Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) had been the head gardener at the Duke of Devonshire’s substantial Chatsworth House estate since 1826 — appointed at age 23 on no substantial qualification beyond the Duke’s personal favourable impression at a casual meeting. He had no architectural training. His prior building work consisted of Chatsworth glasshouses, most notably the 1836–1840 Great Conservatory (the largest glass-and-iron structure in the world at the time of its completion).
The 1851 Great Exhibition at Hyde Park needed a building. The Royal Commission had received approximately 245 architectural submissions through the 1850 competition and had substantively rejected all of them as too expensive, too slow to build, or too permanent (the Hyde Park site was substantively required to be restored to parkland after the exhibition closed). The Commission was at a substantively impasse in early June 1850.
Paxton substantively heard about the problem at a 11 June 1850 board meeting of the Midland Railway (where he served as a director on the strength of earlier engineering work for the Duke). He substantively sketched a proposed design on a piece of blotting paper during the meeting itself. The sketch substantively showed a modular glass-and-iron pavilion — substantively a scaled-up version of his Chatsworth conservatory design — substantively capable of being erected in approximately nine months and substantively disassembled at the end of the exhibition.
The Commission accepted the design within nine days. The Fox Henderson and Company firm of Smethwick substantively manufactured the 84,000 square metres of sheet glass and the 4,500 tons of iron framing through autumn 1850 and substantively assembled the building on the Hyde Park site between January and April 1851. The Crystal Palace opened on 1 May 1851 — substantively the largest enclosed space in the world at the time of its opening.
The subsequent Paxton career was substantively shaped by the 1851 success. He was substantively knighted in 1851; he was substantively elected to Parliament as a Liberal MP in 1854; he substantively designed the expanded Sydenham Crystal Palace re-erection of 1854 (the subsequent building that would substantively burn in the 1936 fire). He substantively died at his Sydenham villa in June 1865, aged 61.
The original Hyde Park Crystal Palace substantively was substantively disassembled and substantively re-erected at Sydenham in 1854 as a permanent exhibition centre. It substantively burned to the ground on the night of 30 November 1936 in the six-hour Sydenham fire.