If you have ever endured one of those seemingly interminable meetings where people talk in buzzwords and phrases imbued with dubious modern “wisdom”, you will surely have been told that there is “no need to reinvent the wheel”. For the wheel, such fatuous lines of discussion run, has already been invented, and with a rounded perfection which requires no amendments or updates. That there usually follows, with grim inevitability, a list of required amendments and updates, is often lost on the person making the demands.
One of the issues – other than irony – with this corporate lingo-bingo is that the wheel has, in fact, been reinvented. Not, admittedly, in its essential shape, or in its basic, long-standing function as a facilitator of transportation, but in the way that it has morphed from the mundane into the remarkable – into an attraction which looms large in travel plans and in major cities, offering bird’s-eye perspectives on everything at its feet.
For some of the nearest, clearest evidence of this, you need only glance at the Thames where it flows through central London – and at the landmark which has come to define the riverbank in a way that those who added to the vista in prior centuries could scarcely have imagined.
Certainly, neither William II, who laid the foundations of Westminster Hall (and with it, the Houses of Parliament) in 1097 – nor Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, who designed the clock tower, completed in 1859, that is generally (and wrongly) known as “Big Ben” – could have envisaged that, come the turn of the millennium, the scene would be dominated by a sphere taller and more loved than any of their handiwork.
It is a quarter of a century this month since the London Eye opened to the public (on March 9 2000, 10 weeks after its ceremonial ribbon-cutting on New Year’s Eve 1999, as part of Tony Blair’s grand end-of-a-century celebrations across the capital).
In the 25 years that have followed, it has become a literally unmissable fixture of the city skyline, hitting a height of 443ft (135m) that raises it above its immediate surroundings (for the record, the Elizabeth Tower, to give the “Big Ben clocktower” its formal name, is a mere 316ft/96m). At the time of its installation, it was the biggest Ferris wheel in the world – and while it has since lost that global title (falling to sixth on the planetary list), its immense scale is sufficient to ensure that it remains top of the class in western Europe.
Indeed, it has become so cemented in the mind’s-eye view of the South Bank that it is easy to forget it was supposed to be temporary. Back in the distant mists of the very late 1990s, the London Eye was only handed a five-year lease; permanent status was granted in July 2002, after its ticket sales proved impressive. They remain so. Like it or loathe it – and there are plenty of people in each camp – the wheel remains a firm crowd-pleaser. With around 3.5 million visitors every year, it is the most popular paid-for attraction in the UK.
Of course, the London Eye is not, in itself, a reinvention of the wheel; merely a furthering of the revolution. For the moment of reinvention, you have to go back to the 19th century, to the American Midwest – and to the most pertinent word two paragraphs above: Ferris.
There is a reason as to why a “Ferris wheel” is so-called. Its inventor had the same name.
True, there had been rideable wheels, as public amusements, in much earlier times. There are documented cases of “pleasure wheels”, generally turned by sinew-straining strongmen, in Bulgaria in the early 17th century – while the Italian author and traveller Pietro Della Valle cited a “Great Wheel” in Constantinople in a letter penned in 1615, writing that “I was delighted to find myself swept upward and downward at such speed.”
But it was George Washington Gale Ferris Jnr who took these fairground fripperies and turned them into the epic feats of engineering that are so recognisable in the present day.
Born in the Illinois town of Galesburg, 200 miles south-west of Chicago, on Valentine’s Day 1859, Ferris was a small-town boy who made a big impact in the city. Having trained as a civil engineer, he answered a call put out by the organisers of the World’s Columbian Exposition – the 1893 extravaganza better known as the “Chicago World’s Fair” – to forge a monument that would capture the imaginations of those attending the event.
The brief asked for visions that were “original, daring and unique” – but what it really wanted was something to rival the Eiffel Tower. Paris’s most notable structure had appeared, to loud praise, a couple of years earlier (it was built between 1887 and 1889). In submitting his idea for a huge wheel from which passengers would be able to view the entire festival site, Ferris put this ambition into words. His baby, he declared, would “out-Eiffel Eiffel”.
There is little doubt that he failed in this specific mission. Put together on the relevant spot in Jackson Park during the winter of 1892-1893, this iron and steel behemoth could not have been described as “small beer”. At 264ft (80m), it soared to a height that must have astounded those who witnessed its gradual ascent over those cold months. Even so, to compare it to the Eiffel Tower – all 1,083ft (330m) of it, as resplendent today in its position on the Champs de Mars as it was 136 years ago – was a wilful flight of fantasy.
However, Ferris also succeeded – and so much so that his name is forever and indelibly branded to his invention. His wheel was a hit. True, it must have been a cramped experience – it had 36 cars, each with 40 revolving chairs, each able to hold 60 passengers. With this, it had a capacity of 2,160 people, whirling them around in slow motion – rides took around 20 minutes, 11 of them taken up by the process of loading and unloading. But the queues to use it were lengthy. Over the course of the event (May 5 until October 31 1893), the wheel carried an average of 38,000 paying customers per day.
In fact, the response was rapturous. Julian Hawthorne, the son of the American novelist Nathaniel, was an astounded eye-witness, marvelling that anything so big “continues to keep itself erect [when] it has no visible means of support; none that appear adequate”. He was also amazed at the mix of strength and subtlety, writing that “the spokes look like cobwebs; they are after the fashion of those in the newest make of bicycles”.
Surviving photos support his words – although 21st-century observers will note that there is no great visual difference between the Ferris Wheel and the London Eye. The blueprint was fixed.
All of this was quite the achievement for a man of just 34, and you might assume that it was the first flourish of an incredible career. But neither Ferris nor his wheel survived for much longer. Tragically, the engineer was dead within three years, succumbing to typhoid in a Pittsburgh hospital on November 22 1896. It is easy to theorise that stress may have played a part in his decline.
By the time the Fair finished, his relationship with its directors had frayed beyond repair, amid claims that he had been short-changed on his promised share of the $750,000 profits generated by his invention (passengers paid 50 cents each to ride it). Ferris spent the last two years of his life mired in legal wranglings about his cut of the pie – while fending off accusations that his inspiration was borrowed.
The bunting was barely down in Chicago when he was sued for copyright infringement by one William Somers, who held a US Patent for an “Observational Roundabout”. Just months earlier, in 1892, Somers had opened a trio of them on the east coast – at Coney Island in New York, and at Ashbury Park and Atlantic City in New Jersey. It was even revealed during deliberations that Ferris had ridden the Atlantic City model – but Somers lost the case on appeal, partly because his “roundabouts” were made of wood, not metal.
The “Ferris Wheel” lasted longer than its creator’s life, fortunes and reputation – but only marginally. It remained in Chicago during the decade immediately after the World’s Fair, being dismantled then reconfigured in Lincoln Park, where it operated from 1895 until 1903. The following year, it was taken apart and moved once again, this time to St Louis, for the 1904 World’s Fair, where it reprised its show-stealing role in the confines of Forest Park.
But when the curtain came down in Missouri, time had run out for what had been a fabulous innovation. With no buyers forthcoming, it underwent a controlled demolition by dynamite on May 11 1906. In 2007, a magnetic scan revealed the mysterious presence of a 46ft (14m) metal beam, buried under a St Louis street near the explosion site. The item has never been unearthed, but it is thought to be the wheel’s axle.
Of course, the wheel has not needed to stay physically extant to secure a shining legacy. Its echoes are everywhere. Chicago, having let the original slip from its grasp, has made the 196ft (60m) Centennial Wheel the focal point of its ever-photogenic Navy Pier, its spokes silhouetted against the sunset over Lake Michigan. And the concept has also travelled rather further afield, as these celebrated examples demonstrate.
Three of the world’s greatest Ferris wheels
Wiener Riesenrad (Austria)
There are bigger Ferris wheels in warmer places, but none, maybe, which are quite as emblematic of their city as the remnant of 1897 which turns so beautifully in Vienna. Small by modern standards (at 212ft/65m), the Wiener Riesenrad was the largest Ferris wheel in the world between 1920 and 1985. That said, its size has always been secondary to its elegance, rotating gently in Prater park. It has done so too on screen, in films as varied as espionage classic The Third Man (1949), Dalton-era Bond caper The Living Daylights (1987) and gorgeous romantic drama Before Sunrise (1995).
High Roller (USA)
When the London Eye lost its position as the world’s tallest Ferris wheel in 2006, it did so to the 525ft (160m) Star of Nanchang in the Chinese city of the same name – and fell to third when the Singapore Flyer (541ft/165m) arrived in 2008. All three were then superseded, with an air of an inevitability, by the scene-stealer which emerged in the American West. Part of the Caesars empire, the High Roller reaches 550ft (168m) on the Las Vegas Strip.
Ain Dubai (UAE)
If there is one thing more inevitable than a super-sized Ferris wheel in Nevada’s casino playground, it is an even more gargantuan version in the Middle East’s own metropolitan temple to bigger, better, faster, more. As of 2021, the Ain Dubai has taken George Ferris’s masterplan and stretched it to an unprecedented scale – 820ft (250m). It does, however, have a smaller capacity (1,750 riders in 48 cars) than its Chicago ancestor – and is still 263ft (80m) short of the landmark Ferris wished to eclipse, the Eiffel Tower.