

This ride, called Loop The Loop, was oval-shaped to reduce g forces. In 1901 a man named Edward Prescott built a new looping coaster, also at Coney Island. The circular design was very unforgiving in the g-force department, and whiplash complaints were no doubt part of the reason why it only lasted a few seasons. Nearly 50 years later, in 1895, Lina Beecher revived the idea with the Flip-Flap Railway, a 25-foot circular loop at Coney Island. The rider would sit in a wheeled cart, pray to the physics gods, and hang on as the car whipped down the hill and through the loop with only centrifugal force keeping the cart and rider on course. This Paris attraction, called the Centrifuge Railway (Chemin du Centrifuge), featured a 43-foot high hill leading into a 13-foot wide loop. Way back in 1846, an Englishman apparently sold a loop-the-loop coaster ride to the French. It continued to operate, with an amazing safety record, until it was closed in 1933. Eventually a restaurant and hotel were built at the top, and the ride attracted more than 35,000 passengers a year. In 1872, a new tunnel was constructed, which made the track obsolete forĬoal-hauling.


People would pay $1 to ride up the gradual incline, then the steam engine was removed, and the cars were pushed back down the hill, with speeds apparently reaching nearly 100 mph. Eventually, the mules were replaced by a steam engine that hauled the empty cars up a longer, more gradual track. Thrill-seekers soon took notice, and the track was converted to a thrill ride in the afternoons. Mules, whose job was to pull the cars back up the hill, and a brave, solitary brakeman were apparently the first participants in this nine-mile, hair-raising tear down the mountain. The track was built so that miners could load mine cars with coal, shove them over the hillside, and let gravity do the rest. It was the second railroad ever built (1827) in the United States, and was originally used to haul coal from mountaintop mines down to the Lehigh River. The ultimate American thrill ride - past or present - may well have been the Mauch Chunk Switchback Gravity Railroad, in Mauch Chunk, Penn. It had two tracks that ran next to each other, so riders could race (and onlookers could bet on the outcome). In 1817 someone attached the carts to the tracks and dubbed the ride the Russian Mountains of Belleville. Eventually, someone swapped wheels for runners, and more ambitious and thrilling tracks were created. Undeterred, he or someone else developed an allseason solution by waxing the sled runners. Somewhere along the line, a French businessman brought the ice slide idea back to France, perhaps forgetting that Russian-like winters might be a prerequisite for their success. Riders would use a wooden sled or block of ice to slide at up to 50 miles-per-hour (mph) down giant icecovered wooden hills and crash-land into a sand pile at the bottom. These large wooden structures, up to 70-feet tall, were popular throughout Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries. Most coaster historians consider Russian ice slides the forerunners of roller coasters. But we do know one thing: that mind-clearing adrenaline buzz you only get from being scared out of your wits is a timeless human endeavor. It’s difficult to trace the origins of the thrill ride - for all we know, Stonehenge is just the ruined supports for an early roller coaster.
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