INNOVATION
Who Made That Ferris Wheel?
John Harper/Spaces Images, via Corbis
The London Eye
By PAGAN KENNEDY
Published: April 5, 2013 7 Comments
“I leave it to you, ladies and gentlemen, to say if the wheel is still in my head,” George Ferris called out to a crowd at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Skeptics had joked that the young engineer would never build the giant whirligig that spun in his imagination. That day, his steel behemoth towered over the fairgrounds, its spokes gleaming in the sunlight; it could accommodate more than 2,000 riders at once.
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A reporter named Robert Graves took a ride in one of its streetcarlike cabins, the windows crisscrossed by wires to prevent suicidal leaps. As the wheel began to move, the floor quivered, setting nerves on edge. But when the cabin floated high over the fairgrounds, passengers forgot their worries and rushed to the windows to admire the river winking in the distance. “It is an indescribable sensation,” Graves wrote, “of revolving through such a vast orbit in a bird cage.” Many engineers had predicted Ferris’s wheel would collapse, killing riders and bystanders. Instead, it performed perfectly. The “vertical merry-go-round” worked on the same principle as a bicycle wheel — each of the spokes pressed into the rim, exerting a force that gave it enormous strength, says Rich Weingardt, a structural engineer who wrote a biography of Ferris. But Ferris’s luck soon ran out. Though the wheel brought in $750,000 in ticket sales, the Chicago World’s Fair staked a claim to most of the proceeds; Ferris battled them in court — and lost. Meanwhile, America was hit with a severe recession, and his engineering business lost money. Three years after he started up his wheel, Ferriss was dead at the age of 37 from tuberculosis; the funeral home held onto his ashes because no one paid the balance due. Yet Ferris, Weingardt says, “probably had more to do with the acceptance of structural steel than anybody alive at his time.” Today, cities as diverse as Berlin, London and New York compete to build the most elaborate wheels in the world. And many are still inspired by the circle that spun in Ferris’s head.
MAN OF STEEL
Erik Larson’s nonfiction book, ‘‘The Devil in the White City,’’ tells the story of a murderer who stalked the Chicago World’s Fair. George Ferris appears as a character.
Did you know anything about George Ferris when you began your book? I never knew that the ‘‘Ferris’’ in Ferris wheel was a person. I thought it meant iron — like ferrous — that it was a corruption of that word.
What’s the strangest part of the Ferris story? That he was allowed to build his wheel in the first place. If you were to try to build an untried amusement today, it would never happen. There would be so many lawyers stepping up and saying, ‘‘I don’t want to take a chance on this thing.’’
Are you a fan of Ferris wheels? I have zero interest in riding on a Ferris wheel. I’m not fond of heights.
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