The Americans had also made extensive preparations for this Great Exhibition. Cyrus McCormick won fame in a single stroke, with both his reaper and seeder receiving major prizes awarded by the British.
Beyond that, threshing machines, grain separators, and cotton gins all made appearances, along with sewing machines and vulcanized rubber technology reverse-engineered from Austrian Empire products.
These machines might have seemed highly novel to other countries, but to the Austrian Empire, they were somewhat outdated. After all, such agricultural machinery had been in use in the Austrian Empire for more than a decade and had already undergone numerous improvements.
As for vulcanized rubber technology, it had never been much of a secret. Many countries could manage it; the greatest problem was simply that they had no rubber.
The Austrian Empire could obtain cheap natural rubber in an endless stream from its Southeast Asian colonies, but other countries did not enjoy such convenient conditions.
If they bought rubber from Brazil, they might as well wear genuine leather products instead—they would be cheaper.
The sewing machines made by the Americans, on the one hand, lacked precision parts, were crudely manufactured, and were not particularly reliable in performance. On the other hand, the Americans still used traditional assembly methods, making their sewing machines less efficient to produce and more costly.
In the American domestic market, they could not compete with Austria in the high-end market, and they could not even hold on to the low-end market.
Their coming to the exhibition was entirely a gamble, to see whether the British would take the bait.
Unfortunately, Britain was only slightly better off than America. The British could still linger on beneath trade barriers, but that did not mean they would pay the Americans any heed.
What interested the Austrians most was perhaps the