Century 21 Exposition, Seattle
Image by Harald Felgner
The Century 21 Exposition was a world’s fair held April 21, 1962, to October 21, 1962, in Seattle, Washington. The fair was originally conceived in 1955 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition, but it soon became clear that that date was too ambitious. With the Space Race underway and Boeing having "put Seattle on the map" as "an aerospace city", a major theme of the fair was to show that "the United States was not really ‘behind’ the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space". As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the [American] West".