George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.

George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. was an American civil engineer who designed the original Ferris wheel for Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

World’s Columbian Exposition: A 1893 world’s fair in Chicago marking the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The exposition commissioned the monumental wheel that made Ferris famous.
Ferris wheel: A large vertical rotating structure carrying passenger cars around its circumference. Ferris’s design established the form later associated with his name.
1893 Ferris Wheel: The enormous passenger wheel built for Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. This was Ferris’s specific design and the attraction that established his reputation.
George Washington Gale: An American educator and Presbyterian minister who founded institutions that shaped early higher education in Illinois. Ferris was named after this maternal grandfather, a prominent figure in his family history.
Ferris wheel (ride type): A class of rotating amusement rides whose passenger cars travel around a large vertical wheel. The ride type took its common English name from Ferris’s 1893 design.
Daniel Burnham: An American architect and urban planner who directed the design of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Burnham challenged engineers to propose a structure that could rival the Eiffel Tower.
Structural engineering: The branch of engineering concerned with the strength, stability, and behavior of structures under loads. The wheel’s unprecedented size posed a structural problem, not merely an amusement-design challenge.
Great Wheel: A giant observation wheel built for London’s Empire of India Exhibition in 1895. Built after Chicago’s wheel, it adapted the large passenger-wheel idea for another exposition.
Gustave Eiffel: A French civil engineer and entrepreneur associated with the Eiffel Tower and major iron structures. Eiffel’s tower provided the engineering spectacle Ferris’s fair attraction was meant to rival.
Midway Plaisance: A broad parkway in Chicago that hosted the entertainment district of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The fairground’s Midway became associated with commercial amusement and attractions such as Ferris’s wheel.

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Traveling carnivalRelated: His wheel became an emblem of large-scale fair attractions that touring operators could later adapt.