Spray Paint, Turning the World’s Fair into the White City
The grand Beaux Arts buildings at the fair needed to be built fast, yet still show the grand facades of Burnham’s White City. Instead of cladding the temporary buildings in gleaming marble, most were painted white. But painting all those facades by hand would take a lot of time and be expensive, so fair officials turned to technology. Enter spray paint.
There is debate over the initial invention of spray paint. Some sources credit Francis Davis Millet, the Fair’s Director of Decoration. Others say it is older, invented by T.G. Turner in New York for the Southern Railway, or Joseph Binks, a maintenance supervisor at Marshall Fields. The battle about its origins rages on, but the result is that spray paint and the hand-pumped gun used to spray it, was given a worldwide stage at the Fair.
