Metro Pulse/Secret History/Elusive Legacy

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Did the 1982 World's Fair make a difference?

by Jack Neely

The Museum of East Tennessee History on Market Street, at the sign of the giant Rubik's Cube, is hosting an exhibit devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1982 World's Fair. If you were there 20 years ago, the exhibit's display of memorabilia can ambush you with unexpected nostalgia. With photos, a film, staff uniforms, every single World's Fair pin I remember and several I don't, a Fair "passport," a solar-powered beanie, an unopened can of World's Fair Beer, and a push-button recording of the once-maddening Energy Express theme, it's an exhibit designed to prompt memories.

However, at the end of the two-room exhibit is a wall devoted to "The Fair Legacy;" I felt for the curators obliged to fill it. Dominating the wall are three laminated Petro's placemats. The chili-and-corn-chips combo introduced at the Fair is now available in about a dozen locations, mostly in the Knoxville area.

They're tasty, sure enough. But the Fair's promoters promised that "history is being made in Tennessee"—and that history would be mainly involved with showing the world wiser alternatives to the old ways of producing and consuming energy. Most of the Fair's exhibits at least nodded to that ideal; the geodesic dome home was a model of fuel efficiency. The Australians showed off towering windmills. The U.S. Pavilion, the TVA pavilions, several pay phones, and especially Today's Solar Home had photovoltaic cells on their roofs, converting sunlight into clean energy.

But most of the energy-saving devices touted at the Energy Expo wouldn't catch on—at least not in the next 20 years. Solar collectors are still as rare as windmills. Coal-burning plants are still the norm, the source of the overwhelming majority of America's electric power. Meanwhile, we've found lots more ways to use the electricity they produce.

If the planners of the World's Fair had had the foresight to build an accurate Home of the Future, well, it would have been much bigger, for one thing. It would have been equipped with personal computers that hum through the night. It would have had hot-water jacuzzis and giant-screen TV's and, for exercise, motorized treadmills. In spite of some popular energy-saving technology, like improvements in home insulation, we're actually using more electricity than we did before the Fair. According to TVA, the average household demand in the Tennessee Valley, in kilowatt hours, has increased about nine percent since 1982.

More troublesome than coal, then and now, was oil: in the decade before the Fair, the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian revolution had startled Americans into realizing how dependent America is on petroleum from people overseas whose world views don't always mesh well our Western notions about liberty and democracy. The Fair was to show America ways to be less dependent on the gasoline-based internal-combustion engine and, ultimately, less dependent on the despotism of foreign oil. A lightweight solar-powered car toured the site one day, and there was also a methane-powered Ford and the Filipinos' wacky, multi-horned, charcoal-powered bus.

In 1982, the trends were promising. In spite of a growing population, Americans burned less gasoline that year than any year since 1970, thanks in part to the smaller, energy-efficient cars we were driving. It seemed to herald a new era of less dependence on oil. If you were to have asked me then who would still be driving big gasoline-powered cars in the 21st century, I would have guessed antique-car hobbyists and elderly Shriners in LeSabres.

But somehow the average American family car today is still gasoline-powered and it may be a good deal bigger and heavier than it was in 1982. And some studies suggest that we're driving our big cars more miles than we used to drive our small cars, because we live farther from our jobs and schools and malls and soccer fields. In spite of federal recommendations about fuel efficiency, and alternative-transportation programs, demand for gasoline hasn't sagged. The U.S. Federal Highway Administration tells us that since 1982, America's consumption of gasoline has actually risen. In that 20 years gasoline usage has increased by about 40 percent—a figure so big it can't be attributed to mere population growth. The weird fact is that we're each buying much more, not less, gasoline than we used to.

The prospect that Americans weren't learning much from the 1982 World's Fair would have suited the folks at the crowded Saudi pavilion just fine. Overlooking the intricate diorama of Mecca, King Fahd was there on a big poster, smiling benignly, unthreatened by the alternative fuels these naive Americans were touting outside. It was almost as if he already knew about the permanence of the internal-combustion engine, the coming of the SUV, and the triumph of sprawl; and that, as great as our concern for the environment or our outrage at terrorism would ever be, it would never, ever be greater than our demand for cheap gasoline.

So, with that out of the way, maybe the Fair's chief legacy is indeed the delicious Petro. Unless you also add pre-mixed Cherry Coke, which Coca-Cola introduced at a kiosk at the Fair in the summer of '82, about three years before marketing it nationally. And another flavor, Vanilla Coke, finally launched just this month, almost exactly 20 years after it was test-marketed to thirsty tourists waiting in the China line. I'd be surprised if anyone in Atlanta remembers that. But try one, whenever they get here, and remember how history was made in Tennessee.