Paris Exposition moving sidewalk, Paris, France, 1900 - S03 06 01 014 image 9893

The Rue de l'Avenir () was an electric

moving walkway A moving walkway, also known as an autowalk, moving pavement, moving sidewalk, people-mover, travolator, or travelator, is a slow-moving conveyor mechanism that transports people across a horizontal or inclined plane over a short to medium distan ...

installed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

. It ran along the edge of the Exposition site, from the Esplanade of

Les Invalides The Hôtel des Invalides ( en, "house of invalids"), commonly called Les Invalides (), is a complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France, containing museums and monuments, all relating to the military history of France, as ...

to the

Champ de Mars The Champ de Mars (; en, Field of Mars) is a large public greenspace in Paris, France, located in the seventh ''arrondissement'', between the Eiffel Tower to the northwest and the École Militaire to the southeast. The park is named after the ...

, passing through nine stations along the way, where passengers could board. It was designed by architect

Joseph Lyman Silsbee Joseph Lyman Silsbee (November 25, 1848 – January 31, 1913) was a significant American architect during the 19th and 20th centuries. He was well known for his facility of drawing and gift for designing buildings in a variety of styles. His most ...

and engineer Max E. Schmidt, designers of ''The Great Wharf Moving Sidewalk'' installed at the

1893 World's Fair The World's Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World's Fair) was a world's fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. The centerpiece of the Fair, hel ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

, the first-ever moving walkway.

Features

The moving sidewalk was a very popular and useful attraction, given the large size of the Exposition. It consisted of a fixed platform and two mobile platforms, on a viaduct above the ground level, that covered a loop around the exhibition site with nine stations. The passengers stepped from the platform onto an access sidewalk wide traveling at , then onto a faster sidewalk wide moving at . The sidewalks had posts with handles which passengers could hold onto, or they could walk. The fast sidewalk made it possible to complete the loop in 26 minutes. The fare was an average of fifty

French franc The franc (, ; sign: F or Fr), also commonly distinguished as the (FF), was a currency of France. Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money. It w ...

centimes. The sidewalk went counterclockwise along the following

circle route A circle route (also circumference, loop, ring route, ring line or orbital line) is a public transport route following a path approximating a circle or at least a closed curve. The expression "circle route" may refer in particular to: * a rout ...

: Esplanade des

Invalides The Hôtel des Invalides ( en, "house of invalids"), commonly called Les Invalides (), is a complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France, containing museums and monuments, all relating to the military history of France, as ...

along the Rue Fabert, Le Rue des Nations along the

Quai d'Orsay The Quai d'Orsay ( , ) is a quay in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. It is part of the left bank of the Seine opposite the Place de la Concorde. The Quai becomes the Quai Anatole-France east of the Palais Bourbon, and the Quai Branly west of th ...

, the

along the Avenue de La Bourdonnais and the Avenue de La Motte-Picquet to connect again with the Rue Fabert. It could simultaneously accommodate 14,000 people; during the afternoon of Easter Day, it carried 70,000 people, while the busiest tram and bus lines carry little more than 40,000 passengers a day on average. A

Decauville Decauville () was a manufacturing company which was founded by Paul Decauville (1846–1922), a French pioneer in industrial railways. Decauville's major innovation was the use of ready-made sections of light, narrow gauge track fastened to steel ...

electric train followed the same route, running at a maximum speed of in the opposite direction of the moving sidewalk. The rail track was sometimes at 7 meters high like the moving sidewalks, sometimes at ground level and sometimes underground.

Mechanism

The originality of the system of movable sidewalks, adopted for the 1900 Exhibition, lay in the fact that the propulsion components were absolutely distinct from the supporting and running components. The propulsion was provided for each sidewalk by a roller acting by friction on a beam fixed along the center line of the trucks and these were, two by two, provided with two pairs of wheels carried and guided by side rails established under the floors. The electricity necessary for the production of the movement was supplied by the Moulineaux factory of the Compagnie de l'Ouest; the current supplied was transformed into

direct current Direct current (DC) is one-directional flow of electric charge. An electrochemical cell is a prime example of DC power. Direct current may flow through a conductor such as a wire, but can also flow through semiconductors, insulators, or even ...

because of the ease of starting and speed adjustment it provides. This current is brought to the platforms by 9 cables and received on a distribution board which makes it possible to obtain the march in one direction or the other, or the immediate stop.

Gallery

References

{{coord missing, France Exposition Universelle (1900) World's fair architecture in Paris Former buildings and structures in Paris