To say that Ferris wheels have permeated pop culture is an understatement. Not only are they a regular feature at fairs across the country and a form of entertainment for both children and adults alike, they also dot the landscape of many major metropolises throughout the world as well.
The London Eye, for instance, stands 443-feet tall and can be seen in the opening credits of the BBC/PBS series Sherlock, and even played a role in the first installment of the 2005 revamped Doctor Who. Vienna, Japan and China likewise have giant spinning wheels on permanent display, making them a symbol of a city’s status in much the same was as towering skyscrapers.
While Pittsburgh may not currently have its own giant observation wheel, the Steel City did serve as the base of operation for the man who constructed the very first one as part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. George Ferris Jr. was a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who later served as an engineer for both the Louisville Bridge and Iron Company and the Queen City Mining Company in West Virginia. When his reputation began to rise, Ferris decided to embark on his own. With Pittsburgh being at the forefront of the steel industry, the city was the logical locale to open G.W.G. Ferris and Company in 1886.
Three years later, Ferris launched a second business, Ferris, Kaufman and Company. While the former certified the quality of steel used in major engineering projects, the latter was a bridge-building design firm. Ferris was commissioned soon afterwards to construct a steel-based bridge over the Allegheny River at Ninth Street in Pittsburgh, as well as additional bridges in both Cincinnati and Wheeling, West Virginia. As his companies grew, George Ferris opened satellite offices in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, and Ferris himself became a prominent member of the Engineers’ Society of Western Pennsylvania.
Because of its steel manufacturing capabilities, the United States was seen as the leader within the engineering industry. William Le Baron Jenney, for instance, built the world’s first skyscraper, the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, using iron and steel instead of traditional masonry. John Roebling, meanwhile, perfected wire-rope suspension bridges, including the original Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh and the more famous Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
Despite these achievements, American engineers were being eclipsed during the latter half of the nineteenth century by a French counterpart named Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel outfitted the Statue of Liberty in 1886 with an internal iron and steel skeletal truss that enabled the statue to withstand strong winds and other forces of nature, while his Eiffel Tower in Paris was the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years.
The Eiffel Tower debuted at the 1889 World’s Fair, and the planning commission for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was determined to construct an engineering marvel that would not only serve as the Tower’s equal but reaffirm America’s dominance within the field. At a luncheon during the planning stages of the Exposition, committee chairman Daniel H. Burnham went so far as to deride those in attendance for their lack of vision, stating that none of the proposals received so far “meet the expectations of the people.”
The engineers in attendance – which included George Ferris – were shocked by the remarks, and Ferris became determined to meet the challenge and design an apparatus that would do for the World’s Columbian Exposition what the Eiffel Tower did for the 1889 World’s Fair.
As Richard G. Weingardt explains in his 2009 biography Circles in the Sky: The Life and Times of George Ferris, no one knows for certain how Ferris came up with the idea of building a giant observation wheel in Chicago. A few years earlier, Ferris had visited Atlantic City, which featured a small amusement wheel on its boardwalk. Another engineer, George E. Baird, had proposed a similar idea to the Exposition Committee that, although rejected, was reported in the November 2, 1889, edition of the Chicago Tribune.
While he may have indeed been subconsciously influenced by his visit to Atlantic City and Baird’s proposal, Ferris later asserted that the idea came to him spontaneously one night at a Chicago restaurant.
“I got out some paper and began sketching it out,” he later explained. “I fixed the size, determined the construction, the number of cars we would run, the number of people it would hold, what we would charge, the plan of stopping six times during the first revolution for loading, and then making a complete turn. In short, before the dinner was over, I had sketched out almost the entire detail, and my plan never varied an item from that day on.”
As easy as it may have been to conceive the Ferris wheel, gaining acceptance for his proposal and then building the giant device was another matter. When he first met with the Chicago Exposition Committee in June 1892, the plan was initially approved but then rejected 24 hours later. Ferris was undeterred, however, and refined his plan even further. He again met with the committee five months later, but chairman Daniel Burnham was still not convinced.
“Your wheel is so flimsy it will collapse, and even if it doesn’t, the public will be afraid to ride in it,” Burnham told Ferris. “You are an architect, sir, I am an engineer,” Ferris replied. “I feel that no man should prejudge another man’s idea unless he knows what he’s talking about.” Despite the implied insult, the response impressed Burnham, and Ferris was officially given permission to build his wheel on December 16, 1892.
When Alexandre Gustave Eiffel built his Tower in Paris, he was given three years to construct it, and the project was financed with public funding. George Ferris, on the other hand, had a mere four months to erect his Ferris wheel, and was given no money by the Chicago Exposition Committee to assist with the project.
Furthermore, once construction costs had been recovered – which were fixed at $300,000 – any further revenue derived from the wheel would be split 50/50 with the committee, and unlike the Eiffel Tower, the Ferris wheel would have to be removed from Chicago within sixty days of the conclusion of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Ferris thus launched two new companies to both build the wheel and operate it, using his own life savings as a starting point to finance the project.
A brutal Chicago winter delayed construction, and costs eventually exceeded the agreed upon amount by $62,000. Thus while the World’s Columbian Exposition opened on May 1, 1893, the Ferris wheel was not fully operational until June 21. Numerous naysayer had predicted that the giant device would fail, that it would either crumble under its own weight when it began to spin or would be unable to withstand the strong winds of Chicago, but neither of those predictions came true.
The Ferris wheel instead became the success that Daniel Burnham had openly challenged American engineers to construct for the World’s Columbian Exposition – an engineering feat that could “out-Eiffel” Eiffel and capture the imagination of those in attendance.
“In nineteen short weeks of operation, the Wheel carried approximately 1.5 million passengers,” Richard G. Weingardt writes in Circles in the Sky. “On its busiest days, it carried well over 30,000 passengers, and would have carried more if people would not have had to pay to get into the Exposition first before taking a ride. At a cost of fifty cents for a ride, which was as much as the admission to the Columbian Exposition itself and ten times the cost of a carousel ride, the Ferris Wheel amazingly grossed more than $750,000 ($16 million in 2009 dollars). In addition, it made more than 10,000 revolutions without mechanical incident or injuries.”
Despite its success, over-budget construction costs and the contractual obligation of splitting the revenue 50/50 with the Chicago Exposition Committee resulted in little of the profits going directly to George Ferris. Ferris was also named in a lawsuit which argued that the Ferris wheel was in violation of patents used in the small entertainment wheel that Ferris had once visited in Atlantic City.
Although the courts eventually ruled in Ferris’s favor, the costs of his legal defense took any additional toll on his financial well-being. When he was unable to find a suitable location to rebuild his wheel, Ferris was forced to sell his interests in both the G.W.G. Ferris and Company and Ferris, Kaufman and Company in 1896. One week later, George Ferris was admitted to Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh with symptoms of typhoid fever. He subsequently died on November 18, 1896, just three months shy of his thirty-eighth birthday.
George Ferris never filed for a patent on his giant observation wheel, but a handful of engineers made the journey to Chicago during the summer of 1893 to study its design. By 1894, imitation wheels were springing up at fair grounds across the United States and in cities throughout Europe, all of which utilized the same engineering principles that went into George Ferris’ original masterpiece.
Although Ferris never received financial compensation for any of those endeavors, his name became associated with them nonetheless – ensuring that his legacy will endure well into the future.
Anthony Letizia