their music drifting across the waters. He wanted Chinese lanterns strung from boats and bridges alike. “Why not skipping and dancing masqueraders with tambourines, such as one sees in Italy? Even lemonade peddlers would help if moving about in picturesque dresses; or cake-sellers, appearing as cooks, with flat cap, and in spotless white from top to toe?” On nights when big events in Jackson Park drew visitors away from the Midway, “could not several of the many varieties of ‘heathen,’ black, white and yellow, be cheaply hired to mingle, unobtrusively, but in full native costume, with the crowd on the Main Court?”
When Burnham read Olmsted’s letter, he must have thought Olmsted had lost his mind. Burnham had devoted the last two years of his life to creating an impression of monumental beauty, and now Olmsted wanted to make visitors laugh. Burnham wanted them struck dumb with awe. There would be no skipping and dancing. No heathen.
The exposition was a dream city, but it was Burnham’s dream. Everywhere it reflected the authoritarian spandrels of his character, from its surfeit of policemen to its strict rules against picking flowers. Nowhere was this as clearly evident as in the fair’s restrictions on unauthorized photography.
Burnham had given a single photographer, Charles Dudley Arnold, a monopoly over the sale of official photographs of the fair, which arrangement also had the effect of giving Burnham control over the kinds of images that got distributed throughout the country and explains why neat, well-dressed, upper-class people tended to populate each frame. A second contractor received the exclusive right to rent Kodaks to fair visitors, the Kodak being a new kind of portable camera that eliminated the need for lens and shutter adjustments. In honor of the fair Kodak called the folding version of its popular model No. 4 box camera the Columbus. The photographs these new cameras created were fast becoming known as “snap-shots,” a term originally used by English hunters to describe a quick shot with a gun. Anyone wishing to bring his own Kodak to the fair had to buy a permit for two dollars, an amount beyond the reach of most visitors; the Midway’s Street in Cairo imposed an additional one-dollar fee. An amateur photographer bringing a conventional large camera and the necessary tripod had to pay ten dollars, about what many out-of-town visitors paid for a full day at the fair, including lodging, meals, and admission.
For all Burnham’s obsession with detail and control, one event at the fair escaped his attention. On June 17 a small fire occurred in the Cold Storage Building, a castlelike structure at the southwest corner of the grounds built by Hercules Iron Works. Its function was to produce ice, store the perishable goods of exhibitors and restaurants, and operate an ice rink for visitors wishing to experience the novelty of skating in July. The building was a private venture: Burnham had nothing to do with its construction beyond approving its design. Oddly enough, its architect was named Frank P. Burnham, no relation.
The fire broke out in the cupola at the top of the central tower but was controlled quickly and caused only a hundred dollars in damage. Even so, the fire prompted insurance underwriters to take a closer look at the building, and what they saw frightened them. A key element of the design had never been installed. Seven insurers canceled their policies. Fire Marshal Edward W. Murphy, acting chief of the World’s Fair Fire Department, told a committee of underwriters, “That building gives us more trouble than any structure on the grounds. It is a miserable firetrap and will go up in smoke before long.”
No one told Burnham about the fire, no one told him of the cancellations, and no one told him of Murphy’s forecast.
At Last
AT THREE-THIRTY P.M. on Wednesday, June 21, 1893, fifty-one days late, George Washington Gale Ferris took a seat on the speakers’ platform built at the base of his wheel. The forty-piece Iowa State Marching Band already had boarded one of the cars and now played “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Mayor Harrison joined Ferris on the platform, as did Bertha Palmer, the entire Chicago city council, and an assortment of fair officials. Burnham apparently was not present.
The cars were fully glazed, and wire grills had been placed over all the windows so that, as one reporter put it, “No crank will have an opportunity to commit suicide from this wheel, no hysterical woman shall jump from a window.” Conductors trained to soothe riders who were afraid of heights stood in handsome uniforms at each car’s door.
The band quieted, the wheel stopped. Speeches followed. Ferris was last to take the podium and happily assured the audience that the man condemned for having “wheels in his head” had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance. He attributed the success of the enterprise to his wife, Margaret, who stood behind him on the platform. He dedicated the wheel to the engineers of America.
Mrs. Ferris gave him a gold whistle, then she and Ferris and the other dignitaries climbed into the first car. Harrison wore his black slouch hat.
When Ferris blew the whistle, the Iowa State band launched into “America,” and the wheel again began to turn. The group made several circuits, sipping champagne and smoking cigars, then exited the wheel to the cheers of the crowd that now thronged its base. The first paying passengers stepped aboard.
The wheel continued rolling with stops only for loading and unloading until eleven o’clock that night. Even with every car full, the wheel never faltered, its bearings never groaned.
The Ferris Company was not shy about promoting its founder’s accomplishment. In an illustrated pamphlet called the “Ferris Wheel Souvenir” the company wrote: “Built in the face of every obstacle, it is an achievement which reflects so much credit upon the inventor, that were Mr. Ferris the subject of a Monarchy, instead of a citizen of a great Republic, his honest heart would throb beneath a breast laden with the decorations of royalty.” Ferris could not resist tweaking the Exposition Company for not granting him a concession sooner than it did. “Its failure to appreciate its importance,” the souvenir said, “has cost the Exposition Company many thousands of dollars.”
This was an understatement. Had the Exposition Company stood by its original June 1892 concession rather than waiting until nearly six months later, the wheel would have been ready for the fair’s May 1 opening. Not only did the exposition lose its 50 percent share of the wheel’s revenue for those fifty-one days—it lost the boost in overall admission that the wheel likely would have generated and that Burnham so desperately wanted. Instead it had stood for that month and a half as a vivid advertisement of the fair’s incomplete condition.
Safety fears lingered, and Ferris did what he could to ease them. The souvenir pamphlet noted that even a full load of passengers had “no more effect on the movements or the speed than if they were so many flies”—an oddly ungracious allusion. The pamphlet added, “In the construction of this great wheel, every conceivable danger has been calculated and provided for.”
But Ferris and Gronau had done their jobs too well. The design was so elegant, so adept at exploiting the strength of thin strands of steel, that the wheel appeared incapable of withstanding the stresses placed upon it. The wheel may not have been unsafe, but it looked unsafe.
“In truth, it seems too light,” a reporter observed. “One fears the slender rods which must support the whole enormous weight are too puny to fulfill their office. One cannot avoid the thought of what would happen if a high wind should come sweeping across the prairie and attack the structure broadside. Would the thin rods be sufficient to sustain not only the enormous weight of the structure and that of the 2,000 passengers who might chance to be in the cars, but the pressure of the wind as well?”
In three weeks that question would find an answer.
Rising Wave
AND SUDDENLY THEY BEGAN to come. The enthusiasm Olmsted had identified during his travels, though still far from constituting a tidal wave, at last seemed to begin propelling visitors to Jackson Park. By the end of June, even though the railroads still had not dropped their fares, paid attendance at the exposition had more than doubled, the average for the month rising to 89,170 from May’s dismal 37,501. It was still far below the 200,000
