Passage V

Ferris Reinvents a Wheel

The following paragraphs may or may not be in the most logical order. Each paragraph is numbered in brackets, and question 75 will ask you to choose where Paragraph 5 should most logically be placed.

[1]

Six months before the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, the fair's organizers realized they had a big problem. No one had yet designed an engineering marvel to capture the public's imagination. No one had proposed anything like the Eiffel Tower, which had been such a crowd pleaser at the Paris Centennial Exhibition in 1889.

[2]

Through the newspapers, the Chicago event called for submissions of a design. The attraction, they indicated, should be somehow unconventional. In contrast, if it were on a grand scale, so much the best.

[3]

George Ferris was intrigued. The thirty-three-year-old Pittsburgh resident decided that his childhood memory of a huge water wheel might be the genesis of something exciting for Chicago's fair. The wheel Ferris remembered from his youth turned more slow in a river current, hoisting buckets of water into a drinking trough for horses and mules. Ferris's inspiration was to design a wheel 250 feet tall that would carry hundreds of people with enough courage to go up for a ride high in the air.

[4]

When the inventor revealed his plans to the fair's organizers, he was told that the structure looked flimsy and that people would be afraid to ride in them. But Ferris persisted and eventually convinced the planners that his creation would be safe.

[5]

Not only was the Ferris wheel a success in Chicago, but when it was later dismantled and shipped to St. Louis, fairgoers there lined up enthusiastically for rides at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904.

[6]

The wheel became an instant hit when the exposition opened on May 1, 1893, being swept off the ground proved to be a thrill few fairgoers could resist. Concerns about safety faded as the wheel operated daily, for the nineteen weeks of the exposition without a mishap.

[7]

Modern versions of the Ferris wheel are still in use today. What was once Ferris's bold innovation is now a long-standing worldwide favorite at fairs and amusement parks throughout the world.