Chapter 9
Towering over every world’s fair in spirit since the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris, Gustave Eiffel’s eponymous iron spire was the Earth’s tallest man-made structure for forty-one years, until New York’s Chrysler Building surpassed its 1,063-foot loftiness in 1930. The tower’s stature also made it an iron king every subsequent expo wanted to topple, including the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, when the fair’s planners declared they wanted something “original, daring and unique” to out-Eiffel Eiffel. But daring became deranged when J.B. McComber, on behalf of the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Co., shared a vision of a priapic pillar that would stand 8,947 feet above the Earth—an elevation nearly nine times that of the Eiffel Tower, and 3.3 times that of the Burj Khalifa, currently the world’s tallest building. Stretching from the tower’s top to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities would be elevated rails allowing visitors from those metropolises to toboggan all the way back home.
Such a manhood-measuring contest might result in surpassing the Eiffel Tower’s height, but not its riveted—and riveting—wrought-iron beauty. Realizing that height did not make might, civil engineer George Washington Gale Ferris proposed a massive revolving “observation wheel” reminiscent of smaller, wooden “pleasure wheels” that had been extant since the seventeenth century.
Modeled on a bicycle wheel, Ferris’s $380,000 contraption was made of components manufactured as far away as Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, as well as Pittsburgh and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, then shipped on 150 railroad cars to Chicago. Quickly assembled in five months, the Ferris wheel soared 264 feet high, with supporting towers soaring 140 feet and an axle that, at 46.5 tons, was supposedly the largest piece of steel ever forged in the United States. A dynamic duo of 1,000-horsepower steam engines, located in a power plant built 700 feet away, blasted hot air through 10-inch-thick pipes to move the wheel until Westinghouse-made brakes slowed its churn. Three thousand of Thomas Edison’s new incandescent light bulbs lit the spinning wheel like sequins on a ball gown.
Attached to the titanic disc were 36 giant gondolas for passengers, each running 24 feet long, 13 feet wide, and 10 feet high. They weighed 26,000 pounds apiece, equal to about two fully-grown male African elephants. After paying 50 cents (on top of the admission to the fair itself, which was another 50 cents), riders entered through a door at either end, and relaxed on twisted-wire chairs that provided seating for 38 of each carriage’s maximum capacity of 60 passengers. The first part of the ride took one revolution, during which six stops were made for loading more of the gondolas. Once all the gondolas were stuffed with patrons, the passengers experienced nine minutes of nonstop revolution. From their rotating perch, they saw more than just a stratospheric view of the fair’s 633 acres (in scope, 7.4 times the size of Disneyland Park): They surveyed the 400 buildings comprising the “White City,” as the exposition was called due to its slew of alabaster neoclassical main constructions. They saw Frederick Law Olmsted’s extravagant landscaping; Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge’s Beaux-Arts style Art Institute; and Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic. It was a sight so transformative to eyes accustomed to prairie drabness that L. Frank Baum later modeled Oz’s Emerald City on the White City. By the end of the fair, the Ferris wheel garnered 1,453,611 paid admissions, earning Ferris a profit of $395,000 and saving the expo from insolvency. “It’s too much for my mind,” said one fair attendee.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
But it wasn’t too much for a century of imitators that followed. Understanding the innate link between a country’s greatness and its exhibits, the British built the Great Wheel for the Empire of India Exhibition at Earls Court, London, two years later in 1895. At 308 feet high, it topped its Chicago cousin by about 44 feet, and stood until 1907 after its last hurrah at the Imperial Austrian Exhibition of 1906.
Even grander was the 328-foot-high Grande Roue de Paris (“The Great Wheel of Paris”), a French version of the Ferris wheel, built for Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1900, whose apogee wasn’t surpassed for almost nine decades, until the rise of the 107.5-meter (about 353 feet) Cosmo Clock 21 built for YES ’89 (Yokohama Exotic Showcase) in Yokohama, Japan. Since then, five of the ten tallest Ferris wheels have been constructed in China, but the king of them now is the High Roller. Located on the Las Vegas Strip, it rises 550 feet in the air, more than double the height of its iron ancestor in Chicago.
Despite their structural impressiveness, few of these newer incarnations replicated the charm of the original Ferris wheel. The only true contender may be the Uniroyal Giant Tire from the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair. Designed by the same firm that did the Empire State Building, the fiberglass structure stood a modest 80 feet tall and weighed 12 tons. More than 2 million people rode in the twenty-four barrel-shaped, four-person gondolas attached to the wheel, including the Shah of Iran and Jacqueline Kennedy and her children, Caroline and John. When the fair closed, Uniroyal transported it in 188 shipments to its sales office in Allen Park, Michigan, where it was reassembled in four months. There, over the last 50-plus years it has been renovated at least three times: neon lighting and a new hubcap were added to the tire’s body, and a giant nail was placed in the tire’s tread to demonstrate the product’s ability to seal 90 percent of tread punctures up to 3⁄16-inch in diameter. Over the years it has become an emblem of Uniroyal’s legacy, whose magic was sparked by Ferris’s spinning connivance. The Ferris wheel’s singular popularity, a tread even time cannot grind down, may best be reflected in something E.B. White wrote in “The Points of My Compass”: “I see nothing in space as promising,” White said, “as the view from a Ferris wheel.”