Wikipedia alleges this was the first Ferris Wheel, at 80 meters, designed by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. But it also gives examples of earlier but far smaller rotating rides, such as this 1857 wheel in Romania.
The Eiffel Tower was made for the 1889 Paris Expo, and Chicago came with, “We, too, can make enormous trussed structures!” Not to be outdone, London made a 94m Ferris wheel a few years later, which was the world’s tallest until Paris claimed the crown with a 96m wheel in 1900. Just enough to pip the Brits. That remained the largest ever made for 89 more years, when Japan broke the record in 1989 with 107m.
The 1893 Chicago wheel cost 50 cents to ride, over $18 in 2026 dollars. People thought it looked insubstantial, a spider web held up by magic. Huge truss and cable structures were not common. Certainly nothing that size that moved!
Here is an 1893 photo,
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And a rider’s eye view from the wheel. Each car could hold quite a few people, as you can see across. The wheel was powered by a 1000hp steam engine.
The 1893 Chicago wheel was demolished in 1906, after moving to St. Louis for a while. The 1895 London wheel in 1907, and the 1900 Paris wheel in 1920.
There is a great documentary about this fair narrated by Gene Wilder called Expo: Magic of the White City if anyone wants to learn more.
Thanks for the link. I will definitely watch this! Looks wonderful, and anything with Wilder is usually good.
Devil in the white city is the best seller true story about the chicago worlds fair intertwined with America’s first known serial killer moving to the city in the years leading up to the fair, it’s all true story but writtrn as a fictitious novel. The Ferris wheel contains considerable coverage. The cars held IIRC 40-60 people each, enormous compared to today’s standards, and considering the size and numbers of cars could have been a proper Hindenburg had something gone wrong. Luckily it didn’t.
could have been a proper Hindenburg
When digging into the history of this, I was thinking that I would trust modern safety standards and engineering practices more than I would those of the late 1800’s. Not that I doubt their intent to make it safe. Just that we’ve learned one heck of a lot since then. We have much better methods to simulate the behavior of structures, and we know more about failure modes.
Americans had a habit of patenting things that were already common in other countries.
So that was probably the first Ferris wheel. But I guarantee it was not the first wheel-shaped ride.
Heck… it wasn’t even the first wheel ride in the US! There was one in New Jersey which Ferris himself rode before making his. There was a patent dispute about it, but the courts ruled Ferris’ wheel used novel engineering techniques, so was not encumbered by the earlier patents.
Wikipedia says,
… much smaller wooden wheels of a similar idea predate Ferris’s wheel, dating perhaps to the 1500s. … Similar wheels also appeared in England in the 17th century, and subsequently elsewhere around the world, including India, Romania, and Siberia.
Just guessing here, but wikipedia may be making a distinction between very large truss and tension structures, and other structural techniques which are limited to smaller scale. The size of the Chicago wheel did eclipse its predecessors by quite a lot, although clearly it was 100’s of years after the first wheel rides.
