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A Ferris wheel is an amusement ride consisting of an upright wheel with passenger gondolas suspended from the rim. It is named after George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., who designed a 75-meter (250-foot) wheel for the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was designed as a rival to the Eiffel Tower, the centerpiece of the 1889 Paris exhibition . This first wheel carried 2160 people at a time. Its axle was the largest piece of steel cast to that time. The entire machine weighed 2200 tons. At 26 stories it was four stories taller than the tallest skyscraper in the world also in Chicago but only a quarter of the Eiffel Tower's height. It was reused at the St. Louis World's Fair.
Another famous Ferris wheel with a height of 65 meters, dating back to 1897, can be found in Vienna's Prater (2nd district Leopoldstadt - see also World's Fair.
London, UK had its very own 'Gigantic Wheel' built at Earls Court in 1895, which was modelled on the original one in Chicago. This wheel stayed in service until 1906Events January 8 Landslide in Haverstraw, New York kills 20 January 31 Earthquake in Ecuador (8. 6 in Richter scale) February 11 Pope Pius X publishes the encyclical Vehementer nos''. February 15 Representatives of the Labour Representation Committee in t by which time it had carried over 2.5 million passengers.This illustration, based on a patent drawing, depicts a variant of the Ferris Wheel with sliding gondolas. It was built at Coney IslandConey Island is a community of about 60,000 people on the Atlantic shore of Brooklyn, New York. Geologically, it the westernmost of the barrier islands of Long Island. It is now connected to the main part of Brooklyn, but was formerly an actual island, se in the 1920s, and still operates at Deno's Wonder Wheel Park. A replica of this Ferris wheel can be found in Disney's California Adventure theme park.
The earliest ancestor of the Ferris wheel is the Ups-and-Downs, a crude, hand-turned device, which dates back at least to the 17th century and is still in use in some parts of the world.
Ferris wheels are often confused with observation wheelAn observation wheel is a large slowly-rotating vertically-oriented structure carrying enclosed passenger cars or pods along its circumference. Although observation wheels are often described as Ferris wheels, the two differ in a number of significant ress, of which the London EyeThe London Eye is, as of December 2003, the largest observation wheel in the world (though often erroneously called a Ferris wheel). It stands 135 metres (443 feet) high on the western end of Jubilee Gardens, on the South Bank of the River Thames in Lambe is currently the largest example in the world. Although they are superficially similar, they differ in a number of important respects, most notably in that the passenger cars are not suspended from the wheel's circumferance but are mounted on its exterior. This requires them to be stabilised mechanically, making observation wheels much more technically complex than Ferris wheels.