The Origins of the Amusement Park — A two-part series

• Part 1: Machines Not Built for Play (current)
• Part 2: From a Spring in the Woods to the Theme Park

The Origins of the Amusement Park Part 1: Machines Not Built for Play

In 1873, something strange was happening in Mauch Chunk, a mountain town in Pennsylvania. Just months earlier, coal cars had rumbled down this track from the mountaintop. Now people were lining up to buy tickets for a ride on the very same rails. The line had originally been laid in 1827 as a freight railroad, built by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company to move coal from the mines at Summit Hill down to the canal below using gravity alone.^[1] But in 1872, a new railroad was built on the other side of the mountain, and there was no longer any reason to send coal down this particular track. In truth, the railroad had already become a popular attraction well before that. In 1869 alone, more than thirty thousand people paid to ride it, and once it lost its freight function entirely, it was converted into a tourist-only line.^[1]

Pull apart almost anything people today call a “ride,” and you find a story much like the Mauch Chunk railroad’s. The carousel began as training equipment for teaching cavalry soldiers to handle a lance. The ancestor of the Ferris wheel was a fairground attraction that people cranked by hand. The roller coaster started as a winter pastime at the Russian court and passed through an American coal railroad on its way to becoming what it is today. The flume ride was once an artificial waterway built to move timber down a mountainside. None of the four was designed from the start to entertain anyone. Military training equipment, a fairground curiosity, a seasonal means of transport, and industrial infrastructure each lost its original purpose, or found itself with idle capacity, and was repurposed into a ride.

The Carousel — Cavalry Soldiers Spearing Rings

The English word “carousel” comes from a game that imitated war. Around the twelfth century, Arab and Turkish cavalrymen practiced a training exercise in which they threw and caught clay balls filled with perfume. Whoever dropped a ball got doused. Crusaders who watched this exercise called it garosello in Italian and carosella in Spanish — both words meaning “little battle.”^[2] The term eventually passed through French and became the English “carousel.”

As the exercise made its way into Europe, its form changed. The game of tossing balls from a galloping horse evolved into “ring-tilting,” a contest in which riders speared small rings suspended in midair with a lance.^[3] To practice for this contest, a device appeared in France: legless wooden horses hung from the arms of a rotating pole.^[2] A person, horse, or mule turned the central post, and the wooden horses swung around in a circle. This training device is the direct ancestor of today’s carousel.

The decisive moment that spread the name across Europe was an event held in France in 1662. To celebrate the birth of the heir to the throne, Louis XIV staged a grand tournament called the Grand Carrousel in the forecourt of the Tuileries Palace in Paris. There were 655 mounted participants among a total of 1,297, and more than fifteen thousand spectators came to watch.^[4] The square in front of the Louvre in Paris is still called the Place du Carrousel because of this event.^[4] Even at this point, however, the carousel remained a lavish spectacle for the nobility — not a ride that anyone could pay to board.

There is a reason this spectacle stayed a spectacle instead of becoming something more accessible. The cost of staging a single tournament had climbed as high as £1,000 in England around 1610, and as gunpowder weapons transformed the battlefield, the value of the exercise as genuine military training faded along with it. England held its last royal tournament in 1625.^[3] Once the expensive noble pageant disappeared, only its name and form remained. Real lances and real horses gave way to carved wooden horses and mechanical apparatus.

The carousel’s transformation into a popular ride came courtesy of nineteenth-century mechanical engineering. In 1861, the English inventor Thomas Bradshaw unveiled the first steam-powered carousel at Bolton’s Pot Market fairground and patented the design in 1863.^[2] In 1880, another English engineer, Frederick Savage, developed a system of gears and cranks that let the horses rise and fall at different heights, adding the sensation that they were actually galloping.^[5] Once a steam engine replaced human arms or a mule’s muscle, the carousel finally left behind its origins as a spectacle of noble military training and became a ride anyone could board for the price of a ticket.

The Ferris Wheel — A Record 273 Years Ahead of Ferris

Mention a Ferris wheel and most people picture the “Ferris Wheel” that appeared at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Built by the engineer George Ferris, it stood 80.4 meters tall, carried thirty-six gondolas that each held sixty people for a total capacity of 2,160, and was America’s answer to a challenge: to build something to rival the Eiffel Tower, which had stunned visitors at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.^[6] But while Ferris did hold a genuine patent on his structure, he was not the one who first thought up the idea of a giant wheel that carries people around as it turns.

On May 17, 1620, the English traveler Peter Mundy witnessed a strange device while watching the Bayram festivities (today’s Kurban Bayram, or Eid al-Adha) in Philippopolis, an Ottoman-ruled city in the Balkans known today as Plovdiv, Bulgaria. In his travel journal, he called it a “pleasure wheel” and described it as resembling “the wheel of a crane at a custom-house quay,” with small seats hung here and there around its rim to carry children.^[7] He added that the children stayed sitting upright no matter how the wheel rose or fell — a principle no different from how a Ferris wheel’s gondolas work today. It was likely turned by several strong men using their arms. Mundy was a merchant and travel writer who kept meticulous records of the customs he observed everywhere he went, and his journal was formally published in the twentieth century by the Hakluyt Society, a scholarly organization.^[7] That makes it a reliable historical record, not a passing note jotted down by some traveler in transit.

In Plovdiv, the device was known as a “karnushka,” and to this day several European countries still refer to this early form of Ferris wheel as a “Bulgarian wheel” or a “Bulgarian ride.”^[8] Two hundred seventy-three years before Ferris was even born, the prototype of the Ferris wheel was already turning at fairgrounds using nothing but wood and human muscle — no steel, no steam engine required. It’s also worth noting that Mundy did not write about the device as though he were seeing anything new. He described it matter-of-factly as one of several “swings” commonly found at that region’s festivals.^[7] In other words, by 1620 this device was already not some unfamiliar invention but a familiar sight at fairground celebrations. What Ferris achieved was to take this old fairground attraction and scale it up into a steel structure that became the landmark of a World’s Fair.

The Roller Coaster — From Ice Slides to a Coal Railroad

The roots of the roller coaster lie in the ice hills of the winter gardens of Saint Petersburg, Russia. Starting in the seventeenth century, Russians built tall wooden-framed hills, coated them in ice, and rode sleds down them for fun.^[9] The trouble was that this pastime only worked in winter. In 1784, Catherine the Great ordered a wheeled cart running on grooved rails to be built at her summer residence in Oranienbaum, creating a summer version of the ice hill.^[9] For the first time, a pastime that had been trapped by the seasons became a mechanical device that could be enjoyed year-round.

The pastime then made its way to France by an unexpected route. After Napoleon’s defeat, sometime between 1815 and 1816, Russian soldiers occupying Paris are believed to have introduced their winter amusement to the French.^[9] In 1817, Nicolas Bozon opened a ride called Promenades Aériennes (“aerial walks”) at the Parc Beaujon in Paris, which the French called montagnes russes — “Russian mountains.”^[9] Most of the similar rides built afterward kept this name, and to this day French and Spanish speakers still call roller coasters montagnes russes and montaña rusa, respectively — literally, Russian mountains.

The interesting twist is found in Russian itself. The Russian word for roller coaster is американские горки (amerikanskiye gorki) — “American hills.”^[9] A Russian winter pastime traveled through Europe and picked up a name there, was carried across the Atlantic under that name and built into a large machine in America, and was then reimported back to Russia, this time bearing the label “American.” Exactly when and how this name became fixed is not documented with precision, but it appears to align with the twentieth-century trend of large-scale American roller coasters becoming famous worldwide.

The key scene in this “Americanization” played out at the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway mentioned earlier. Someone had taken notice of the railway after it lost its original job of hauling freight and turned into a tourist attraction: LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a minister and businessman. Drawing on his own experience riding the mountain railway at Mauch Chunk, he envisioned a machine that could recreate that thrill on a smaller scale.^[10] On June 16, 1884, Thompson opened his “Switchback Railway” at Coney Island in New York. A modest machine 15 meters high and 180 meters long, running at about six miles an hour, it was nonetheless the first commercial roller coaster in the United States.^[10] And Thompson gave this ride the very same name as the Mauch Chunk railway: “Switchback.” The name of a railroad once used to haul coal had become the name of a ride that carried no cargo at all.

The Flume Ride — A Waterway Built for Timber

The flume ride’s ancestor is the “log flume,” a wooden waterway built by the American logging industry in the nineteenth century. Moving logs cut in mountain camps down to sawmills at the base of the mountain was a serious headache. Horse- or ox-drawn carts struggled with the rough mountain terrain, and the cost was high. Instead, loggers took advantage of the mountain’s slope, built water-filled wooden channels, and floated the logs down them. Building a flume was cheaper than building a road, and crossing a ravine required only a light bridge rather than a heavy one.^[11]

In the late 1860s, J. W. Haines built the first successful log flume of this kind in the Sierra Nevada, a channel stretching roughly thirty-two miles from Alpine County, California, to Empire City, Nevada.^[12] In 1870, Haines patented a V-shaped flume design that used the flow of the water itself to push along any logs that got stuck. The patent was later invalidated in litigation, but the V-shaped design itself became the standard for timber flumes throughout the Sierra Nevada region.^[12]

Riding the flume down the mountain also turned into an unexpected form of entertainment among logging workers. Laborers who floated small boats down the flume to inspect the equipment began to enjoy the speed and the drops along the way.^[11] That experience made its way into an actual ride in 1963, at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, Texas. Built in partnership with the developer Arrow Development, the ride was named “El Aserradero,” Spanish for “the sawmill.”^[13] An industrial facility once built to carry logs became a ride that carried people seated in log-shaped boats — and even kept the name of its original destination, the sawmill. The ride was a major success: a second flume was added in 1968, and it set off a wave of flume rides spreading to amusement parks around the world.^[13]

What the Non-Rides Had in Common

Line up all four machines side by side, and the same shape repeats. Whenever an original purpose disappeared, or a gap opened up between that purpose and idle time, play moved in to fill it. Cavalry lance training lost its battlefield value once gunpowder weapons changed warfare, and spectacle and entertainment filled the vacancy. The fairground wheel was, from the start, an attraction for festival season. Russian nobles’ winter pastime ran up against the limits of the season and turned into a mechanical device, while an American coal railroad lost its reason for existing overnight because of a single new tunnel. The logging flume was, from the outset, infrastructure designed to carry timber, not people.

What runs through all four is, in the end, repurposing. A machine or device built by someone for one purpose got picked up by someone else and used for a completely different one. And this repurposing usually happened by accident. If Thompson had never ridden the Mauch Chunk railway, if Savage had never experimented with a new mechanism, if no one had ever confirmed that Haines’s flume could hold people just as safely as timber, these rides would look nothing like they do today.

American readers can still visit the very rails where this story began. In 1954, Mauch Chunk merged with its neighbor East Mauch Chunk and renamed itself Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, after the Olympic athlete, whose widow arranged for his burial there in exchange for the honor — even though Thorpe himself had never set foot in the town during his lifetime.^[14] The old town center is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Old Mauch Chunk Historic District, and a local preservation foundation has studied how to preserve and interpret what remains of the old switchback line on Mount Pisgah for visitors. A railroad built to move coal, then repurposed to move tourists, now sits inside a town that itself was renamed for reasons that had nothing to do with railroads or amusement at all — one more layer of repurposing stacked on top of the ones already traced here.

So how did machines born in different places, in different eras, for different reasons, end up gathered together in a single spot? The concept of the “amusement park” itself — the space where a carousel, a Ferris wheel, and a roller coaster all stand side by side — has its own separate history. That story begins at a spring in the woods, older than any of these rides.

Next: Part 2: From a Spring in the Woods to the Theme Park