Technologies introduced at the fair include the Corliss Steam Engine. Pennsylvania Railroad displayed the John Bull steam locomotive that was originally built in 1831.[20] Waltham Watch Company displayed the first automatic screw making machinery and won the Gold Medal in the first international watch precision competition. Until the start of 2004, many of the fair's exhibits were in the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building in Washington, DC, adjacent to the Castle building.
Consumer products first displayed to the public include:
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone
Remington Typographic Machine (typewriter)
Heinz Ketchup
Wallace-Farmer Electric Dynamo, precursor to electric light
Hires Root Beer
Kudzu erosion control plant species
A reconstruction of a "colonial kitchen" replete with spinning wheel and costumed presenters sparked an era of "Colonial Revival" in American architecture and house furnishings. The Swedish Cottage, representing a rural Swedish schoolhouse of traditional style, was re-erected after the Exposition closed, in Central Park, New York. It is now the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre.
The New Jersey official State Pavilion was a reconstruction of the Ford Mansion, which served as General George Washington’s Headquarters during the winter of 1779-80 in Morristown, New Jersey. The reconstruction had a working "colonial kitchen" featuring a polemical narrative of "old-fashioned domesticity." This quaint hearth and home view of the colonial past was juxtaposed against the theme of progress, the overarching theme of the exhibition serving to reinforce a view of American progress evolving from a small hearty colonial stock and not from a continual influx of multi-ethnic waves of immigration.