by Kevin Burton
In response to one of my Valentine’s Day posts, a reader let me know that Feb. 14 is also National Ferris Wheel Day in the United States.
Now that’s news I can use! What an apt metaphor for the “love” of love songs that is wrapped in feelings, or perhaps even nothing but feelings, as opposed to the hard work, selflessness and dedication of real love.
Like that cotton candy kind of love, the Ferris wheel takes you from the high to the low and back again, over and over and over. It also reminds us that what goes around, comes around.
Back in the bad old days when I was the very picture of hopeless loneliness I would have grabbed onto anything that diverted my attention from Valentine’s Day. Wish I had known. Ferris wheels, surely would have fit the bill.
So in preparation for next Feb. 14, or for some summer fun that is just around the corner, here’s a little knowledge about the Ferris wheel and its inventor.
“In late 1890, Daniel Burnham, the eminent architect charged with turning a boggy square mile of Chicago into a world-dazzling showpiece, assembled an all-star team of designers and gave them one directive: ‘Make no little plans,’ wrote Jamie Malanowski, in Smithsonian Magazine.
“Burnham was laboring in the shadow of a landmark erected the year before in Paris, an elegant wrought iron structure rising a thousand feet into the air. But nobody in the States had an answer for the Eiffel Tower.”
“Oh, there were proposals: a tower garlanded with rails to distant cities, enabling visitors to toboggan home; another tower from whose top guests would be pushed off in cars attached to thick rubber bands, a forerunner of bungee jumping. Eiffel himself proposed an idea: a bigger tower. Merci, mais non.”
“As plans for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago took shape, there was a void where its exclamation point was meant to stand,” Malanowski wrote. “Burnham spoke before a group of engineers employed on the project and chided them for their failure of imagination. To avoid humiliation, he said, they needed to come up with ‘something novel, original, daring and unique.’
“One of their number, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., a 33-year-old engineer from Pittsburgh whose company was charged with inspecting the steel used by the fair, was struck by a brainstorm and quickly sketched a huge revolving steel wheel. After adding specifications, he shared the idea with Burnham, who balked at the slender rods that would carry people to a height taller than the recently opened Statue of Liberty. “Too fragile,” he said.
“Ferris was hardly the first to imagine such a wheel. In fact, a carpenter named William Somers was building 50-foot wooden wheels at Asbury Park, Atlantic City and Coney Island; a roundabout, he called it, and he’d even patented his design,” Malanowski wrote.
“But Ferris had not only been challenged to think big; the huge attendance expected at the fair inspired him to bet big. He spent $25,000 of his own money on safety studies, hired more engineers, recruited investors. On Dec. 16, 1892, his wheel was chosen to answer Eiffel. It measured 250 feet in diameter, and carried 36 cars, each capable of holding 60 people.”
“More than 100,000 parts went into Ferris’ wheel, notably an 89,320-pound axle that had to be hoisted onto two towers 140 feet in the air. Launched on June 21, 1893, it was a glorious success. Over the next 19 weeks, more than 1.4 million people paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride and access to an aerial panorama few had ever beheld. “It is an indescribable sensation,” wrote reporter Robert Graves, “that of revolving through such a vast orbit in a bird cage.”
Ferris wheel tickets were priced at 50 cents, a considerable sum for the era, according to John K, writing on discoverwalks.com. But riders were enthralled.
“It was an experience unlike people had ever really had before,” Paul Durica, director of exhibitions at the Chicago History Museum, told the CBS News program Sunday Morning. “You really sort of lose yourself in the experience as the world below you faded away and then suddenly came back into view, faded away again…”
“But when the fair gates closed, Ferris became immersed in a tangle of wheel-related lawsuits about debts he owed suppliers and that the fair owed him. In 1896, bankrupt and suffering from typhoid fever, he died at age 37. A wrecking company bought the wheel and sold it to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Two years later, it was dynamited into scrap.”
“So died the one and only official Ferris wheel. But the invention lives on in the ubiquitous imitators inspired by the pleasure Ferris made possible,” Malanowski wrote. “Eiffel’s immortal icon is undoubtedly une pièce unique. But at boardwalks, county fairs and parish festivals around the globe millions whirl through the sky in neon-lit wheels and know the sensation that, years later, Joni Mitchell put into words. “Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels,” she sang, “the dizzy dancing way you feel.” Summertime riders know just what she means.”
“Ferris received a posthumous tribute in the form of a commemorative silver half-dollar coin minted in 1936–37, according to John K. A replica of his original 1893 Chicago Ferris Wheel stands proudly today at the Navy Pier amusement park on Lake Michigan.
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