They are their own advertisement. The novel sensation, the opportunity to study a great engineering work, the beauty of the scene presented from the great altitude, all combine to make the trip on this structure fully worth the time and the cost. As yet there is not the slightest reason to fear the safety of the machine. The steel towers which support the vast bicycle wheel are bedded and bolted into thirty feet of concrete. They are calculated to support five times the weight and the wind pressure produced by a tornado of a hundred and fifty miles an hour.
Motion is imparted to the mass by means of huge cogs in which a link belt fits.
If anything should break and it be desirable to stop the machinery there is a powerful brake operated by compressed air. How Ferris ever got it up there is a mystery to me, but he did it. The cars are so attached to the wheel, it is said, that it is impossible for them to fail to turn so as to preserve the center of gravity. It is that of a bicycle wheel, as I have said, except that this wheel does not rest upon the surface but depends from the steel axle. The lower half of the wheel simply hangs from the mighty axle, and this lower half supports the upper half by means of the steel framework of its two rims.