At the turn of the twentieth century, Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) enjoyed an international reputation both as a scientist and as a standard-bearer for science. In these capacities, he served as president of the second International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) held in Paris during the International Exposition of 1900, and as vice-president of the International Physics Congress, held shortly after the ICM. At the physics congress, Poincaré explained that the notions of space and time inherited from Newtonian mechanics had been arrived at in an arbitrary fashion, and could be replaced by any number of alternative dynamical schemes with no loss of predictive power. Four years later, Poincaré represented French science again, this time on U.S. soil, at the Congress of Arts and Sciences held in September 1904 during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis. On this occasion, Poincaré launched a new critique of classical mechanics that underlined the conflict between Newton's third law and the principle of relativity, and envisaged in its place a "new mechanics", in which the speed of light in empty space could never be surpassed.

While scholarly studies of the World's Fairs and the events leading up to the theory of relativity are abundant, little has been made of the occasion offered by the World's Fairs of 1900 and 1904 for intellectual hybridization, via the concentration of multiple scientific congresses in a single place and time. The latter topic recently gained new interest, as far as the field of nonlinear electrical oscillations is concerned, when a neglected study by Poincaré in 1908 of the stability of such oscillations in the circuit of Duddell's singing arc came to light (Ginoux & Petitgirard 2010). Both Duddell and V. Poulsen attended the Electrical Congress in St. Louis, along with Poincaré, who served as an Honorary Vice-President. Not only hybridization, but self-cultivation as well was on display, for example, when Poincaré availed himself of insights drawn from his treatise on "Les méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste" for his lecture in St. Louis on the geodesics of convex surfaces, that built on earlier work by Jacques Hadamard.

Rapidly-unfolding developments in wireless technology and advanced mathematics such as these were followed closely by Poincaré, who recognized in them the potential to open up new research horizons. In short, an in-depth study of the contexts of Poincaré's World's Fair lectures stands to illuminate the origins of relativity theory, systems dynamics, and the emergence of the modern scientific worldview.