by Erik Larson
As the wheel turned, the car pivoted on the trunnions that both connected it to the frame and kept it level. “Owing to our car not having made a trip,” Gronau said, “the trunnions stuck slightly in their bearings and a crunching noise resulted, which in the condition of our nerves was not pleasant to hear.”
The car traveled a bit higher, then unexpectedly stopped, raising the question of how everyone aboard would get down if the wheel could not be restarted. Rice and Gronau stepped to the unglazed windows to investigate. They looked down over the sill and discovered the problem: The fast-growing crowd of spectators, emboldened by seeing passengers in the first car, had leaped into the next car, ignoring shouts to stay back. Fearful that someone would be hurt or killed, the engineer had stopped the wheel and allowed the passengers to board.
Gronau estimated that one hundred people now occupied the car below. No one sought to kick them out. The wheel again began to move.
Ferris had created more than simply an engineering novelty. Like the inventors of the elevator, he had conjured an entirely new physical sensation. Gronau’s first reaction—soon to change—was disappointment. He had expected to feel something like what he felt when riding a fast elevator, but here he found that if he looked straight ahead he felt almost nothing.
Gronau stationed himself at one end of the car to better observe its behavior and the movement of the wheel. When he looked out the side of the car into the passing web of spokes, the car’s rapid ascent became apparent: “… it seemed as if every thing was dropping away from us, and the car was still. Standing at the side of the car and looking into the network of iron rods multiplied the peculiar sensation…” He advised the others that if they had weak stomachs, they should not do likewise.
When the car reached its highest point, 264 feet above the ground, Mrs. Ferris climbed onto a chair and cheered, raising a roar in the following car and on the ground.
Soon, however, the passengers became silent. The novelty of the sensation wore off, and the true power of the experience became apparent.
“It was a most beautiful sight one obtains in the descent of the car, for then the whole fair grounds is laid before you,” Gronau said. “The view is so grand that all timidity left me and my watch on the movement of the car was abandoned.” The sun had begun its own descent and now cast an orange light over the shorescape. “The harbor was dotted with vessels of every description, which appeared mere specks from our exalted position, and the reflected rays of the beautiful sunset cast a gleam upon the surrounding scenery, making a picture lovely to behold.” The entire park came into view as an intricate landscape of color, texture, and motion. Lapis lagoons. Electric launches trailing veils of diamond. Carmine blossoms winking from bulrush and flag. “The sight is so inspiring that all conversation stopped, and all were lost in admiration of this grand sight. The equal of it I have never seen, and I doubt very much if I shall again.”
This reverie was broken as more bolts and nuts bounded down the superstructure onto the car’s roof.
Spectators still managed to get past the guards and into the following cars, but now Gronau and Rice shrugged it off. The engineer in the pit kept the wheel running until the failing light made continued operation a danger, but even then thrill-seekers clamored for a chance. Finally Rice informed those who had shoved their way into the cars that if they remained he would run them to the top of the wheel and leave them there overnight. “This,” Gronau said, “had the desired effect.”
Immediately after leaving the car, Mrs. Ferris telegraphed her husband details of the success. He cabled back, “God bless you my dear.”
The next day, Monday, June 12, Rice cabled Ferris, “Six more cars hung today. People are wild to ride on wheel & extra force of guards is required to keep them out.” On Tuesday the total of cars hung reached twenty-one, with only fifteen more to add.
Burnham, obsessing as always over details, sought to decree the style and location of a fence for the wheel. He wanted an open, perforated fence, Ferris wanted it closed.
Ferris was fed up with Burnham’s pressure and aesthetic interference. He cabled Luther Rice, “… Burnham nor anyone else has any right to dictate whether we shall have a closed or open fence, any more than from an artistic standpoint.”
Ferris prevailed. The eventual fence was a closed one.
At last all the cars were hung and the wheel was ready for its first paying passengers. Rice wanted to begin accepting riders on Sunday, June 18, two days earlier than planned, but now with the wheel about to experience its greatest test—a full load of paying passengers, including entire families—Ferris’s board of directors urged him to hold off one more day. They cabled Ferris, “Unwise to open wheel to public until opening day because of incompleteness and danger of accidents.”
Ferris accepted their directive but with reluctance. Shortly before he left for Chicago, he cabled Rice, “If the board of directors have decided not to run until Wednesday you may carry out their wishes.”
It’s likely the board had been influenced by an accident that had occurred the previous Wednesday, June 14, at the Midway’s Ice Railway, a descending elliptical track of ice over which two coupled bobsleds full of passengers could reach speeds of forty miles an hour. The owners had just completed the attraction and begun conducting their first tests with passengers, employees only, when a group of spectators pushed their way into the sleds, eight in the first, six in the second. The interlopers included three of Bloom’s Algerians, who had come to the railway, one explained, because “none of us had ever seen ice,” a doubtful story given that the Algerians had just endured one of Chicago’s coldest winters.
At about six forty-five P.M. the operator released the sleds, and soon they were rocketing along the ice at maximum speed. “It was about sundown when I heard the sleds coming around the curve,” said a Columbian Guard who witnessed the run. “They seemed to be flying. The first went around the curve. It struck the angle near the west end of the road, but went along all right. The second struck the same point, but it jumped the track. The top of the car, with the people holding tightly to the seats, broke the railing and fell to the ground. As it fell, the sled turned over and the people fell under it.”
The sled plummeted fifteen feet to the ground. One passenger was killed; another, a woman, suffered fractures of her jaw and both wrists. Four other men, including two of the Algerians, sustained contusions.
The accident had been tragic and was a black mark for the fair, but everyone understood that the Ferris Wheel, with thirty-six cars carrying more than two thousand passengers, embodied the potential for a catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale.
Heathen Wanted
DESPITE HIS MISGIVINGS OLMSTED LEFT the completion of the exposition landscape in the hands of Ulrich and adopted a punishing schedule of work and travel that took him through sixteen states. By mid-June he was back at Vanderbilt’s North Carolina estate. Along the way, in rail-cars, stations, and hotels, he solicited the views of strangers about the fair while keeping his own identity a secret. The fair’s lackluster attendance troubled and perplexed him. He asked travelers if they had visited the fair yet, and if so what they had thought of it, but he was especially interested in the opinions of people who had not yet gone—what had they heard, did they plan to go, what was holding them back?
“Everywhere there is growing interest in the Exposition,” he told Burnham in a June 20 letter from Biltmore. “Everywhere I have found indications that people are planning to go to it.” Firsthand accounts of the fair were sparking heightened interest. Clergymen who had seen it were working the fair into sermons and lectures. He was delighted to find that what visitors liked best were not the exhibits but the buildings, waterways, and scenery and that the fair had surprised them. “People who have gone to the Fair have, in the main, found more than the newspapers … had led them to expect.” He concluded, “There is a rising tidal wave of enthusiasm over the land.”
But he saw that other fa
ctors were exerting a countervailing force. While personal accounts of the fair were enthusiastic, Olmsted wrote, “nearly always incompletenesses are referred to, favoring the idea that much remains to be done, and that the show will be better later.” Farmers planned to wait until after harvest. Many people had put off their visits in the expectation that the nation’s worsening economic crisis and pressure from Congress eventually would compel the railroads to reduce their Chicago fares. Weather was also an issue. Convinced that Chicago was too hot in July and August, people were postponing their visits until the fall.
One of the most pernicious factors, Olmsted found, was the widespread fear that anyone who ventured to Chicago would be “fleeced unmercifully,” especially in the fair’s many restaurants, with their “extortionate” prices. “This complaint is universal, and stronger than you in Chicago are aware of, I am sure,” he told Burnham. “It comes from rich and poor alike…. I think that I have myself paid ten times as much for lunch at the Exposition as I did a few days ago, for an equally good one in Knoxville, Tenn. The frugal farming class yet to come to the Fair will feel this greatly.”
Olmsted had another reason to worry about high meal prices. “The effect,” he wrote, “will be to induce people more and more to bring their food with them, and more and more to scatter papers and offal on the ground.”
It was critical now, Olmsted argued, to concentrate on making improvements of a kind most likely to increase the gleam in the stories people took back to their hometowns. “This is the advertising now most important to be developed; that of high-strung, contagious enthusiasm, growing from actual excellence: the question being not whether people shall be satisfied, but how much they shall be carried away with admiration, and infect others by their unexpected enjoyment of what they found.”
Toward this end, he wrote, certain obvious flaws needed immediate attention. The exposition’s gravel paths, for example. “There is not a square rod of admirable, hardly one of passable, gravel-walk in all of the Exposition Ground,” he wrote. “It appears probable to me that neither the contractor, nor the inspector, whose business it is to keep the contractor up to his duty, can ever have seen a decently good gravel walk, or that they have any idea of what good gravel walks are. What are the defects of your walks?”—Your walks, he says here, not mine or ours, even though the walks were the responsibility of his own landscape department—“In some places there are cobbles or small boulders protruding from the surface, upon which no lady, with Summer shoes, can step without pain. In other places, the surface material is such that when damp enough to make it coherent it becomes slimy, and thus unpleasant to walk upon; also, without care, the slime is apt to smear shoes and dresses, which materially lessens the comfort of ladies.” His voyage to Europe had shown him that a really good gravel path “should be as even and clean as a drawing room floor.”
The cleanliness of the grounds also fell short of European standards, as he had feared it would. Litter was everywhere, with too few men assigned to clean it up. The fair needed twice as many, he said, and greater scrutiny of their work. “I have seen papers that had been apparently swept off the terraces upon the shrubbery between them and the lagoons,” Olmsted wrote. “Such a shirking trick in a workman employed to keep the terraces clean should be a criminal offence.”
He was bothered, too, by the noise of the few steam vessels that Burnham, over his repeated objections, had authorized to travel the exposition’s waters alongside the electric launches. “The boats are cheap, graceless, clumsy affairs, as much out of place in what people are calling the ‘Court of Honor’ of the Exposition as a cow in a flower garden.”
Olmsted’s greatest concern, however, was that the main, Jackson Park portion of the exposition simply was not fun. “There is too much appearance of an impatient and tired doing of sight-seeing duty. A stint to be got through before it is time to go home. The crowd has a melancholy air in this respect, and strenuous measures should be taken to overcome it.”
Just as Olmsted sought to conjure an aura of mystery in his landscape, so here he urged the engineering of seemingly accidental moments of charm. The concerts and parades were helpful but were of too “stated or programmed” a nature. What Olmsted wanted were “minor incidents … of a less evidently prepared character; less formal, more apparently spontaneous and incidental.” He envisioned French horn players on the Wooded Island, their music drifting across the waters. He wanted Chinese lanterns strung from boats and bridges alike. “Why not skipping and dancing masqueraders with tambourines, such as one sees in Italy? Even lemonade peddlers would help if moving about in picturesque dresses; or cake-sellers, appearing as cooks, with flat cap, and in spotless white from top to toe?” On nights when big events in Jackson Park drew visitors away from the Midway, “could not several of the many varieties of ‘heathen,’ black, white and yellow, be cheaply hired to mingle, unobtrusively, but in full native costume, with the crowd on the Main Court?”
When Burnham read Olmsted’s letter, he must have thought Olmsted had lost his mind. Burnham had devoted the last two years of his life to creating an impression of monumental beauty, and now Olmsted wanted to make visitors laugh. Burnham wanted them struck dumb with awe. There would be no skipping and dancing. No heathen.
The exposition was a dream city, but it was Burnham’s dream. Everywhere it reflected the authoritarian spandrels of his character, from its surfeit of policemen to its strict rules against picking flowers. Nowhere was this as clearly evident as in the fair’s restrictions on unauthorized photography.
Burnham had given a single photographer, Charles Dudley Arnold, a monopoly over the sale of official photographs of the fair, which arrangement also had the effect of giving Burnham control over the kinds of images that got distributed throughout the country and explains why neat, well-dressed, upper-class people tended to populate each frame. A second contractor received the exclusive right to rent Kodaks to fair visitors, the Kodak being a new kind of portable camera that eliminated the need for lens and shutter adjustments. In honor of the fair Kodak called the folding version of its popular model No. 4 box camera the Columbus. The photographs these new cameras created were fast becoming known as “snap-shots,” a term originally used by English hunters to describe a quick shot with a gun. Anyone wishing to bring his own Kodak to the fair had to buy a permit for two dollars, an amount beyond the reach of most visitors; the Midway’s Street in Cairo imposed an additional one-dollar fee. An amateur photographer bringing a conventional large camera and the necessary tripod had to pay ten dollars, about what many out-of-town visitors paid for a full day at the fair, including lodging, meals, and admission.
For all Burnham’s obsession with detail and control, one event at the fair escaped his attention. On June 17 a small fire occurred in the Cold Storage Building, a castlelike structure at the southwest corner of the grounds built by Hercules Iron Works. Its function was to produce ice, store the perishable goods of exhibitors and restaurants, and operate an ice rink for visitors wishing to experience the novelty of skating in July. The building was a private venture: Burnham had nothing to do with its construction beyond approving its design. Oddly enough, its architect was named Frank P. Burnham, no relation.
The fire broke out in the cupola at the top of the central tower but was controlled quickly and caused only a hundred dollars in damage. Even so, the fire prompted insurance underwriters to take a closer look at the building, and what they saw frightened them. A key element of the design had never been installed. Seven insurers canceled their policies. Fire Marshal Edward W. Murphy, acting chief of the World’s Fair Fire Department, told a committee of underwriters, “That building gives us more trouble than any structure on the grounds. It is a miserable firetrap and will go up in smoke before long.”
No one told Burnham about the fire, no one told him of the cancellations, and no one told him of Murphy’s forecast.
At Last
AT THREE-THIRTY P.M. on Wednesday, June 21, 1893, fift
y-one days late, George Washington Gale Ferris took a seat on the speakers’ platform built at the base of his wheel. The forty-piece Iowa State Marching Band already had boarded one of the cars and now played “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Mayor Harrison joined Ferris on the platform, as did Bertha Palmer, the entire Chicago city council, and an assortment of fair officials. Burnham apparently was not present.
The cars were fully glazed, and wire grills had been placed over all the windows so that, as one reporter put it, “No crank will have an opportunity to commit suicide from this wheel, no hysterical woman shall jump from a window.” Conductors trained to soothe riders who were afraid of heights stood in handsome uniforms at each car’s door.
The band quieted, the wheel stopped. Speeches followed. Ferris was last to take the podium and happily assured the audience that the man condemned for having “wheels in his head” had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance. He attributed the success of the enterprise to his wife, Margaret, who stood behind him on the platform. He dedicated the wheel to the engineers of America.
Mrs. Ferris gave him a gold whistle, then she and Ferris and the other dignitaries climbed into the first car. Harrison wore his black slouch hat.
When Ferris blew the whistle, the Iowa State band launched into “America,” and the wheel again began to turn. The group made several circuits, sipping champagne and smoking cigars, then exited the wheel to the cheers of the crowd that now thronged its base. The first paying passengers stepped aboard.
The wheel continued rolling with stops only for loading and unloading until eleven o’clock that night. Even with every car full, the wheel never faltered, its bearings never groaned.