20 Public Spectacles That Packed Crowds Before Movies Existed

Rome’s new Colosseum was inaugurated in 80 CE by Emperor Titus with 100 days of games. At that time, it could be flooded from the aqueducts, since permanent storage chambers were not built under the arena floor until later. In its early years, real ships and fighters performed mock naval battles for crowds of between 50,000 and 80,000 people under a giant canvas awning operated by naval sailors.

In 1917, three shepherding children in Fátima, Portugal, claimed that the Virgin Mary promised them a public miracle to occur on October 13. At noon on that day, roughly 70,000 people (estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000) converged on a muddy open field. The rain clouds moved apart, and many saw what they took to be the sun spinning and hurtling toward the earth for several minutes. None of the regional observatories found any evidence of any such thing.

Charles Blondin was the stage name of Frenchman Jean François Gravelet, the first man to cross the Niagara River Gorge on a rope. He did so on June 30, 1859, to a crowd of thousands who lined both sides of the river. In his later performances, he even crossed the gorge blindfolded, and once cooked an omelet while walking over it, drawing even larger crowds. Blondin lived on for decades, eventually dying peacefully in bed.

Rome’s dictator Julius Caesar, not emperor, held four consecutive days of triumphal processions in 46 BCE. The Roman Forum and the Via Sacra were packed with people eager to see the spoils of war, specifically the gold, the animals from foreign lands, and the captured Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix walking in chains. According to the historian Suetonius, the crowd became so dense that two senators were trampled to death. Caesar also put on a mock naval battle in a man-made lake with thousands of men aboard the ships.

On November 16, 1724, Jack Sheppard, a 22-year-old housebreaker who had escaped from prison four times, was taken to be hanged at Tyburn, London’s public execution site. Some 200,000 spectators, almost a third of the city’s population, were said to have made their way along the two-mile stretch from Newgate Prison to watch him go by. Souvenir pamphlets of Sheppard’s last words were sold by vendors, and seats in makeshift bleachers were rented out. But he didn’t make it away from the gallows.

In 1863, Nadar, aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a French photographer and ballooning enthusiast, launched Le Géant, a massive gas-filled balloon from the Champ de Mars in Paris. Made of silk and boasting a two-story gondola containing cabins and even a printing press, the balloon drew crowds estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 people, among them the Emperor Napoleon III. It had a somewhat undignified end, however: crash landing in Hanover, Germany.

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, oversaw the Great Exhibition, which opened in May 1851 inside Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, a 19-acre glass-and-iron hall in London’s Hyde Park. Cheap one-shilling tickets and discount excursion trains brought working-class visitors as well as members of the affluent elite. Over the course of the next six months, the exhibition attracted a total of just over 6 million admissions, including some repeat visitors, representing roughly a third of the country’s entire population.

The American circus showman P. T. Barnum had purchased Jumbo, an 11-foot-tall African elephant from London Zoo, for $10,000. In April 1882, Jumbo reached New York harbor. Barnum marched him up Broadway in the middle of the night, flanked by 16 other elephants and horses towing the large crate in which he had been transported. Despite the fanfare, Jumbo had never actually appeared on stage. Tens of thousands of the city’s citizens filled the lit streets and windows to watch him go by.

Engineer George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. designed and built the first Ferris wheel for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World. The massive wheel hauled hundreds of people in giant glass cars at a time. Turnstiles counted more than 27 million admissions for the entire six-month fair, including a record-setting single day on one October afternoon.

The 2nd-century charioteer Gaius Appuleius Diocles, arguably the highest-paid athlete in history, was a star of Rome’s Circus Maximus, a sprawling, free-to-the-public stadium, part of Rome’s policy of “bread and circuses.” There, drivers competed for the patronage of rival stables, racing their four-horse chariots around the arena for seven laps around a central barrier, until someone crashed and had a shipwreck. Modern historians estimate the stands held around 150,000 people, though ancient writers claimed as many as 250,000, and Diocles earned over 35 million sesterces across his career.

Spain’s young King Charles II presided over the largest auto da fé of the Spanish Inquisition, which took place in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid in 1680. More than a hundred people, wearing yellow penitential tunics, were paraded through the packed streets of the capital for the ceremony of sermons and public sentences that lasted most of the day. Twenty-one were handed over to the civil authorities to be burned outside the city.

On August 27, 1783, French physicist Jacques Charles and engineer brothers Anne-Jean and Marie-Noël Robert sent up the first unmanned hydrogen balloon over Champ de Mars in Paris. The crowd numbered about 300,000, or roughly half the city’s population according to one account, and paid for the balloon’s creation through a subscription drive. Among those in attendance was the American scientist Benjamin Franklin. The balloon traveled some 15 miles before it landed near a village. The villagers, terrified by what they thought was a monster, attacked it with their pitchforks.

The 16th Earl of Eglinton, Archibald Montgomerie, inspired by the novelist Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, held a medieval jousting tournament at his estate in Ayrshire in August 1839. He invited roughly 4,000 guests, but 100,000 attendees descended upon him. Roads were packed and newly opened railways were jammed. Heavy rain transformed the fields into mud and blew down the tents. It took until the third day for the storm to subside and the armored knights to joust under umbrellas.

In February 1814, unemployed London ferrymen organized a fair on the solid ice of the Thames between two bridges. Thousands of Londoners strolled out on the ice every day, passing betting stands and pubs that served gin and roasted mutton. The grand finale occurred when handlers brought out a live elephant, which they led across the frozen river near Blackfriars Bridge as proof that the ice could support a heavy load. This was the last time a frost fair was held on the Thames.

Two huge sperm whales, each about 60 feet long, stranded off the Dutch coast, first at Berckhey in 1598 and then at Beverwijk in 1601. The strandings drew thousands of people walking, riding, and driving carts to the shore. People scrambled up on the whales and ate food sold by beach vendors. They also saw engravings, such as one by Jan Saenredam showing a nobleman standing on the carcass holding a perfumed handkerchief to his nose, which were an early form of illustrated news.

In 1593, Dutch anatomist Pieter Pauw established a permanent anatomical theater at Leiden University in the Netherlands, a circular, wooden amphitheater for public human dissections in the winter when cold temperatures prevented rapid decomposition. Civil authorities provided cadavers of executed criminals, and dissections lasted two or three days, drawing as many as 500 spectators, both paying students and townspeople, who enjoyed music and banquets alongside a sobering reminder of the fragility of life.

The Frenchman Robert-François Damiens struck King Louis XV in 1757 with a small knife while the king was wearing thick clothes. The result was a minor cut, but French law made an attempt on the life of the king a capital offense, no matter the outcome. Damiens was executed in front of a crowd in Paris’s Place de Grève on March 28, 1757. It took more than four hours to finish the job. Wealthy Parisians paid to rent windows that overlooked the square, including the Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova. Louis XV lived for another 17 years.

In 1883, former army scout William “Buffalo Bill” Cody debuted his traveling arena show that he called an educational exhibition and not a circus. With hundreds of participants, like sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Lakota chief Sitting Bull, it reenacted mock stagecoach holdups and brawls. A decade after its premiere, its show alongside the Chicago World’s Fair attracted almost 6 million spectators, and its overseas tours filled stadiums with tens of thousands per performance.

The Scottish painter Robert Barker had patented his “Panorama” and opened a rotunda in London’s Leicester Square on May 25, 1793. Viewers climbed a dark stairway up to a platform around which were displayed some 10,000 square feet of continuous painted canvas showing battles and cities. The panels were arranged in such a way that their edges were masked by a row of hidden skylights, allowing the eye to be fooled into the perception of real depth. Some beholders experienced genuine disorientation. For over 60 years, the rotunda attracted vast numbers of people.

Paris’s Exposition Universelle was held in April 1900 along the banks of the Seine River. More than 500 acres were covered by a moving sidewalk, a 315-foot Ferris wheel, and the Palace of Electricity, which was illuminated by electric light bulbs. During the course of this fair, Auguste and Louis Lumière projected their early motion pictures on a large screen for fairgoers to see. The fair generated over 50.8 million total turnstile admissions over its seven-month run, a record for its time. Though the Lumière brothers had already shown films in Paris five years earlier, this fair brought movies before their largest crowd yet, a sign of the movie age to come.

This content was created with the help of AI.