November 8, 2021
#372

Thank you, Barbara Schock, for sharing your delightful tales of Sandburg and 19th century Galesburg & American history.

The World's First Ferris Wheel at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The Ferris Wheel

By Barbara Schock

We don’t know if Carl Sandburg ever had the experience of riding on a Ferris Wheel. The first one wasn’t built until 1893. He would have been fifteen years old by that time. The Panic of 1893 began that summer and wages were cut by the railroad. The Sandburg family was reduced to eating bread spread with lard rather than butter. The children also gathered small pieces of coal which had fallen off the cars riding along the railroad tracks. These were used to keep a fire in the kitchen stove for cooking and to provide a little heat.

The world was given the Ferris Wheel by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. He was born in Galesburg February 14, 1858, one of ten children. His parents were George and Martha Hyde Ferris. The family moved to Carson City, Nevada, when George was five years old.

He earned a degree in civil engineering and began designing railroad bridges, trestles and tunnels while working for a company in Pittsburgh. He happened to be at a meeting in Chicago when Daniel Burnham, a Chicago architect in charge of plans for the World’s Columbian Expostion, stated that he wanted something at the fair which would be as exciting as the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Young Ferris immediately started drawing plans on a dinner napkin. He was remembering the waterwheels he had seen as a child. There were plenty of skeptics at the meeting. He was given permission to continue working on his idea at his own expense. He created a stock company to finance the work.

The wheel was 250 feet tall and the axle weighed more than 26,000 tons. The wheel was designed to withstand 150 mile per hour winds. The Ferris Wheel was very popular at the fair and carried 1.4 million passengers during the six-month run. Each car held twenty people. It cost fifty cents for a ride of about twenty minutes. The views from the cars must have been astonishing.

Dubai Eye (Ferris Wheel)

On October 21, 2021, a new Ferris Wheel started turning in Dubai. It is located on an island adjacent to the capitol city. It is called the Dubai Eye and is 820 feet tall (250 meters). It carries 1400 passengers in  48 cabins and one revolution requires 38 minutes.

The original Ferris Wheel had a sad ending. It was moved to the northside of Chicago as an attraction, but the neighbors complained about its appearance. In 1904, it was reassembled for the St. Louis fair and then sold for scrap.

Today, there seems to be a competition for erecting ever taller Ferris Wheels. The London Eye is 440 feet high and the High Roller in Las Vegas is 550. The wheel at Navy Pier in Chicago is now taller than the original one which has been moved to Branson, Missouri.

George Ferris died at the age of 37 in 1896. He was bankrupt, his wife had left him and his health was broken. Fifteen months after his death, his brother paid the funeral bill and collected the ashes. The location of the ashes is unknown.