Ritalin Invitees on Nostr: I guess I always assumed that Ferris wheels were just a thing that started to exist ...

I guess I always assumed that Ferris wheels were just a thing that started to exist at some point. That they were invented by a guy named Ferris is, I suppose, not surprising, but I never really thought about it. It's like learning that the escalator was invented by a guy named Ferdinand Von Escalator. Obviously someone must have invented the escalator (it turns out that a fair number of people were actually involved and the history is rather convoluted to the point where I'm unable to say exactly who invented the fucking escalator) but one doesn't really think about it.

One also doesn't think that the elevator (which was not invented by Giuseppe Elevatore) predates the escalator by so many centuries, but while the safety elevator was invented by Elisha Otis (founder of the company which bears his name and which still manufactures elevators and escalators), the elevator as a concept is about as old as dirt and Archimedes is the first reported builder of one, although he probably didn't invent it, sometime in the Third Century before the Common Era (conveniently delineated by the supposed birth of Jesus even though we're not religious about it at all). That sentence was a catastrophe and I'd like to apologize to everyone involved.

Anyway, I picked escalators totally at random because I thought the name "Ferdinand Von Escalator" would be funny. It was, but now I've sort of lost the thread, which used to be that there was this dude named Ferris (last name; he was not Matthew Broderick) who invented the wheel named for him, which is so obvious as to need no repetition. And further, I'm in very real danger of becoming so meta about this that I might be classified as discourse of some kind or other and shunned.

Damn it, I said very clearly earlier this morning that I felt that entirely enough learning and growth had taken place for the day, and yet here I am learning pointless things. Did you know, for instance, that the first elevator shaft was built 4 years before the first safety elevator had been invented? That's what Wikipedia says, but I take exception to that because I feel like there had to have been shafts involved in elevators prior to Otis inventing the safety elevator. What did they put elevators in before shafts? Wikipedia is silent on the subject. Maybe it's only an elevator shaft if safety is involved. Maybe the vertical passage through which an elevator travels was known as an elevator doom vortex prior to the invention of the safety elevator. We may never know the answer because "elevator doom vortex" is too much fun to say for me to look into it further.

I wonder if George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. (which was his name, and holy shit, what a name to be saddled with) ever introduced himself to people with, "The name's Ferris. Maybe you've heard of my wheel." It seems unlikely but who knows? Tragically, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. died of typhoid fever (which is not the same thing as typhus, you'll probably not be interested to know) and his ashes weren't collected from Pittsburgh for over a year, so it's probable that, given that this was just three years after his wheel was inaugurated at the Chicago World's Fair (or the World's Columbian Exposition as it was known at the time) of 1893, and given that Ferris spent most of the remainder of his life after the Fair locked in a legal battle for his share of the profits from his wheel, he didn't get much chance to use it as a come-on. Holy shit, that sentence was almost a war crime.

It's entirely possible, though, that the first American serial killer, H.H. Holmes, could have ridden the first Ferris wheel. That is, if H.H. Holmes is in fact the first American serial killer. I guess Andrew Jackson is out of the running because it's not serial murder if you're the president and your victims are brown people. I digress.

Ferris' wheel wasn't the only attraction at the fair. One of the others was the zoopraxiscope (which was not invented by Evgeny Zoopraxiscope), Eadweard Muybridge's nascent motion picture projector. Eadweard Muybridge had a name which stole vowels from surrounding words, so if there are sm mssng frm ths prgrph, tht's wh (and sometimes why). The parenthetical phrase at the end of the preceding sentence was hilarious to me but will undoubtedly be unrecognized in its own time.

But, to come full circle and stop this crazy machine, another attraction at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 (a mouthful in and of itself) was the first travelator (which was not invented by Francois Trąvèlator) or moving walkway, another thing which I had never really thought about being invented by anyone. Where would the Jetsons be without Joseph Lyman Silsbee? Where would Frank Lloyd Wright? Where would the people of Chicago?

Truly, Ferris built a wheel and it is us.