The biggest splurge of our wedding was renting a Ferris wheel.
This type of Ferris wheel with seats that hold two or three people is the only kind I was familiar with until recently.
I’ve been reading The Great Wheel by Robert Lawson aloud to my kids. It’s a fictional account of a young Irish man who takes part in the building of the first Ferris wheel for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Turns out the first Ferris wheel, built by bridge-builder George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. (1859-1896), was enormous!
- 264 feet (80.4 meters) tall (That’s the height of a 24-storey building.)
- Pilings were driven 32 feet (9.7 meters) into the ground
- 45.5 foot (13.9 meters) long axle (including the largest hollow forging at that time)
- 36 passenger cards could each hold 60 people
- Two revolutions took 20 minutes (and cost 50 cents)
The Ferris wheel remained at the fairgrounds from June 1893 until April 1894. It was then dismantled and rebuilt at another site in Chicago where it ran until 1902. It was set up for the third time at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis before being demolished in 1906.
Today the biggest Ferris wheel is the High Roller in Las Vegas at 550 feet tall (a larger wheel is in the works in Dubai), but I still think the original is mighty impressive!
We loveThe Great Wheel! Hope Andrew remembers it as fondly as I do. Brian says the London Eye is patterned after that Wheel . Fair Weather, by Richard Peck, is fun, too, but bawdier, and probably intended for a slightly older audience.