In 1850 the organizers of London’s Great Exhibition, including Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, rejected all 245 design entries and had less than a year left. Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House, had studied the ribbed underside of the giant Victoria amazonica water lily. He sketched a glass and iron building on pink blotting paper during a Midland Railway meeting and delivered plans within two weeks at a budget of 85,800 pounds. Because Chance Brothers could make panes no bigger than 10 by 49 inches, Paxton built the whole design on a 24 foot prefabricated grid, with roof tracks that became Paxton gutters and hollow iron columns that served as downspouts.

The building enclosed Hyde Park’s elm trees, trapping sparrows that the Duke of Wellington proposed removing with sparrowhawks. Queen Victoria opened it on May 1, 1851, and over six million visitors came, with shilling days that let the working class in. The surplus of 186,000 pounds funded the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum. The palace was rebuilt larger at Sydenham Hill, went bankrupt in 1911, trained naval recruits as HMS Victory VI, housed John Logie Baird’s television labs, and burned on November 30, 1936, as Winston Churchill watched.

• Evaporative cooling with wet canvas shades, wall louvers, and floorboard gaps that let skirts sweep dust into the basement
• George Jennings’s flushing monkey closets, used by more than 827,000 people at a penny each, and the origin of spend a penny
• Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s 33 life-sized Crystal Palace dinosaurs and fountains that shot water 250 feet high
• How the Lord’s Day Observance Society kept the Sydenham palace closed on Sundays and crippled its finances
• The world’s first cat show in 1871 and a fire whose glow was visible across eight counties