George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.

This is the 154^th anniversary of the invention of the Ferris Wheel, which became a major attraction at the Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893.

    The man who invented it grew up in Carson City. Ferris arrived in Nevada in 1864 at the age of five. His father, George Ferris Sr., was a horticulturalist who was responsible for much of the landscaping in Carson City in the 1870s, including the grounds of the State Capitol.

    The Ferris family lived in the Carson Valley for two years and then moved to a house on the southeast corner of Third and Division streets in Carson City. In 1875, George Ferris Jr. left Nevada to attend the California Military Academy in Oakland. In 1880, he received a degree in civil engineering and was hired by an architectural firm in New York City.

    After a few years, a Pittsburgh firm hired him and it was while working there that he designed the Ferris Wheel. It grew out of the desire to have some kind of structure that would be just as iconic as the Eiffel Tower. Apparently the erecting of the tower was somewhat of a thorn in the side of American engineers. The Americans wanted something grander, something that would say to the world that American engineering prowess was just as good as the French’s, maybe even better.

    The first impression of the fair’s steering committee was not favorable. They initially dismissed the design as being a “crackpot” idea. It was, “modeled on a bicycle wheel: in the pace of spokes to maintain the wheel’s shape and balance, it had heavy steel beams, the ‘forks’ in which the axle was set were two steel girder pyramids. The wheel was 264 feet high, the supporting towers were 140 feet high, and the axle – the largest piece of steel ever forged in the US – weighed 46 ½ tons. The wheel carried 36 elegantly outfitted passenger cars, each of which could fit 40 people sitting or 60 people standing. That's a maximum capacity of 2,160 people! The wheel was spun by either of two 1,000 horsepower steam engines, and stopped by an oversized air brake.”

Much to the committee’s surprise the wheel was proved to be safe.

     It was an immediate hit at the fair and in less than a half year it had carried 1.4 million passengers. In 1904, the wheel was moved to St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Following the show, it was destroyed for scrap. However, the wheel outlived Ferris, who died in Pittsburgh in 1896 at the age of 37.

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