The 1904 World’s Fair sold St. Louis as the future, which is funny now because much of it looked like plaster, boosterism, and imperial delusion. But some of the future was real. One of the stranger attractions involved visitors lining up to peer into a technology that could see through flesh.

X-rays had only been discovered a few years earlier, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition treated them the way a city treats any new machine that feels halfway between science and sorcery: by putting it on display and daring people to be amazed. The fair was built to flatter American modernity. It sprawled across Forest Park and Washington University’s campus, pulled in millions of visitors, and presented technology not just as useful but theatrical.

That was the trick. St. Louis did not merely exhibit inventions. It staged them. X-rays, wireless communication, new recording devices, electric conveniences — they were all part of an argument that the coming century would be faster, shinier, and somehow under control. The fair was less a museum than a confidence game run by progress, and progress happened to have excellent architecture for seven months.

Of course, 1904 was also the year the city put living human beings on display in anthropological exhibits. The future being advertised was selective, and the moral wiring was bad. That contradiction matters. The same exposition that presented startling scientific wonders also showcased old cruelties dressed up as education.

Still, there is something perfectly WeirdSTL about the image of St. Louisans and tourists standing around a new machine that let them see what had previously been hidden. The city has spent the century since doing the opposite with much of its own history.

A fairground X-ray could reveal a hand bone. It took much longer to see the city.