Roller Coasters

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I've mentioned on the show
recently that I've been trying to improve my French on

(00:21):
Duelingo and for some languages. Duolingo has these stories where
the characters have this conversation in an at least hypothetically
real world kind of scenario. And there's this one where
two friends Lely and Zuri are having They're having a
conversation in line to ride a roller coaster, and every

(00:44):
time Duolingo has shown me this story, I have wound
up mostly focused on the fact that the French word
for roller coaster is montagnous or Russian mountains, and so
every time I'm like, what is the story there? And
that is how we got to this episode. So during

(01:04):
this episode, we're going to be touching a little bit
on amusement park history more and generally, because there becomes
a point where these two things are very tightly interconnected.
But one thing we're not really going to talk about
much is like roller coaster crashes and derailments and other
similar incidents because there have just been so many with

(01:26):
so many different causes. It felt sort of like trying
to mention all the car crashes in the building of
the interstate highway system, right. It just it felt like
a list of carnage that wasn't adding up to some
sort of greater understanding of anything. So that is not
really going to be a focus of this. And also,

(01:48):
I know there are a lot of roller coasterficionados out there,
and there are folks who have extremely strong opinions on
specific roller coasters and types of roller coasters and roller
coaster records and particular designers. So I just want to
say upfront that this is not in any way an
exhaustive chronicle of every single thing about roller coasters. If

(02:11):
we did not mention your favorite thing. This is more
of like the trajectory of how these rides evolved over
the last centuries. That could be an entire podcast just
called coasting. And I maybe it is somewhere Montagna rous

(02:33):
got their start, as the name suggests, in Russia. Specifically
in Russia in the seventeenth century, as a winter pastime,
people built wooden ramps and covered them with water, and
that water then froze into a slick surface, and then
riders would climb stairs or a ladder to the top
of this frozen ramp, get into some kind of vehicle
like a sled or a hollowed out log, or even

(02:54):
an ice block with a straw seat, and slide down.
Often at night, water would be applied to the ramp
so that it could freeze back over into a new
and totally smooth, fresh surface by morning. These frozen hills
were nicknamed flying mountains. They could be up to six
hundred feet or one hundred and eighty three meters long,

(03:16):
and riders reached speeds that were reportedly up to fifty
miles an hour, which is about eighty kilometers an hour. Often,
at the end of the ride you would come out
at the base of a second tower, so you could
climb up that and just do it all over again.
The logs or the ice blocks were brought back up
along a track to one side of the hill, or

(03:37):
in some cases when people were using more lightweight sleds,
they would just be carried up the steps by the riders.
These were really popular public attractions, especially around Saint Petersburg,
and wealthy people also built smaller versions of them. On
their estates for their own enjoyment. Two different empresses have
been noted as having a particular love for the flying mountains, Elizabeth,

(04:01):
who reigned from seventeen forty one to seventeen sixty two,
and Katherine the Second also known as Katherine the Great,
who reigned from seventeen sixty two to seventeen ninety six.
So super quick Russian history refresher. Catherine the Great did
not directly follow Elizabeth. Elizabeth's successor was her nephew Peter
the Third, who ruled as emperor for about six months

(04:24):
before being overthrown and assassinated. Katherine definitely played a part
in his overthrow. There is still some debate over her
role in his death. If you watch the show The Great,
that is a version not entirely historically accurate, but I
love it. Yeah. So. Some sources say that Catherine the

(04:46):
Great was the first person to have one of these
mountains fitted with grooves that could accommodate carriage wheels so
that they could be used in the summer. But English
clergyman John glen King, who was chaplain to Saint Petersburg,
wrote a letter in seventeen seventy eight in which he
credited Elizabeth, saying that Elizabeth had a flying mountain built

(05:08):
at the Imperial Palace at Zarskicello that was usable during
the summer and the winter. Catherine does seem to have
built more than one of them as well, including one
at or Niniba Park in Saint Petersburg. King described the
flying mountain this way, quote, you will observe that there
are five mounts of unequal heights. The first and highest

(05:31):
is full thirty feet perpendicular altitude the momentum with which
they descend. This carries them over the second, which is
about five or six feet lower, just sufficient to allow
for the friction and resistance, and so on to the last,
from which they are conveyed by a gentle descent with
nearly the same velocity over a piece of water into

(05:51):
a little island. He went on to say, quote these slides,
which are about a furlong and a half in length,
are made of wood that they may be used in
summer as well as in winter. The processes two or
four persons fit in a little carriage, and one stands behind.
For the more there are in it, the greater the
swiftness with which it goes. That runs on casters and

(06:15):
in grooves to keep it in its right direction, and
it descends with a wonderful rapidity. Under the hills is
a machine worked by horses for drawing the carriages back
again with the company in them. Such a work as
this would have been enormous in most countries for the
labor and expense at cost, as well as the vast
quantity of wood used in it. There's a little bit

(06:38):
of conjecture around how the Russian flying mountains made their
way to France and evolved into Montaigne Rouse. One likely
scenario is that French soldiers saw them in eighteen twelve
when Napoleon invaded the Russian Empire, although some of the
sources used in this episode say the first one in
France was actually built before that. Most of France really

(07:00):
did not get cold enough in the winter to maintain
a frozen sliding surface, so like the Russian empresses did
during the summer, builders in France turned to vehicles that
could roll down the hills on wheels. They had no
safety equipment. People just had to hang on. Yeah, this
episode just had a particularly large amount of sources saying

(07:24):
totally contradictory things with absolute authorities. So I found some
sources that said the very first of these were built
in eighteen twelve, and then others that very confidently said
that the first one was in like eighteen oh four,
And which is right, I don't know. And in eighteen
sixteen journal entry though armand Marie Antoinette Duplaci Marquise de

(07:46):
Montcalm Gozon describes a French Montagne rouse this way quote.
It is an inclined plane made of planks of sixty
feet more or less, at the top of which is
placed a sled on which one sits, and which brings
you to the bottom with an extreme rapidity. This pleasure,
which is not without danger, may be compared, according to

(08:07):
the opinion of several people, to the impression that one
would feel if one fell from a fourth floor window,
which does not seem very seductive. These mountains are made
of ice in Russia, and one hopes, in spite of
the difference in climate, to imitate them in winter. A
man said, in speaking of them, that he was surprised
that this fashion does not elicit complaint against the influence

(08:30):
of Russia, which is very common today to render responsible
for everything. These amusements were extremely popular in France, and
they were also known as promenade rienne or aerial walks.
There were songs and plays about them, and people could
buy all kinds of mountains souvenirs. Intense rivalries also developed

(08:52):
between competing mountains, and in eighteen seventeen, these rivalries even
inspired a satirical play called the Battle of the Mountains
or bougeu faull. This popularity was somewhat ironic. Number one.
These attractions seemed to have been most popular and most
widespread in France in eighteen sixteen. In eighteen seventeen, in

(09:14):
other words, during the year without a summer, which was
much chillier and much rainier than normal, you can look
out for an upcoming Saturday classic on the year without
a summer. Number two. This was just after the end
of the Napoleonic Wars. France had been defeated in eighteen
fifteen and Napoleon had abdicated for the second time under

(09:36):
the Treaty of Paris of eighteen fifteen, which officially ended
the war. France was occupied by the nations that had
fought against and those occupiers included Russia. It's possible that
the number of montagner Rouse, built in France during the Eighteenteens,
was made possible by Russian occupiers who already knew how
to do it. But it's also a little odd that

(09:58):
French citizens seemed to have really fl and celebrated something
that was so closely associated with Russia, something that the
Marquis alluded to in her journal entry. Montagna Rouss also
became a metaphor in France during this period, both in
literature and in casual conversation. A lot like roller coaster
can be used today to describe the various up and

(10:19):
downs of life, among other things. Most of these attractions
closed by the end of eighteen eighteen. Sending a wheeled
vehicle down a wooden track at high speeds naturally caused
a lot of wear, and these tracks weren't maintained very well,
so they eventually broke down. The popularity of the Montagne
Rousse also plummeted that year after two riders were killed

(10:41):
when the car that they were in stopped suddenly. The
post war occupation of France also ended in eighteen eighteen,
and it's possible that after that point people did kind
of want to get away from all the foreign influences.
We should also take a moment here to note that
French is not the only language to call roller coasters
some variation on Russian or Russian mountains. A lot of

(11:05):
other languages in Western Europe do, including Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan,
and Italian, among others. The next stretch of roller coaster history,
kind of like this one was, is a little contradictory
and sometimes vague, and we will get to it after
a sponsor break. If you pull up five different articles

(11:34):
about roller coasters, you may find at least that many
completely different and yet totally authoritative declarations of which thing
was the first roller coaster. Some of them also either
named the Russian Flying Mountains or the French Montaigne Rouse
that we already talked about, And to be fair, these
do seem pretty similar to roller coasters, especially the ones

(11:57):
that like specifically described going down this progressively smaller series
of hills. We are going to talk about some of
the other various contenders. In the eighteen thirties and forties,
a number of centrifugal railways were built in various cities
in Europe. There's some speculation that these were inspired by

(12:19):
children's toys in which you would keep a marble or
a ball rolling around on the inside of a wire track.
A centrifugal railway was basically a downward slope leading into
a circular vertical loop with an upward slope on the
other side. Riders would get in the car on one
end of the slope and ride through the vertical loop
to the other side. Accounts of these centrifugal railways suggests

(12:43):
that it was as much about the terrifying thrill of
the experience as it was about watching other people do
it and maybe not coming out unscathed. This was just
not a smooth ride. It was full of jolts and bumps,
and because the loop was shaped like a circle, the
gravitational forces involved could be really intense. There also wasn't

(13:05):
really any safety equipment, reportedly not even like seat belts.
Centrifugal force was what was supposed to keep people in
their seats, and that worked as long as nothing happened
to cause the car to either slow down or stop suddenly.
Builders tested these railways by sending a variety of inanimate
objects through the loop like eggs or sandbags, as well

(13:28):
as animals, including monkeys. In the eighteen sixties, a coal
transport near what's now jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, became an amusement ride.
Starting in eighteen twenty eight, the mock Chunk Switched Back
Railway had carried coal about nine miles, mostly downhill, from
the mines to the Lehigh Canal. A brakeman controlled the

(13:48):
speed of the descent, and once enough cars had reached
the bottom, a mule team would haul them back to
the top. A return track with a steam powered hauler
was added in eighteen forty four. This return track was
ratcheted to keep the cars from sliding back down as
the hauler stopped for some reason. Ratchet systems are still

(14:08):
used on anti rollback devices on roller coasters today. That's
what makes that repetitive clacking noise that you hear when
a roller coaster is being pulled up a hill. In
about eighteen sixty five, the Mock Chunks Switched Back Railway
started carrying human tourists as passengers and the evenings when
the mines weren't running. Then in the eighteen seventies, construction

(14:29):
of a tunnel made the railway unnecessary for coal transport,
and this railway became a tourist attraction full time. It
ran as a tourist attraction until closing in nineteen thirty three.
At around the same time that the mock Chunk Switchback
Railway became a dedicated tourist attraction, other inventors in the
United States were working on inclined railways. This term could

(14:51):
have a few different meanings. Railways meant to pull loads
up a hill, Funicular railways with two counterbalanced carriages connected
by a cable, and roller coaster like amusement rides were
all called inclined railways. John G. Taylor was granted a
patent called Improvement of Inclined Railways in eighteen seventy two.

(15:13):
His patent shows two parallel tracks, each of them with
hills of various sizes, and the car would roll from
the highest point down to the other end. His description
makes it clear that there were already inclined railways being built,
but that his was better because it had a switch
that would move the car from one track to the

(15:33):
other so that people could continue the journey in the
other direction. Once passengers had disembarked, the car would be
manually moved up a short hill before being switched back
to the other track at the starting point. While Taylor's
patent describes what he calls an improvement, it doesn't have
all the details of a working device, like it doesn't

(15:54):
say how the car would be stopped at the end
of the line. While the illustration has a little set
of steps suggesting where a passenger would disembark, the steps
connect directly to one of the rails, and there's no
corresponding platform for people to get on the railway, So
older sources often described this as a patent that was
issued for an idea, not an invention that Taylor ever

(16:17):
actually made. However, there are multiple newspaper articles mentioning Taylor's
patented inclined railway carrying actual passengers, and there is even
at least one photo. As one example, the August fifteenth,
eighteen seventy four, edition of the Middletown, Connecticut Daily Constitution
claims that Taylor's railway carried two hundred and fifty thousand

(16:38):
passengers the year before with no injuries. Richard Nudson was
also issued a different patent for improvement and inclined plane
railways in eighteen seventy eight. This one featured a lift
at each end of the track for raising the car
back up to the top. It's possible that Nudson built
one of these, maybe even at Coney Island, which wasn't

(17:00):
far away from where he lived, but if he did,
no documentation has been found of that yet. We don't
really know who coined the term roller coaster, but according
to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first written usage in
English was in the Chicago Tribune in eighteen eighty three.
There were some earlier uses than that, though, including in

(17:21):
the Steuben Republican of Angola, Indiana, and the Saint Louis
Post Dispatch. The Steuben Republican describes a roller coaster as
the chief attraction at the tri State Fair, calling it
quote a small improvement on the old time sport of
riding downhill and trudging up the best way you can.
The roller coaster described in this article is on an inclined,

(17:43):
circular track about six hundred feet long, with fifteen or
twenty people riding on a long bench like car for
a ride that lasted about twelve seconds. The ride described
in the Chicago Tribune a few days later was also circular,
with a circumference of about four hundred thirty feet and
a drop of about twenty two feet. The Saint Louis

(18:04):
Post dispatch mention of roller coasters that came out around
this time isn't a pair of ads. One of them
is quote roller coaster sliding downhill on wheels, Lucas Place
in twentieth Street, and the other is quote roller coaster
the old fashioned sleigh ride. Don't fail to take a
ride Lucas Place in twentieth And also, to further complicate

(18:26):
this whole Oxford English Dictionary citation of the Chicago Tribune
is the first mention. A few days before, the Tribune
published an article about a roller coaster being built, which
is what the OEED cites as the word's first use.
It also published an ad. This ad specified that ec
Hudson wanted to hire a man to act as the

(18:48):
roller coasters manager, had a salary of twenty dollars a week,
so before the building of the roller coaster was reported on,
he was trying to hire somebody to run it. And
now nearly two to the way through this episode, we
are finally getting to someone who is very frequently described
as the inventor of the roller coaster or the inventor
of the first modern roller coaster or the inventor of

(19:11):
the first commercially successful roller coaster. LaMarcus A. Thompson, who
built the Switchback Gravity pleasure railway at Coney Island, New
York in eighteen eighty four. Some accounts say he modeled
it after Richard Knudsen's patent, and others after the mock
chunk Switchback Railway. Thompson had invented other things, including a

(19:32):
car coupler and a knitting machine, and some accounts he
had worked himself to exhaustion on the knitting machine business
and that had led his doctor to advise him to
spend more time outside and that's what led him to
build a roller coaster. In other accounts, he was a
devout Christian and was concerned about the temptations of beer
gardens and other vice ridden pastimes on young people, and

(19:55):
he wanted to offer an alternative. It may have been both.
I found zero primary sources confirming any of that, and
every time I read some detail, I was like, where
are you getting this? In addition to the fact that
we've already talked about a whole lot of things that
could be called the first roller coaster, Thompson's roller Coasting

(20:17):
structure patented in eighteen eighty five, doesn't seem all that
roller coaster e in a lot of ways. There were
two parallel tracks, with the ends of the tracks at
the same height, and riders would go out on one
track and back on the other through a series of
slopes that looked pretty gentle in the patent illustration. Since
friction and air resistance and other factors meant that the

(20:39):
car wouldn't be able to get to the top at
the far end of the track by itself, it did
so by quote means being provided to continue the car
to the top. That meant that somebody pushed it the
rest of the way. Passengers road sideways on what was
basically a bench, and they traveled at about six miles
an hour, So this was more about getting a view
of Coney Islands than about any kind of extreme thrill seeking.

(21:03):
Maybe riding a bench at six miles an hour would
have felt really thrilling at the time. A lot of
people run that fast found that a little amusing for
that reason. Sometimes Thompson's rides are called scenic railways rather
than roller coasters, but slower not Thompson's first ride at

(21:26):
Coney Island was extremely popular. People paid five cents to
ride it, and he recouped all the money he'd spent
to build it in about three weeks. He also kept
working on developments for his invention, and by eighteen eighty
seven he held about thirty patents related to roller coasters.
He also founded a company to build scenic railways, which

(21:46):
often took riders past dioramas, scenery, and other theatrical and
visual elements. There are a lot of comparisons to the
It's a Small World ride at Disney, but on a
railroad instead of well, it makes me think of the
Disneyland Railway, which is like train ride that goes past

(22:10):
dioramas and you're like, oh, dinosaurs. I've never been to Disneyland,
so I don't know that one. It got reworked, and
I don't I don't want to make any promises. I
don't remember what all, if anything got added or subtracted there.
But that's how it's worked for a long time. We
call it rolling bench. It makes us so happy to
just sit there and watch beautiful things. I'm gonna say

(22:31):
on a couple of times that I have been to
Disney in Florida, not in California. As an adult, I
have delighted in the rides where you just sit down
in a cool space and ride and look at things.
Give me The people move all day long. So we're
gonna move on to the spread of rides like these
or faster versions of rides like these, after quick sponsor break.

(23:04):
Before we talk about how roller coasters proliferated, especially in
the United States, we should talk a little bit about
the development of amusement parks, because, especially from this point on,
roller coasters and amusement parks are very tightly linked. So
there's not really one linear family tree of amusement parks.
It's more like multiple possible influences going all the way

(23:27):
back to the medieval period. Some of their earliest precursors
were probably European trade fairs, such as Saint Bartholomew's Fair,
which started in England in eleven thirty three. This was
an annual event that incorporated both trade and entertainment, and
through the centuries, Saint Bartholomew's and other fairs gradually became
more and more focused on food, drink, and amusements, including rides.

(23:51):
For example, there were early versions of ferris wheels at
Saint Bartholomew's Fair in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Overlap
with trade fairs were pleasure gardens, which operated during most
or all of the year, rather than just for a
few days or weeks at a time. Also had a
lot of food and entertainments and rides. Sometimes these were

(24:13):
built by the owners of inns or taverns who were
looking for ways to bring in more clientele during their
slower periods. Then, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw
the rise of large international exhibitions or World's fairs, where
the nations exhibiting at the fair showed off their new
developments and accomplishments. Many of these fairs featured ethnological expositions

(24:37):
that were essentially human zoos. The World's Colombian Exposition of
eighteen ninety three also had an entertainment area that was
separate from all the exhibitions, which it called the Midway,
and it was like a carnival with side shows, food,
and rides. This intersects with the rise of trolley parks
toward the end of the nineteenth century, and many areas

(25:00):
colley lines were charged a flat fee for electricity, regardless
of how many trolleys were running, or how many passengers
those trolleys were carrying, So something that was mostly happening
in the United States, and a lot of trolley companies
started investing in attractions at the end of the line
to try to bring passengers onto the trolley on their

(25:21):
day off of work. Often the entry to the park
itself was free, and then people would pay for rides
and food and drink. In nineteen oh two, day Allen
Willie wrote of this quote, the expression trolley park may
not as yet have come into common use, but no
explanation of its meaning is necessary. The oldest of the

(25:42):
trolley parks has been in existence but a few years.
Yet today these resorts are to be found on the
outskirts of nearly every city in the land. The fact
is that the street and suburban railway companies, realizing the
profit arising by catering to the pleasure of the masses,
have entered into the amusement field on an extensive scale.

(26:05):
There were other factors involved beside just the trolley lines
wanting to make money. Among other things, increased urbanization meant
that there were more city dwellers looking for some kind
of outdoor recreation. By nineteen nineteen, almost every major city
in the US had at least one trolley park. Coney
Island in New York was one such destination. By the

(26:27):
middle of the nineteenth century, it had already become a
seaside resort area thanks to its location at the southern
tip of Brooklyn, New York. It shift into being associated
with amusement parks started with the construction of individual rides,
including the Switchback Gravity Pleasure Railway. The first enclosed amusement

(26:48):
park built at Coney Island was Sea Lion Park, which
opened in eighteen eighty five. The most famous of these
parks was probably Luna Park, which opened in nineteen oh
three and then became the namesake for a lot of
other amusement parks all over the world. More trolley parks
and more amusement parks meant more rides, including more roller coasters,

(27:09):
and that led to a lot of developments being made really,
really quickly. In eighteen eighty five, Philip Hinkel developed a
hoist that pulled cars up to the top of the
first hill, which let the cars start out higher and
ultimately reach a faster speed. In eighteen ninety four, e
Joy Morris produced the Figure eight side friction coaster, which

(27:30):
had wheels rolling along the tracks inner edge and allowed
for faster speeds and tighter turns. This was also the
first widely mass produced roller coaster, making it possible for
parks all over North America to buy and build one
of their own. Over the next decades, a rise in
mechanization and mass production techniques made it possible for more

(27:51):
designers to create roller coasters that would give the same
consistent ride every time, no matter where the coaster was built,
at least fully in theory. In theory. Two people who
were working on vertical loop roller coasters near the turn
of the twentieth century were Lena Beecher and Edwin Prescott.

(28:12):
Prescott was awarded a patent for the Loop. The Loop,
which was installed at Coney Island. Like the centrifugal railways
that had been built in Europe more than fifty years before,
this beatured a circular vertical loop. In eighteen ninety nine,
Lena Beecher developed another circular vertical loop roller coaster called
the Flip Flap, which was also built at Coney Island. Then,

(28:35):
in nineteen oh one, Edwin Prescott developed a looping roller
coaster with a tear drop shaped loop, which reduced some
of the excessive g forces that riders were subjected to
in a circular loop. A lot of roller coaster loops
still have that kind of tear drop shape design today,
and then Beecher soon adopted a tear drop shape design

(28:56):
for his own vertical roller coaster as well. John Miller
worked with a number of different roller coaster designers, including
LaMarcus Thompson, and he was issued his first patent in
nineteen ten for a safety device called the chain lift,
which kept roller coaster cars from rolling backwards. This was
the first of many patents Miller was awarded a lot

(29:17):
of them for safety features or for features that made
it possible for roller coasters to go faster, higher, or
through sharper turns than they did before without crashing or derailing.
Another of his major innovations was under friction wheels, which
helped prevent derailments, and he patented those in nineteen nineteen.
By this point, amusement parks were being built in other

(29:40):
parts of the world as well, often with American engineers
or designers working as consultants or with American companies providing
blueprints or even entire disassembled rides to be put together
on site. In nineteen ten, this had reached the point
that the US Department of State recognized usement parks as

(30:01):
a trade opportunity and asked trade consoles to gather information
about existing parks and opportunities to build new ones. All
over the world. By the nineteen twenties, there were amusement
parks on every continent except Antarctica, many of them pattern
after the parks on Coney Island, and this was a
really like a heyday for roller coasters. The Coney Islands Cyclone,

(30:23):
built in nineteen twenty seven, reached speeds of fifty five
miles or eighty nine kilometers per hour, and it had
an eighty five foot drop, something that's not nearly as
fast or tall as most newly built roller coasters today,
but it was at the time groundbreaking. The Coney Islands
Cyclone still stands today and is build as the second

(30:44):
steepest wooden roller coaster in the world. The boom and
trolley parks, amusement parks and roller coasters in the United
States was also happening, alongside increasingly legislated racial segregation in
many parts of the country. Many parks either allowed only
white patrons or allowed patrons regardless of race, but also

(31:06):
had segregated facilities like restrooms and only allowed white patrons
in some areas like restaurants. But there were also black
entrepreneurs who opened their own parks, such as joy Land
in Chicago, which was the first black owned and operated
amusement park in the United States. In the United States,
amusement parks and their roller coasters started to go into

(31:28):
a decline during the depression in World War Two. During
the depression, people often just didn't have the money to
visit an amusement park or to invest in building a
new one. During and after World War Two, people became
more focused on exercise based recreations, such as organized athletic teams.
The post war baby boom also led to more parks

(31:49):
that were focused specifically on recreation for children. As more
people started driving cars and the US started building more
roads and highways to accommodate them, the idea of taking
a train or trolley to the park at the end
of the line started to fall out of fashion. This
was not as true in other parts of the world, though,

(32:10):
As the amusement park economy cooled in the United States,
American developers started intentionally focusing on other countries, some of
which continued to build new parks all the way through
the nineteen thirties and forties. These ongoing international efforts by
American companies to build amusement parks and roller coasters in

(32:30):
other countries maybe why In Russia, for example, roller coasters
are not Russian mountains. They are americanski gorky or American
slides basically. And there are a lot of other languages
whose words for roller coaster include some version of American.
These include Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. In the nineteen twenties,

(32:53):
there had been thousands of roller coasters in the United States,
but as the nineteen sixties approached, there were fewer than
two two hundreds still in operation. But then there was
another big shift with the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California,
on July seventeenth, nineteen fifty five, followed by the opening
of the Matterhorn roller coaster there on June fourteenth, nineteen

(33:14):
fifty nine. Sometimes the Matterhorn is described as the first
steel track roller coaster, but there were earlier steel coasters.
What set the matter Horn apart was that the tracks
were tubular, meaning that the ride was a lot smoother
than on earlier coasters. Disneyland is often credited with sparking
a resurgence in the building of theme parks in the

(33:36):
United States. Sometimes people use theme park and amusement park interchangeably,
but there's a little new ones there. Basically, theme parks
are abusement parks designed around a theme. It's pretty self explanatory.
The development of tubular steel roller coaster tracks paved the
way for so many other roller coaster innovations, just as

(33:58):
some examples. The first cork screw roller coaster was the
Roaring Twenties Corkscrew at Nottsbury Farm in California, which was
later moved to Silverwood Theme Park in Idaho. The first
shuttle launched coasters were developed in nineteen seventy seven, and
the first roller coasters with interlocking vertical loops debut in

(34:19):
nineteen seventy eight, one of those being the Lockness Monster
at Bush Gardens in Virginia. The first suspended roller coasters
opened in the nineteen eighties, with riders hanging below the
rail rather than sitting above it in a car that
could swing as it went around turns. The first inverted coasters,
which have riders similarly below the track but don't swing

(34:40):
out in that way, came out in the early nineteen nineties.
Electromagnetic propulsion systems were introduced for roller coasters in the
nineteen nineties, making it possible for coasters to be launched
very quickly rather than pulled up hills to coast most
or all of the rest of the way. Today's biggest
fastest roller coasters so different from the ones that we

(35:01):
talked about earlier in the show. Currently, the tallest roller
coaster in the world is listed as the Kingdoka at
six Flags Grade Adventure in New Jersey that is four
hundred and fifty six feet or one hundred and thirty
nine meters tall, and the fastest at this moment that
we're reading is Formula RASA at Ferrari World Abu Dhabi,

(35:24):
which reaches speeds of one hundred and forty nine point
one miles an hour, which is two hundred and forty
kilometers per hour. So of course, there have also been
a lot of safety innovations throughout these same years to
try to make it possible for coasters to go that high.
And that fast without being just extraordinarily deadly. While fatal

(35:44):
roller coaster disasters are rare at this point, less severe
injuries are a lot more common. It's kind of tricky
to give exact numbers because a lot of statistics group
amusement park rides together rather than isolating roller coaster injuries specifically. Yeah,
even with all the various like shoulder harnesses and you know,

(36:06):
other ways to try to keep the passengers in these safe,
Like it's still a lot of a lot of drops
and a whipping around, and like there are opportunities for
various physiological consequences of that. Yeah, Yeah, I'm sure we
will talk some more about roller coasters on Friday. And

(36:28):
in the meanwhile, I have listener mail from Jeff. Jeff
wrote and said love the show. I've been listening for years.
Just an added note on modern day use of military balloons.
I was a paratrooper in Canada in the nineties. When
paratroopers train with other Allied countries or airborne forces, they
are often awarded that country's jump wings as an honorary

(36:51):
sort of thing. My regiment sent soldiers to the UK
to work with the Parachute Regiment. While there, they did
basic UK parachute training and they were awarded their British
jump wings. The training jumps they did were from balloons.
I don't know if they still trained this way or not,
but they did in the nineties. The balloon was on
a winch that could be raised and lowered. The candidate

(37:13):
got in the basket and the winch was spooled out
to about a thousand feet. They opened the door on
the side of the basket and performed their drills with
the instructor and then jumped out of the basket and
parachuted to the ground. The basket was then winched back
down to pick up the next candidate. Here's a link, Jeff.
I did not know that, Jeff, but that makes total
sense that that could be a good way to get

(37:36):
people trained on do them parachute jumps. If you would
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcasts, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com
and we're all over social media. Ad missed in History,
so we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you like to get door podcasts stuff. You

(38:02):
missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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