The Centennial Fair (the 1876 Centennial Exposition / Centennial International Exhibition) was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the grounds of Fairmount Park.
On whether there are records that John W. Keely exhibited anything at the fair:
In the official Centennial catalogues, exhibitors are listed by department/building (including the Department of Machinery / Machinery Hall catalogue).
I checked the searchable OCR text versions available online for the official catalogues (including the Machinery Hall volume) and did not find Keely listed as an exhibitor by name—which strongly suggests he was not an official, catalog-listed exhibitor (or, if he appeared, it was under a different listing name that did not survive OCR cleanly).
However, contemporaneous newspapers do place “the Keely Motor” in the orbit of the Centennial period in Philadelphia. For example, The Catholic Columbian (May 13, 1876) describes a visit to the “Keely Motor,” and The Catholic Telegraph (Oct. 11, 1877) retrospectively remarks that being in Philadelphia during the Centennial Exhibition meant seeing the Keely Motor. Those references support that people were going to see a Keely demonstration in Philadelphia during the Centennial season, but they do not, by themselves, prove it was an official on-grounds Centennial exhibit.
If you want the cleanest “replacement-rug” historical footing for SSFT/Volume work: the most defensible phrasing is that Keely was widely discussed and apparently demonstrated his work in Philadelphia during the Centennial period, but he does not appear to have been an officially catalog-listed Centennial exhibitor (based on the accessible official catalogue texts plus the way period press describes it). [ChatGPT, 12/16/25]
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