The History of Carousels

Carousels are part of childhood, but they were originally billed as an entertainment for adults and children alike. And even further back than that, it's believed that they were used to train horsemen.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today
we're doing another listener request hooray uh, and it's a
really delightful one. But I'm actually going to save the

(00:22):
information about the listener email that requested it for the
end of the episode. It'll be our listener mail segment
because it adds a nice coda to the whole story. So, Tracy,
I'm sure you remember writing a carousel or merry go
around as a child, maybe even as an adult. It is,
or at least was a pretty common part of childhood.

(00:44):
But carousels have kind of become a less and less
of an of the moment kind of part of childhood,
even though there are still a number around and people
do still enjoy them, but they are in some ways
part of history and they have their own really interesting
his three. Uh. They're by no means gone, and we're
going to talk about some of the modern developments in

(01:04):
them at the end, but their prevalence in the entertainment
landscape is not what it once was. They used to
be much more of like an event item and centerpiece
to amusement parks. And so we're actually gonna talk about
a few things in this episode. We're going to talk
first about general carousel history, and then we're gonna talk
briefly about a couple of key innovators in carousels, and

(01:26):
then at the very end there's kind of a neat
story that we're going to talk about about one particular
carousel that has its own history that's related to the
civil rights movement. So it sounds like a lot, but
we're doing you know, they're kind of the brief versions
of any of those stories. So this first chuncolet that
we're talking about is consistently told anytime you look at

(01:47):
a history of carousels, but in terms of hard substantiation,
it's difficult to come by. It's almost one of those
things that it could be all completely true, but it
could also be one of those things that's been repeated
so much that accepted his history. Uh. But like I said,
we don't have like so much hard proof on this one.
So yes, and it's so delightful that it would be

(02:08):
such a shame not to talk about it. So the possible,
the possibly apocryphal story of carousels actually starts back in
the twelfth century with a game played by Turkish and
Arabian horsemen, and to play this game, the riders would
toss a clay ball containing perfume back and forth while
they were on horseback, and if a player didn't successfully

(02:29):
catch the ball, it would break and it would cover
him in the scent of failure. Yeah, he would smell good,
presumably it was a perfume, but everyone would know that
he had lost. So it's it's kind of an awkward
consolation prize to smell lovely, but uh, that being kind
of the identifier that you were not as skilled as
your challengers. Italian and Spanish crusaders are said to have

(02:52):
witnessed this game taking place and that they eventually brought
it back to Europe and there it took on the
name Catacella or gerosell uh, depending on which language you're speaking,
and that translated at that time to little War. Later on,
the French adopted this game and they expanded their play
to include multiple equestrian challenges. These developed into competitions called carousels,

(03:16):
and participants needed to practice for their matches, so a
training mechanism was developed that had wooden horses mounted on
arms that were suspended from big poles or chains, and
they rotated around a central central point. There wasn't really
a floor on these carousels. Yeah, it's really um. You know,

(03:36):
they're all kind of dangling from above. So not quite
the way you would think of a carouseler and merry
go around today, but you know, again dangling. There are
other um rides that have have become popular that are
similar where you spin ours. But I'm like this, it's
like the swings at the carnival, where you sit in
the swing and it turns and you swing out. Yes,

(03:59):
but for a long time, that's how carousels worked. So uh.
Some versions of these training carousels were pulled by horses
or mules, others were powered by humans. There would often
be a hand crank or a pull rope that created
the movement, and the horsemen would participate in various games
while they were riding these training steeds. And I'm being
very generous because apparently they were very rudimentary quote horses. Uh.

(04:23):
And one of the games that they would play included
trying to spear a ring with a jousting lance. So
if you have ever been on a carousel with a
ring for riders to grab as they pass under or
buy it, uh, this is a callback allegedly to this game,
although those have become less and less popular. This is
also where that expression grabbed the brass ring comes from,
as the brass ring would be the most prized of

(04:46):
the rings on a carousel game like this. More often
you would see iron rings and then there would be
an occasional brass ring. So that association of grabbing the
brass ring with you know, going after the big prize
or going after something comes all from this. So watching
sports has been a pastime for as long as there
have been sports, and so spectators watched the horsemen practice

(05:08):
and they're said to have grown interested in trying it
out for themselves. So where there's a demand, they are
usually people who are ready to fill it for a price.
And by the late seventeen hundreds, carousels were being made
not for sports training but for entertainment, and for the
next hundred years or so, these simple man and mule
power divertisements because they worked pretty much exactly the same

(05:30):
way as the training ones. They were just gussied up
in a more fun way. Uh, we're appearing at European
festivals and pit fairs pretty consistently, but because they were
powered either by man or animal, they had to stay
pretty much on the small side. Victorian circus entrepreneur Lord
George Sanger described the early hand cranked carousels his father

(05:53):
once made in his book Seventy Years a Showman. These
rudimentary early merrygarounds had horses that weren't realistic, but they
were colorful. The horses, manes and tails are made using
rabbit fur, and because these still required a living creature
to power them, kids were generally employed to push carousels

(06:16):
like singers to get these mechanisms to spin. So these
were usually the kids that could not afford to pay
for a ride themselves, so they would push for the
day and then at the end of the day they
would be paid with free rides. Uh. There are some
sort of dicey tails, mostly apocryphal, but I'm sure some
of this happened of sort of near slave labor at
some fairs where kids weren't really treated all that well. Uh,

(06:39):
But for the most part it seems to have been
like a pay for play situation. You come and do
this work, and then at the end of the day
you get rewarded with a ride on the carousel. And
some mechanisms did not involve children, and they were turned
by horses or, more often at fairs, ponies. The velocityed
was an interesting variation on this idea. Bicycles mounted around

(06:59):
the outside to the carousel would generate the circular motion.
Those things look so fun to me. Now. I'm reminded
for a moment of a ride at the Georgia Renaissance
Festival where you sit in it and it's mounted from
a pole in the center, and the people push it
to turn it all the way up the pole and
it rises up as the thing that suspending it gets

(07:20):
wrapped around the pole and then they let go and
you spin on the way down. Oh I don't I'm
having trouble recalling that one. But I maybe never paid
attention to the rides at the Renaissance Festival. I was
probably too busy eating. Uh. In eighteen sixty one, there
was a major leap forward when steam entered the picture
as a way to power carousels without direct man or

(07:43):
animal power. On New Year's Day, Thomas Bradshaw debuted his
steam driven carousel in Bolton, England, and it contained a
London built boiler unit, an engine and horses that have
been made by Bradshaw himself, and he patented his carousel
design in eighteen sixty three. A similar carousel, which may
actually have been the same one from the eighteen sixty

(08:05):
one Bolton debut, was operating at a fair in Halifax
in eighteen sixty three, and while carousel technology was moving forward,
it wasn't really met with universal enthusiasm at the outset. Yeah.
A journalist who was describing this installation in Halifax described
the mechanism as mammoth and overpowered, and he wondered how

(08:27):
riders were not shot off their mounts like cannon balls. Uh.
Local residents also fretted over the possibility that the whole
thing would explode explode from the pressure of the boiler unit,
and there were some claims and accusations made that they
were endangering children by having this ride available. However, there

(08:47):
were not any explosions and people did continue to be
interested in carousels, and the next couple of years several
more of them appeared around Britain. There's even a newspaper
report of at a steam driven velocity eat at King's
lynmart in eighteen sixty six, although the records of the
mechanism are incomplete, and I'm a little like, how do
you combine the bicycles and the steam? Yeah, I don't know,

(09:10):
but it sounded so fascinating to me. Um. And then
once carousels crossed the Atlantic to the US, they really
underwent a huge transformation and they became bigger and flashier
and more colorful, and the horses became far more intricate
and detailed. Uh. There, it was a little bit of
a shift to sort of the art of it in
many ways. Because the late eighteen hundred saw major advancements

(09:34):
and technology and industry, it wasn't long before the carousel
saw them too. The so called Golden Age of carousel's
started around eighteen eighty, and this was a merry grounds
integrated flooring platforms and up and down movement of the
animals as they circled the central mechanism. Other variations were tried,
including coiled springs to add bounce, and even animals mounted

(09:56):
on undulating tracks to create an up and down movement.
The carousel at the Little Rock, Arkansas Zoo, which is
called over the Jumps, still uses an undulating track and
it's been fully refurbished. If you ever want to ride one, yeah,
so that one instead of like the pole sort of
moving up and down, it just follows this nice wave

(10:16):
pattern track, so you just go up and down. It's
a little more of a rolling hill effect. It's quite gentle,
and as well as all of the technical advancements, there
were some pretty amazing artistic strides going on. So in
the US carousels UH did not restrict themselves to featuring
horses alone, so soon unicorns, lions, guerrillas, dolphins, giraffes, and

(10:36):
a host of other animals made appearances as mounts on carousels.
For five decades, carousels stood as the main attraction affairs
and amusement parks throughout the United States, and people marveled
at their beauty and their craftsmanship. Carousel rides were a
much consumed entertainment diversion for adults as well as kids,

(10:57):
and several different styles developed in the carousel world in
the US. UH. The Coney Island style it's sometimes called,
is sort of a showier style. The horses are painted
in really bright colors and they often have jewels attached
and metallic leaf and the rest of the unit, like
the the central part and the ceilings often feature multitudes

(11:19):
of light catching mirrors. And then the Philadelphia style UH
is a little bit more realistic in the way its
animals are painted and created and carved, and it's associated
usually with really exquisite craftsmanship. The county fair style is
populated with much simpler designs. UH. These merrygorounds are usually
intended to move from place to place like county fairs do,

(11:41):
so they are by necessity a lot less complex and
they don't have as much decoration. And then, just as
the culture of carousels had really embedded itself in the
Americana landscape, the Great Depression happened. Like a lot of industries,
carousel production was hit really hard, and a lot of
companies significantly reduced their out put or closed up shop altogether.

(12:02):
The Golden age of carousels had ended. And it's estimated
that more than four thousand carousels were made in the
United States during the Golden Age. Fewer than a hundred
and fifty of these are still intact UH, and we'll
talk a little bit about some restoration efforts later. On.
But next we're going to talk about a couple of

(12:22):
important men in carousel history. There's certainly more than two,
but in the interests of time, we had to kind
of pick two that are important. But before we talked
about them, let's pause for a quick sponsor break. Now
back to our story. Uh. One of the big names
in carousels is Gustave Denzel, and he was originally from Germany,
and he immigrated to the U s and the mid

(12:44):
eighteen hundreds, and as a boy, Denzel had traveled throughout
Germany with his family in the summers, helping them run
their carousel ride. In the eighteen sixties, Gustave's father shipped
the young man, his brothers, and a carousel to America
on a steamer. When they got there, they brought Philadelphia
one of the first carousels in the United States and
they set up shop there. Yeah. So that's uh, you know,

(13:07):
happening at the same time that things like the steam
power are coming into being. It's a little bit after that,
uh you know, so while England is having this little
boom of of carousels, it is shipping across the Atlantic
at the same time, and there it was certainly happening
in other parts of Europe as well. The Denzel family
built this reputation of incredible craftsmanship, and they set the

(13:29):
tone of realism that came to be associated with the
Philadelphia style of carousels. And what's really interesting is that
their style stayed really consistent throughout the years, even with
changes in leadership to the company. Gustave died in nineteen
o nine, at which point his son's William and Edward
took over the family business. In nineteen twenty, Edward moved

(13:49):
to California to run a West Coast carousel business, and
Williams stayed in Philadelphia, and after almost twenty years helming
the Denzel Carousel come ben He. William died in seven
and the company folded soon thereafter, and Edward decided to
remain in California. He eventually became mayor of Beverly Hills. Eventually,

(14:11):
Edward's son, who was also named William, restarted the family business,
and his son, William Denzel the third still continues this
five generation tradition of elegance, both crafting new pieces and
restoring older hair cells. Yeah, one of the things that
you'll find if you start looking around online is that

(14:32):
a lot of these companies have had sort of a resurgence,
and often it's it's family members that have reopened them
or have just kind of bolstered them when they were
struggling and are now running them again, which is kind
of a lovely, sort of heartwarming part of it. Um.
The other man that we're going to talk about today
is Charles I. D Loof, and, like Denzel, Luf was
originally from Europe. He was born in Denmark in eighteen

(14:54):
fifty two and he moved to the US in eighteen
seventy at the age of eighteen, and at first he
started as a furniture carver. His carousel carving actually started
as a hobby. It was something he did with his
furniture making skills in his off hours, but it soon
sort of started to become a passion, and just five
years after arriving in New York, he opened his first

(15:16):
Coney Island carousel for business. Luke saw the potential of
an amusement destination and he was instrumental in developing Coney
Island as a permanent attraction. Yeah. He also is often
credited with developing or being a major contributor to the
Coney Island style of carousel horses, and five years after
he opened his carousel and Coney Island, he opened a

(15:38):
carousel factory in Brooklyn and he stayed in that location
from eighteen eighty until sometime in late nineteen o four
or early nineteen o five, and at that point he
moved the business to Riverside, Rhode Island. In nineteen ten,
he moved again, but this time much further. He went
across the country to California, and there he was instrumental
in the development of Venice Beach and the Santa Appears

(16:00):
amusement attractions. Unfortunately, Loof's work building up the role of
amusement parks in America turned out to be part of
the carousel's downfall. Working with his son Arthur Charles Luf
and the Wholesome Entertainment Venues he helped build created this
perfect platform for the rise and popularity of a different attraction,
the roller coaster. And as roller coasters became more and

(16:25):
more common, they already existed before this, but they really
started to get a groundhold in terms of popularity in
the amusement industry, in large part due to Luf creating
these sort of parks where people would go. Uh. They
started drawing more and more crowds, and interesting carousels started
to wane because this was a much more exciting and
thrilling ride. Uh, And to try to regain some market share,

(16:49):
the marketing for carousels sort of shifted to be like
more about kids and children's entertainment, whereas, as we mentioned
prior to that, they were touted as diversions for children
and adults each really, but between the newer and more
thrilling options and the onset of the Great Depression, there
just wasn't anyway for Marry Gar Rounds to keep their
previous status. And when Luke died in nineteen eighteen, all

(17:13):
management of their California Peer ventures went to his son,
and Arthur eventually sold off the portion of the Peer
that the family owned, although he continued to operate attractions
there for several years. But eventually the loose contracts they're
all expired and their many empire was dismantled. UH. The carousel,
which had originally been part of loose Santa Monica amusement

(17:34):
center called the Hippodrome, was sold off in parts to collectors.
The Hippodrome incidentally was actually saved from demolition in the
nineteen seventies when Robert Redford and Paul Newman, as well
as other local activists saved it. And it still stands today.
It's been renovated a few times, and it has a
different carousel in it. So before we delve into one

(17:56):
carousel's significance in civil rights history, let's have a quick
word from a sponsor that sounds super duper. So there's
one particular carousel that's connected to the history of the
U s Civil rights movement. Yeah, it's not like it
had a huge, big impact, but it's kind of just
a really beautiful story. Um, And it's a carousel that
still exists today. So, as the March on Washington was

(18:19):
taking place in August nineteen sixty three, a smaller but
still important event was taking place forty miles north of
the city, and on that day, a white, solely amusement
park called Gwynn Oak allowed black children in for the
first time. Sharon Langley, he was only eleven months old
at the time and was held in place on the
saddle by her father, was the first African American child

(18:40):
to ride the carousel at the park, along with white
children and Unfortunately, just a few years after the amusement
park desegregated, it actually closed for good. And after a
few more years, the carousel that had stood at Gwynn
Park was purchased by the Smithsonian that was in one
and at that point it was moved to the National Mall.

(19:01):
Seven years after it's moved to the mall, standing Donna
Hunter purchased the carousel, uh and they have since operated
it there on the mall. But during all that time,
no one knew of this kind of interesting little piece
of history attached to it. Amy Nathan, and author researching
civil rights history, finally put all the pieces together in
two thousand eleven and notified the Hunters of their merrygorounds

(19:23):
historical significance. It became part of Nathan's book Round and
Round Together, Taking Your Ride into Civil Rights History, and
the Nathan's have repainted the horse that Langley rode that
day to commemorate the civil rights movement. The National Park
Service has also included the carousel in educational programming about
civil rights. Yeah. I just love that there's this wonderful

(19:44):
piece of like children's history that's also a part of
the civil rights movement. There's a really sweet picture of
Langley writing it with her dad holding her when she's
eleven months old, and then as an adult, once they
figured out this little piece of history, she went back
and wrote it again and it's just so heartwarming. Uh So,
while carousels did not vanish completely with a great depression,

(20:06):
they certainly experienced a drop in terms of their presence
and their popularity. And once the economy picked back up,
so did production to some degree. But the hand carved
carousel horses that had been sort of this amazing art
that was developing were replaced by fiberglass and aluminum versions. Uh. No,
more steam powered carousels were made. They had shifted over

(20:27):
to electric. Yeah, definitely. When I was a kid, the
thing that we were riding into County Fair was a
fiber last carousel run on electricity, and I was like,
why are you making me do? But now as an adult,
when I'm somewhere and I see some like beautifully restored

(20:47):
handmade wooden carousel, I think it's very lovely. Yeah, there
are still some of those hand carved beauties remaining, and
the restoration projects have been undertaken to keep a lot
of them around. Yeah, some of them are um mounted
by you know, just private people that sometimes start collecting
carousel horses and then decide they want to put carousels

(21:07):
back together, others who are handled by companies. But in
the last four decades, interesting carousels and carousel horses as
collectors items has really swelled, Like in the nineteen seventies,
sort of this kickoff just happened where people started to
become really into them again. And unfortunately, part of the
problem with keeping carousels going is that in many cases
it is more profitable to sell off the amazing horses

(21:30):
than it is to try to keep a carousel running.
They have to run at a profit. There are also
some interesting innovations and modern carousels. Washington's National Zoo now
has one that runs on solar power, and all of
the animals that are represented there are endangered species, so
it's in line with the zoo's theme of conservation. Uh So,

(21:50):
if you love carousels, this is our p s A.
And you want to see them stick around again. They
have to operate in a way that makes money and
makes sense for them to keep going. So go ride one. Seriously,
if you have a local carousel, go buy a ticket
to ride, help keep it going, visit off and bring
your friends. That's what's going to keep this piece of
history alive. And so now we're gonna tie some things

(22:11):
that we've talked about together with the listener mail that
Holly referenced at the top of the episode. Uh, she
or we both actually got this email last year. So
when we tell you that sometimes it takes a while, uh,
I would say almost always said almost always takes a while.
Uh yeah, I mean I wanna I know we always

(22:33):
say it, but I do want to reassure people that
even if we haven't gotten to your request yet, we
may or may not, but we're trying to. So we're
working through it. And this is one of those things
that I love the second we got it, and then
it just kind of got back Bernard by other things
for a while. So and we also do read every
single email that we get, although we are not nearly

(22:54):
as good about answering No. Well, it's hard to keep
up with as well as you know. Unfortunately, the podcast
is not our only job here, so there's we're juggling
some stuff. So I hope no one feels slighted if
they don't get a personal reply. We try too, as
many as we can. But anyway, that's the story. So
this listener mail is from our listener Ashley, and she says,

(23:15):
hello ladies. I love your podcast and I laugh at
your love affairs with delicious food in historical clothing, both
things I wish I knew more about. I have a
happy topic for you since you ask for them so recently.
My job. I work for the world's largest manufacture of
wooden carousels, the Carousel Works, Incorporated of Mansfield, Ohio. This
is site of the historic Ohio State Reformatory where they

(23:37):
filled the Shawshank Redemption. Our carousels are handbuilt, hand carved,
and hand painted. We are one of the few companies
in the world that still does this. And in addition
to having a carousel in nearly every state in the Union,
we have a carousel in Canada too. In South Korea
and the only two carousels at sea on cruise ships
with Royal Caribbeans Oasis of the Seas and Allure of
the Seas. We're putting up our fifty five new care

(24:00):
sell later in our third in South Korea. Right now,
we are restoring the historic Euclid Beach Park, Grand carousel
that was once located in Cleveland, Ohio, just one in
a long line of restorations we've taken part in. It's
also known as PTC Number nineteen. The Philadelphia Toboggan Company
was one of the premier carousel makers in the States,

(24:20):
and their name is tossed around with historic carvers such
as Eleon, herschel Stillman, dentzel, Loof, and Parker. Many of
the wood carvers were immigrants who came from Europe and
found work in the States. Many of these carousels were
richly decorated and painted. However, after the Great Depression they
almost all went away and were replaced with a luminium fiberglass.
It was actually the Carousel Works that created the first

(24:42):
new hand carved carousel in to have been built since
the nineteen thirties, using an antique frame, but all new figures, murals,
and gears. I grew up riding that carousel. This is
a really cool part about her job. It's all cool,
but she says, I myself am a painter at the
Carousel Works, having painted figures and murals for almost three
years now. You can actually see my paint jobs on

(25:04):
a carousel near you at the Birmingham Zoo. It's kind
of near the day trip maybe. Um. We built that
carousel in two thousand two and repainted the figures recently.
In I painted the clouded leopard and the jaguar. That
is the coolest thing. Actually, I actually cyberstocked her work
and went looking for pictures of the clouded leopard and

(25:24):
the jaguar at the Birmingham Zoo carousel, and they're gorgeous.
It's so beautiful. I am so thankful for this listener
mail and the inspiration of it, because it's one of
those topics that it is really beautiful part of history.
And I always like supporting artists, and carousels are in
many cases amazing works of art. So I also kind
of want to return to the days where we played

(25:46):
a game of riding horses and throwing perfume at each other.
I would play that. Well, we can mount that as
our own game. Can have some sort of horrible office
game where we all smell like perfume. My thing is that,
you know, I would want it to be good perfume,
but that gets really expensive. We can just delete an oil.
That's what we'll do there. You go, uh, if you

(26:09):
would like to write to us with an awesome idea
or to tell us about your awesome historically significant job.
You can do that at History Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also connect with this on
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Misston History at Misston History dot tumbler dot com, and
at pinterest dot com slash mist in history. This is
another episode where I can't wait to pin things. Uh.

(26:30):
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spreadshirt dot com if you would like to get some shirts,
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phone or other things that are delightful to you. If
you would like to learn a little bit more related
to what we talked about today, you can go to
our parents site, how stuff works dot com. Go to
the search bar put in roller coasters and you will

(26:50):
get an awesome article about how roller coasters work. Uh.
It is like what I consider how stuff Works classic. UH.
If you would like to visit us online, you can
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(27:16):
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