The Ferris Wheel: America’s Answer to the Eiffel Tower

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Wow, this is Lee Habib and this is our American stories.
Ferris wheels can be found around the world today, but
for this American engineer, it wasn’t an easy path.Speaker 2 (00:22):
He was our own.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Greg Hengler with the story.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
It was only ten months until the next World’s Fair
in Chicago in eighteen ninety three, but everyone was still
talking about the star attraction at the last World’s Fair.
Here’s Paul de Rika, director of Exhibitions at the Chicago
History Museum.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
The Chicago World’s Fair wasn’t the first World’s Fair, but
the biggest rival to what they were planning to do
in Chicago is at World’s Fair that been held in
Paris at eighteen eighty nine. And we still remember that
fair today because its most lasting monument, the Eiffel Tower,
was created for it. So when people began to think
about holding the fair here in Chicago, they needed something

(01:01):
that could out Eiffel Eiffel.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
France’s Eiffel Tower was the world’s tallest building. Completed in
eighteen eighty nine, the Eiffel Tower stood at nine hundred
and eighty six feet, surpassing America’s Washington Monument to become
the world’s tallest man made structure. Here’s George Ferris, scholar
Derwin Rushing.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
The French had just designed it and built the Eiffel Tower,
and that was to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of
the French Revolution. Chicago was having basically the Chicago World’s Fair,
and it was to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of
Columbus landing on America, and they were looking for something
to challenge the Eiffel Tower.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
A nationwide contest was announced. Ideas poured in from around
the country.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
What a lot of people were responding with were designs
that were very similar. We’ll just build a bigger tower
than the Eiffel Tower. But it was George Washington Gale
Ferris who had the idea to make something on the
Simon scale, but allowed to move.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
George Washington Ferris had already designed some of the country’s
biggest bridges, tunnels, and roads. George had seen the Eiffel
Tower’s elegant steel frame rise ten stories high with his
own eyes. George Eiffel grew up near the shore of
Nevada’s Carson River and was inspired by the turning water wheel.
He often dreamed of shrinking to the size of his

(02:25):
toy soldiers and riding in one of the wooden buckets.

Speaker 4 (02:29):
He was born in Galesburg, Illinois, and moved to Pittsburgh
because Carnegie was making steel here and he was a
bridge builder, that is, Ferris was, and he was already
a well respected bridge builder.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Back at his drawing board in Pittsburgh, he and his
engineering partner, William Grennell measured and re measured. A mistake
of even an inch could bring their invention crashing down.
George arrived in Chicago and made his case to the
construction planners of the Fair.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
And what’s interesting is initially the fairs very receptive to
the idea and they basically grant him a concession to
move forward with it. But then as the winter of
eighteen ninety two is unfolding, the fairs planners began to
get cold feet. They think, on the one hand, this
is going to be very, very expensive, how are they
going to finance it? And then seconding, will it actually work?

Speaker 2 (03:17):
The judges could not decide. Fall turned to winter as
they dilly dallied. In only four months the fare would
open and it still had no star attraction. Finally, desperate,
they agreed to give George’ far fetched idea a try,
but they would not give him one penny for the
materials to build it. George went from bank to bank

(03:38):
asking for help, but when he began describing his invention,
lenders laughed at him. George finally decided to use his
own savings and convinced a few wealthy investors to join him.
Still short of money, he boldly went ahead and ordered
the parts he needed from a dozen different steel mills.

Speaker 4 (03:57):
Ferris was thirty two years old when he designed Wheel.
He designed it in a Chicago chop house, and he
designed it on a napkin, and it went from napkin
to reality in just about a year.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
In January eighteen ninety three, George’s construction crew began to
work on the foundation. It was one of the most
brutally cold winners in Chicago history. The frozen tundra was
three feet deep. George ordered his crew to dynamite the
icy earth, but what they found underneath was scarier, still
twenty feet of quicksand George and his workers kept digging. Finally,

(04:32):
thirty five feet down they hit solid ground. They planted
two huge steel towers deep into the earth, bolted them
to cross bars of steel and poured in cement to
hold it all in place. Then they carefully lowered a
seventy ton axle between them. As time grew shorter, freight
trans from all over the country chugged onto the fairgrounds

(04:52):
loaded with more than one hundred thousand parts. Workers hurried
to fit all the pieces together like a giant lego toy. Finally,
with only two months left, the last section was bolted
into place. In there stood a perfect circle, eight hundred
and thirty four feet in circumference, rising two hundred and
sixty four feet above the ground, and designed to move

(05:14):
with the precision of the smallest watch. The crew worked
day and night to attach the passenger cars, each the
size of a train car, with enormous pitcher windows and
forty velvet seats ferris wheels.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Today they could see maybe about two people or four people,
but these were immense cars that could fit up to
sixty people.

Speaker 4 (05:35):
It’s two hundred in the sixty four feet tall, and
the axle itself was the largest single piece of steel
made at that time, and it was ten tons. There
were thirty six cars. They were glass enclosed. They could
accommodate sixty people forty people setting, twenty people standing, so
over twenty one hundred people would be in Ferris’s wheel.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
On June twenty first, eighteen ninety three, opening day finally arrived.
Two thousand people gathered as flags waved. Ferris took the
stage and dedicated his wheel to the noble profession of engineering.
Then George’s wife presented him with a beautiful golden whistle.
George and his wife stepped proudly into car number one.

(06:16):
George blew the golden whistle, and two thousand tons of
steel rose above the city of Chicago. All summer visitors
from around the world traveled to Chicago World’s Fair. They
got to see new inventions like Wrigley’s chewing gum, crackerjacks,
and everything from the dishwasher to the electric chair. But
the star of the show was the Ferris Wheel. It

(06:39):
didn’t matter whether one was a senator, a farmer, a boy,
or a girl. Everyone wanted to take a spin on
the magnificent wheel.

Speaker 4 (06:47):
And I think part of it was because, as before,
the Wright brothers had taken flight to Kitti Hawawk yet,
so people hadn’t ever been that high. They’re up, you know,
two hundred and sixty four feet. They’re on top of it,
the city of Chicago. They’ve got Michigan right to the east.
I mean, it must have been a beautiful site, and
we certainly for that time in that place, it was
really heights that people had never been quite literally.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
At night, George’s Ferris Wheel became a magical glowing circle
with three thousand electric light bulbs, another brand new invention.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
It took twenty minutes for a single rotation around the wheel,
and if you paid the fifty cents fee to ride
the wheel, you would get two rotations, so it’d be
about a forty minute experience.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
On October twenty sixth, eighteen ninety three, the Chicago World’s
Fair was over. George Ferris’s wheel revolved more than ten
thousand times, with stood gale force winds and storms, and
did not need one repair. George had called his creation
a monster wheel, but his investors renamed it after its inventor,

(07:50):
the Ferris Wheel. Visitors returned to their homes to tell
the story of the world’s greatest ride, and before long,
copies of the Ferris Wheel began popping up around the country.
In eighteen ninety four, the next Ferris wheel appeared in
California on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Lit up
at night, it was the first landmark seen by ships

(08:10):
finding their way home. Today, Ferris wheels are the most
familiar and beloved carnival ride at state fairs and amusement parks,
which would not have surprised George Ferris, who said, I
determined that the engineering profession should be represented by something
that would stand as a monument.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
George Ferris would not be surprised at all about the
popularity of his invention. He had complete faith in himself.
He knew it would work, he would probably say, as
he kind of surveyed the world and looked at things
like the Wonder Wheel and Coney Island or the London Eye,
is like see, I told you so. This is a
great attraction.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, writing and
storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. The story of George
Washington Dale Ferris. I never knew it, and the story
behind the story of so many things. That’s what we
do here on our American stories, and it was a
basic bet. Really. We wanted to top what had happened in

(09:09):
France with the Eiffel Tower, and you needed a great
engineer to do that, but also an imaginative one. And
what a story we heard about this magnificent contraption, this
magnificent device that glowed in the dark practically and took
people to heights they’d never been to before. Again, this
is before the Wright brothers. The eighteen ninety three World’s

(09:31):
Fair would be remembered for the Ferris Wheel. And of course,
George Washington Gale Ferris had named this contraption the Monster Wheel,
but the real name stuck. The story of the Ferris
Wheel here on our American Stories