page_title: Ferris wheel
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Ferris wheel / Early history
caption_attribution_description: English: Magic City, Paris, 1913.
context_page_description: A Ferris wheel is an amusement ride consisting of a rotating upright wheel with multiple passenger-carrying components attached to the rim in such a way that as the wheel turns, they are kept upright, usually by gravity. Some of the largest modern Ferris wheels have cars mounted on the outside of the rim, with electric motors to independently rotate each car to keep it upright. These wheels are sometimes referred to as observation wheels and their cars referred to as capsules. However, these alternative names are also used for wheels with conventional gravity-oriented cars.
  The original Ferris Wheel was designed and constructed by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. as a landmark for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The generic term Ferris wheel, now used in American English for all such structures, has become the most common type of amusement ride at state fairs in the United States.
  The current tallest Ferris wheel is the 167.6-metre High Roller in Las Vegas, Nevada, which opened to the public in March 2014.
context_section_description: "Pleasure wheels", whose passengers rode in chairs suspended from large wooden rings turned by strong men, may have originated in 17th-century Bulgaria.
  The travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667 describes and illustrates "severall Sorts of Swinginge used in their Publique rejoyceings att their Feast of Biram" on 17 May 1620 at Philippopolis in the Ottoman Balkans. Among means "lesse dangerous and troublesome" was one: 
  ...like a Craine wheele att Customhowse Key and turned in that Manner, whereon Children sitt on little seats hunge round about in severall parts thereof, And though it turne right upp and downe, and that the Children are sometymes on the upper part of the wheele, and sometymes on the lower, yett they alwaies sitt upright.
  Five years earlier, in 1615, Pietro Della Valle, a Roman traveller who sent letters from Constantinople, Persia, and India, attended a Ramadan festival in Constantinople. He describes the fireworks, floats, and great swings, then comments on riding the Great Wheel:
  I was delighted to find myself swept upwards and downwards at such speed. But the wheel turned round so rapidly that a Greek who was sitting near me couldn't bear it any longer, and shouted out "soni! soni!" (enough! enough!)
  Similar wheels also appeared in England in the 17th century, and subsequently elsewhere around the world, including India, Romania, and Siberia.
  A Frenchman, Antonio Manguino, introduced the idea to America in 1848, when he constructed a wooden pleasure wheel to attract visitors to his start-up fair in Walton Spring, Georgia.
caption: Magic-City, Paris, France, 1913
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