local heritage sites, used to corroborate site, dates, and the Parc Chanot succession)
More Information about Alexandre Lion

French primary sources were machine-translated, then checked against the originals and edited by the author. Portions of this page were drafted with machine assistance; the final text was reviewed, verified, and edited by the author.

Last Updated on 09/04/26