That wonderful wheel

They were sitting in a flat ride called “1001 Nights.” The single car moved with pendulumlike precision, swinging left then swinging right. The mechanical magic carpet soon picked up enough speed to complete a full circle, and kids screamed during the loud “whoosh” on the midway.

Alyssa Goldberg preferred another way to take the summer air. She took a seat on George Ferris’ spinning wheel.

“It’s easy on the stomach,” said Goldberg, 21, a Union College senior who lives in Boston. “You can ride this over and over, and you don’t get sick.”

People have been riding the Ferris wheel over and over since 1893, when George — who studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy — showed off the first round giant at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Must-have ride

The steel wheel has been a regular on the carny circuit ever since. People who know fairs and amusement parks say the old-fashioned spin must be part of their operations.

“There are certain ride pieces that you have to have at a carnival,” said Dick Rowland, longtime manager of the Saratoga County Fair. “There’s a merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl, Flying Bob. Those are traditional rides — you have to have them. It’s not a fair without them.”

Rowland says the Ferris wheel has prospered because it is family-friendly. While roller coasters get bigger, faster and often more extreme, the wheel’s basic principle has not changed much during its 115 years of operation.

“I really think it’s that traditional value,” Rowland said. “It’s not so much for the kids but the whole family can deal with it — Mom and Dad and two kids in the bucket go around the wheel and see the sights from the fair.”

Jim Futrell, historian for the National Amusement Park Historical Association, said there are other attractions to the attraction.

“The height is a lot of the appeal,” said Pittsburgh resident Futrell, whose book “Amusement Parks of New York” profiled the state’s large and small places for coasters and cotton candy. “It gets you up, and it’s always fun to get up to the top of the wheel and wave to people you know below you.”

That’s not possible on most of the high-tech, high-speed machines. “A lot of the thrill rides, if you’re up high, you’re upside down,” Futrell said.

Why the attraction?

Some people don’t care about the view. They aren’t waving to friends, either.

“You can make out with girls on it,” said Chuck Adams, 14, of Ballston Spa, riding the county fair wheel with two friends. There were no kisses given; the friends were guys.

Others say the Ferris wheel delivers more scares than does a dark ride full of fluorescent ghosts.

“I think it’s the scariest ride in the park,” said Julia Meisser, 22, of Albany. “The doors open and close by themselves, there’s nothing holding you in.”

The acceleration and exhilaration started with Ferris — who graduated from RPI in 1881.

Ferris made his name in Chicago. People planning the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 needed a giant conversation piece to rival France’s Eiffel Tower, the architectural giant that became the talk of Paris and the “Exposition Universelle” in 1889.

Going to the top

Ferris was a steel man. After leaving RPI and pursuing interests in the railroad and bridge businesses, he began his own Pittsburgh-based company. Ferris crews tested and inspected metals for railroads and bridge builders.

George’s idea for Chicago was a monster “wheel” 250 feet high — about 25 stories tall and driven by two 1,000-horsepower steam engines. Giant cars attached to the steel circle would give all aboard a slow ride up — and a slow ride down.

“When George Ferris put forth his idea, it originally was far from being accepted,” said Jeff Schanz, RPI’s assistant vice president for alumni relations.

But Schanz said Ferris was an optimist. The man wanted to show Chicago and the rest of the world how engineering could help showcase American technology and ingenuity.

Schanz said Ferris didn’t consider his invention an amusement park ride. “It was his rolling observation deck, he liked to call it,” Schanz said. “It was to show how steel could be manufactured in a way to be completely stable.”

Taking a seat on the Ferris wheel must have taken some bravery. But George had worked out all the numbers, and studied the steel, horsepower and weather that became part of the project. “When you figure 1,000-plus people were on this thing at one time, just imagine that,” Schanz said. “When it comes to steel and civil engineering, imagine having that number of people on this rolling wheel. Off Lake Michigan, the winds had to be anticipated. It had to be an incredible stable structure or nobody would have got on it.”

People got on — the rotating wheel was a smash.

Journalist Walter Wellman, who wrote dozens of feature stories about the Columbian Exposition, marveled about the conversation piece in a story published in the May 12, 1893, issue of Schenectady’s Daily Union newspaper.

Eiffel Tower comparison

“Descriptions, pictures and dimensions all fail of their purpose,” he said. “The only way in which one may comprehend the vastness, the almost weird wonderfulness of this construction, is to see it. Overshadowing everything else in that part of the World’s Fair region, it grows and grows as one approaches nearer. Finally, it appalls and overwhelms.”

Wellman counted 36 cars on the wheel, and said each one was nearly as big as a train sleeping car. Sixty passengers could fit into each one. A full house was 2,160 riders.

“It is not as tall as the Eiffel tower was,” he wrote, “but it has life and motion, which the tower had not. From the engineering standpoint, the wheel is a greater marvel than the tower. It is the engineering wonder of this fair, and in a month it will be the talk of the country.”

More than a million summer visitors paid 50 cents each for the 20-minute ride up and down. Schanz said the exposition had been losing money before the wheel began operations. “If not for Ferris’ wheel,” he said, “the truth is the thing probably would have closed up a lot earlier than it did.”

For kids and couples

The Ferris wheel of today may not be as awesome as the 1893 model. But they are staples at The Great Escape and Splashwater Kingdom in Lake George as well as Hoffman’s Playland in Latham.

Tim Drawbridge, spokesman for The Great Escape, said the park’s nine-story Ferris wheel is popular with both kids and couples. It’s nothing like the park’s signature ride, the famous Comet roller coaster, with its steep drops and sharp rocks.

“The Ferris wheel is just a nice casual ride where you can sit back and still get a great view of the top,” Drawbridge said.

Teenaged members of the family may scream all day on the Comet or Boomerang, the latter a loopy roller-coaster that speeds forward and backward. Small children will want a ride they can try with Mom and Dad; Drawbridge said that ride can be the Ferris.

“If a child is sensitive to heights, the Ferris wheel is a controlled environment where you’ll feel a little bit of an acceleration and the sensation of going up,” he said.

Dave Hoffman, whose family opened Hoffman’s Playland in 1952, said older rides like the Ferris wheel remain relevant in 2008. Parents remember riding Hoffman rides as kids, and want to pass along that feeling to their children.

“The carousel, how old is the carousel?” he asked. “These things you can’t experience on the Internet. You’ve got to come out and ride it and feel it.”

See it, too. After dark, the Ferris wheel is often one of the most spectacularly lighted rides in the park.

“That’s when the magic happens,” Rowland said. “When the lights are glowing on the carnival, that’s kind of the thrilling time. Couples get up in the wheel, you might ask her to marry you, you might sneak a kiss. That’s all part of that, too.”

The Ferris has almost come to symbolize fairs and carnivals.

“It’s a taller ride,” Futrell said. “You can kind of see it before you get to the park.”

Rowland likes to get a lot of eyes on his wheel.

“We try to set it up so when you make that corner on Prospect Street, you look down the street and you see it,” he said. “If you drive on the county side of Ballston, you can see it through the trees.”

Some Ferris wheels are getting bigger. They’re also returning to George Ferris’ original idea — watching scenery during a slow roll up and down.

Futrell said that’s the idea behind the London Eye, Star of Nanchang in China and Singapore Flyer — all more than 40 stories high and all utilizing enclosed cars or capsules instead of open-air buckets.

The Eye has become a popular tourist attraction in the United Kingdom; more than 3 million visit every year.

“It’s very slow,” Futrell said. “It actually never stops moving. It moves so slow, they can load and unload the cars without stopping the ride.”

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