On 5 July 1841, British travel pioneer Thomas Cook took 570 members of the temperature society (an organization opposed to drinking alcohol) on the newly opened railway from Leicester to Loughborough. This was the first package tour, and the beginning of what was to become the world’s best known travel company. When the Paris exhibition opened in 1851, Cook took “excursionists” abroad for the first time. By the time Thomas Cook died in 1892, he had made travel possible for the masses. During the 19th and 20th centuries, major exhibitions in Europe and the USA brought millions of people to the big cities of the world. Many had never traveled before. The Great Exhibition in London in 1851 had more than six million visitors. A century later, the 1951 festival of Britain attracted 8.5 million. The Paris Exposition of 1889, for which the Eiffel tower was built, had 28 million visitors, and more than 51 million visited the New York World’s fair of 1964 – 65.
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