The Internet is a fundamental infrastructure, a fundamental tool for science around the globe. But, just as science is part of the global community, it is also part of the local community. If you are a physicist from Georgia, you a part of the global physics world, but you are also a citizen of your local community.

In a few minutes, I shall say something about the future of the Internet, my subject for the day. But, to look at tomorrow on the Internet, we should look at yesterday in the real world. If we want to look to the future, we must learn from the past.

As we enter the information age, it is useful to look at the last century, the industrial century, and in particular at how we built our infrastructure. In 1859, in London, the British government built the Crystal Palace, the centerpiece of the first world's fair. The British called this event the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.

The Crystal Palace was the largest covered structure built at the time. It housed 100,000 exhibits over 17 acres, all under one remarkable roof.

The Great Exhibition attracted millions of people. One of them, the author Charlotte Brontë, remarked about the sea of people, the tides of humanity swelling in and out of the great hall, and marvelled over what she called "every machine known to man."

The Crystal Palace served as the place where the industrial age was introduced to the public. The Crystal Palace also served as the showplace for engineers to bring in new machines, to challenge each other to surpass themselves.

The Great Exhibition was followed by many more. In Paris, a series of Universal Exhibitions were held, culminating in the 1889 Exhibition, best known for the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was a great tourist attraction (indeed, today it attracts twice as many visitors as the Louvre), but it was also an engineering marvel. For forty years after the Exhibition, the Eiffel Tower was an important tool for scientific research. For example, it provided one of the earliest wind tunnels that helped us build the modern aerospace industry.

There were many fairs int he 19th century, but two in particular attracted my attention. Let me tell you about them. I think you'll see some remarkable parallels to our modern world.

The Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 was where the telephone was introduced to the world. The telelphone though, was just a gadget, a talking novelty. What attracted people at that time was power.

The machinery hall of the Philadelphia Exhibition had 13 acres of machinery. In the center of the hall, towering over everything, was a marvel: the 1,500 horsepower, double-cylinder, Corliss steam engine. Fifteen hundred horsepower was the biggest engine ever made and this massive engine powered the entire machinery hall.

They tell the story about the opening day for the Exhibition. The hall was packed with people, but it was dead silent. The President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Emperor of Brazil walked up the stairs onto the podium of the Corliss engine.

They pulled the levers allowing steam into the giant cylinders. The engine hissed, then the floor trembled. The huge walking beams slowly started moving up and down, up and down, and then the flywheel started spinning, gaining momentum, storing power.

Gradually the hall woke as over five miles of belts and shafts and pulleys started turning, delivering power to the vast array of machines. Three daily newspapers printed their editions in the hall. Machines sawed logs, printed wallpaper, and stuck pins automatically into paper, and sewing machines created new clothes faster than you could wear them.

But do you know what really amazed people? The Corliss engine, sitting in the middle of this beehive of activity, the center of the show network, had one single attendant. And do you know what this keeper of the netowrk operating center did? He sat on the platform and read his newspaper.

The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition attracted 9.9 million people. In 1876, 9.9 million people.

Seventeen years later, there was another show network built, this time for the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago. This was 1893 and a 1,500 horsepower steam engine wasn't enough. This was the birth of electricity and there was a big fight going on.

A guy you may have heard of, Thomas Edison, had got into the power business. He was championing a power distribution technology called direct current, or DC. Edison had built a power plant in New York City, but DC had problems. Most of the power got lost in the distribution network.

A bunch of young Turks had come up with a radical new technology called alternating current, or AC. They claimed AC would allow efficient power distribution over long distances, but Edison wasn't buying it. He waged a bitter public campaign, telling people how AC would harm their health, how the technology was unstable, was untested, and that AC was nonstandard and we couldn't allow every group to come up with its own standard.

One of the leaders of the young Turks was an engineer named George Westinghouse. He got the contract to build the show network for the 1893 Chicago Colombian Exposition. He put in 22,000 horsepower of generating capacity.

When the show started, there were 90,000 electric lights. There was a network of 200 synchronized clocks. There was an elevated electric railway. There was a Ferris Wheel. And, there were 21.5 million visitors, from all over the world.

People came to learn, to learn about technology from around the world.

People also came to relax, to amuse themselves. They went to the Great White Way, the first electricity-powered amusement park, to ride the Ferris Wheel and to eat the newly invented hamburger.

Many world exhibitions followed. In 1939 in New York, for the first time, the public was able to see television. David Sarnoff, the president of NBC, made his grand unveiling, even though only a half-dozen people had TV sets. He stepped up to the microphone and announced, "now we add radio sight to radio sound."

These great exhibitions were places where the new technologies, the new inventions were shown to the world. The engineers created their massive networks of wheels and of towers.

The exhibitions that were the most successful mounted a grand spectacle during the fair, but they also left a legacy. In London, Hyde Park was created where the Crystal Palace was built, a public park to remain in perpituity.

The great exhibitions ushered in the industrial age. They introduced technology to millions of people. World's fairs left a lasting legacy. They were the marker, the tempo, the symbols of our industrial age.

It is time now for another world's fair, a world's fair for the information age. For the last year, a coalition of engineers, public officials, artists, community leaders, and corporate executives have been planning the Internet 1996 World Exposition. Let me tell you about this global exposition, a fair that we hope will usher in the information age just as the fairs of yesterday ushered in the industrial age.

This world's fair is the first that is located all over the world. But this is not a virtual world's fair. It is a real one. The Internet 1996 World Exposition will last all of 1996. Time is too short to tell you all the details, but let me give you a few highlights.

It is crucial that this fair be part of the real world, not a virtual fair. We must connect to activities that already occur, perhaps a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., or perhaps a national festival of the arts. While this is a distributed fair, with many activities in many countries, it does have some structure, some infrastructure.

The core of the fair is called Central Park, a public park for the global village. Central Park consists of a set of large computers, donated by the Official Organizers of the fair and run by our Network Operating Team of volunteers.

Central Park consists of large servers at key Internet exchange points. Some of the sites include Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, and Washington, D.C. Central Park will remain in place after the exhibition is finished, and we hope to reach a capacity of many terabytes of disk drives.

During the fair, we're going to supercharge Central Park with something called the Internet Railroad. We're going to put in high-speed lines, a back-end railroad if you will, that will connect the regions of the world. In Japan, for example, a line of 45 million bits per second will be installed between Tokyo and Washington, D.C. This line, the fastest international line on the Internet when it goes into service, has a value of over $10 million dollars from MCI and KDD, the sponsors.

Other lines of lower capacity will fan out from the backbone. These lines, running at a speed of 1.5 million bits per second and known as T1 lines, will allow for homes and people to be connected to the net. We don't know what people will do with these lines: we are hoping they will show us. Perhaps a painter will show his pictures, or a chef will show people how to cook.

The goal for the Internet railroad is to circle the globe at T3 speeds: 45 million bits per second. We hope to move data around, but also real-time audio/video streams. We hope to connect South America and Europe and Africa and every other region of the world. If we are successful, this Internet Railroad will be one of the first systematic attempts to build a global infrastructure.

Carl Malamud then went on for another 20 minutes, talking about Dutch Cow Pavilions, Thai Food Pavilions, and other planned activities. He closed with his usual attempt to draw this strange project together by quoting Marshall McLuhan's famous statement, "the medium is the message." A typical close, deleted by the certifying committee as irrelevant, might consist of the following:

These are just a few of the highlights, and I encourage you to visit the main web site at http://park.org to learn more about this project. But today, rather than dwell on all the details of this global collaboration, I want to close with a few words about why we need to do this, and why we need to do this now for the Internet to move to the next stage.

Marshall McLuhan, the philospher who became a famous media guru in the 1960s, had a saying: "the medium is the message." He meant that any medium–TV, radio, newspapers–changes the nature of the content it provides. The very fact that something is on TV means that the message is different than it would be if it were in a newspaper.

But "the medium is the message" means something else on the Internet. For too long, the Internet discussion groups were about one thing: the Internet. Content was all about computers. The medium was truly the message.

We have another saying for this Internet World's Fair: "Finally, the medium isn't the message!" Our goal is to reach out to all walks of life, to see the amount of content on the Internet grow and change.

The Internet is a fundamental infrastructure, a part of our daily lives. This technology is beginning to reach all of society and it is important that we take the time to make sure that the technology is relevant to all people, to all walks of life. The Internet shouldn't be a discussion group about computers, it should be a place where artists and world leaders and chefs and small businessmen are able to all participate in a technology as fundamental as radio, or electricity, or mass transit.

Charlotte Bronte spoke of the unique assemblage of the Crystal Palace. People remember their trips to the world's fair for the rest of their lives. Let us create a unique assemblage here in Central Asia, and throughout the rest of the Global Village.