Since the full heat of summer is now here, and we’re in the traditionally slow week heading into the July 4th holiday, I’m going to spend some time looking, with an engineering perspective of course, at some of the strangeness constructed along the beaches. Not this kind of strangeness, though:
No one was going to Coney Island around 1900 to dig coal. The Great Coal Mine was apparently some kind of hybrid between a dark ride and one of the “educational” displays, where patrons rode in coal cars and saw something they were told was mining. It’s a bizarre cultural artifact, but it’s not strange in an engineering sense. The entrance to another ride just to the left gives a nice history of rollercoasters in a name: the L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway Company. The earliest rollercoasters were based on railroad technology and the phrase “scenic railway” was one of the ways they were described.
The kind of engineering strangeness I’m talking about can be seen at Whirl The Whirl, a ride at Luna Park. That’s the center of Luna Park at the top of the page, showing off its electric lights at night. The Whirl the Whirl was nearby and here it is in operation:
The gondolas are tilted outwards from centrifugal force* and slightly blurred while the rest of the photo is crystal clear: obviously the entire cross-shaped structure of the four arms and four gondolas is spinning around the central tower. There are guy-wires to held the tower vertical – the structure of the tower is a built-up laced steel column – and another set of cables running to some big sheaves at the tower top.
It’s unfortunate that the gondola nearest the camera blocks a view of the hub, because it seems like there might be useful information there. My guess is that the same cables that raised and lowered the arms also contributed to the spin, by way of a pulley system that we can see part of to the right of the tower. This also seems like a primitive mechanism with little or no redundancy, where a single broken cable could result in an accident.
* Yes, I know that centrifugal force is fictitious, and simply a name we give to the effects of inertia. But try describing an amusement-park ride without using that convenient fiction.
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