the Peristyle, with slashes of the blue lake visible between them. The light suffusing the Court was so plentiful and intense, it hurt their eyes. Many of the people around them donned spectacles with blue lenses.
They retreated for lunch. They had innumerable choices. There were lunch counters in most of the main buildings. The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building alone had ten, plus two large restaurants, one German, the other French. The cafe in the Transportation Building, on a terrace over the Golden Door, was always popular and offered a spectacular view of the lagoon district. As the day wore on, Holmes bought them chocolate and lemonade and root beer at one of the Hires Root Beer Oases that dotted the grounds.
They returned to the fair almost daily, two weeks being widely considered the minimum needed to cover it adequately. One of the most compelling buildings, given the nature of the age, was the Electricity Building. In its “theatorium” they listened to an orchestra playing at that very moment in New York. They watched the moving pictures in Edison’s Kinetoscope. Edison also displayed a strange metal cylinder that could store voices. “A man in Europe talks to his wife in America by boxing up a cylinder full of conversation and sending it by express,” the Rand, McNally guidebook said; “a lover talks by the hour into a cylinder, and his sweetheart hears as though the thousand leagues were but a yard.”
And they saw the first electric chair.
They reserved a separate day for the Midway. Nothing in Mississippi or Texas had prepared Anna for what she now experienced. Belly dancers. Camels. A balloon full of hydrogen that carried visitors more than a thousand feet into the sky. “Persuaders” called to her from raised platforms, seeking to entice her into the Moorish Palace with its room of mirrors, its optical illusions, and its eclectic wax museum, where visitors saw figures as diverse as Little Red Riding Hood and Marie Antoinette about to be guillotined. There was color everywhere. The Street in Cairo glowed with soft yellows, pinks, and purples. Even the concession tickets provided a splash of color—brilliant blue for the Turkish Theater, pink for the Lapland Village, and mauve for the Venetian gondolas.
Sadly, the Ferris Wheel was not quite ready.
They exited the Midway and strolled slowly south back to Sixty-third Street and the Alley L. They were tired, happy, and sated, but Harry promised to bring them back one more time—on July 4, for a fireworks display that everyone expected would be the greatest the city had ever witnessed.
Brother Harry seemed delighted with Anna and invited her to stay for the summer. Flattered, she wrote home to request that her big trunk be shipped to the Wrightwood address.
Clearly she had hoped something like this would happen, for she had packed the trunk already.
Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel also went to the fair. He bought a souvenir for his son Howard—a tin man mounted on a spinning top. It quickly became the boy’s favorite possession.
Vertigo
AS FERRIS’S MEN BECAME accustomed to handling the big cars, the process of attaching them to the wheel accelerated. By Sunday evening, June 11, six cars had been hung—an average of two a day since the first turn of the wheel. Now it was time for the first test with passengers, and the weather could not have been better. The sun was gold, the sky a darkling blue in the east.
Mrs. Ferris insisted on being aboard for the first ride, despite Gronau’s attempts to dissuade her. Gronau inspected the wheel to make sure the car would swing without obstruction. The engineer in the pit started the engines and rotated the wheel to bring the test car to one of the platforms. “I did not enter the carriage with the easiest feeling at heart,” Gronau said. “I felt squeamish; yet I could not refuse to take the trip. So I put on a bold face and walked into the car.”
Luther Rice joined them, as did two draftsmen and the city of Chicago’s former bridge engineer, W. C. Hughes. His wife and daughter also stepped aboard.
The car swung gently as the passengers took positions within the car. Glass had not yet been installed in its generous windows, nor the iron grill that would cover the glass. As soon as the last passenger had entered, Rice casually nodded to the engineer, and the wheel began to move. Instinctively everyone reached for posts and sills to keep themselves steady.
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.
