Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I've mentioned on the show recently that I've been trying to improve my French on Duelingo and for some languages. Duolingo has these stories where the characters have this conversation in an at least hypothetically real world kind of scenario. And there's this one where two friends Lely and Zuri are having They're having a conversation in line to ride a roller coaster, and every time Duolingo has shown me this story, I have wound up mostly focused on the fact that the French word for roller coaster is montagnous or Russian mountains, and so every time I'm like, what is the story there? And that is how we got to this episode. So during this episode, we're going to be touching a little bit on amusement park history more and generally, because there becomes a point where these two things are very tightly interconnected. But one thing we're not really going to talk about much is like roller coaster crashes and derailments and other similar incidents because there have just been so many with so many different causes. It felt sort of like trying to mention all the car crashes in the building of the interstate highway system, right. It just it felt like a list of carnage that wasn't adding up to some sort of greater understanding of anything. So that is not really going to be a focus of this. And also, I know there are a lot of roller coasterficionados out there, and there are folks who have extremely strong opinions on specific roller coasters and types of roller coasters and roller coaster records and particular designers. So I just want to say upfront that this is not in any way an exhaustive chronicle of every single thing about roller coasters. If we did not mention your favorite thing. This is more of like the trajectory of how these rides evolved over the last centuries. That could be an entire podcast just called coasting. And I maybe it is somewhere Montagna rous got their start, as the name suggests, in Russia. Specifically in Russia in the seventeenth century, as a winter pastime, people built wooden ramps and covered them with water, and that water then froze into a slick surface, and then riders would climb stairs or a ladder to the top of this frozen ramp, get into some kind of vehicle like a sled or a hollowed out log, or even an ice block with a straw seat, and slide down. Often at night, water would be applied to the ramp so that it could freeze back over into a new and totally smooth, fresh surface by morning. These frozen hills were nicknamed flying mountains. They could be up to six hundred feet or one hundred and eighty three meters long, and riders reached speeds that were reportedly up to fifty miles an hour, which is about eighty kilometers an hour. Often, at the end of the ride you would come out at the base of a second tower, so you could climb up that and just do it all over again. The logs or the ice blocks were brought back up along a track to one side of the hill, or in some cases when people were using more lightweight sleds, they would just be carried up the steps by the riders. These were really popular public attractions, especially around Saint Petersburg, and wealthy people also built smaller versions of them. On their estates for their own enjoyment. Two different empresses have been noted as having a particular love for the flying mountains, Elizabeth, who reigned from seventeen forty one to seventeen sixty two, and Katherine the Second also known as Katherine the Great, who reigned from seventeen sixty two to seventeen ninety six. So super quick Russian history refresher. Catherine the Great did not directly follow Elizabeth. Elizabeth's successor was her nephew Peter the Third, who ruled as emperor for about six months before being overthrown and assassinated. Katherine definitely played a part in his overthrow. There is still some debate over her role in his death. If you watch the show The Great, that is a version not entirely historically accurate, but I love it. Yeah. So. Some sources say that Catherine the Great was the first person to have one of these mountains fitted with grooves that could accommodate carriage wheels so that they could be used in the summer. But English clergyman John glen King, who was chaplain to Saint Petersburg, wrote a letter in seventeen seventy eight in which he credited Elizabeth, saying that Elizabeth had a flying mountain built at the Imperial Palace at Zarskicello that was usable during the summer and the winter. Catherine does seem to have built more than one of them as well, including one at or Niniba Park in Saint Petersburg. King described the flying mountain this way, quote, you will observe that there are five mounts of unequal heights. The first and highest is full thirty feet perpendicular altitude the momentum with which they descend. This carries them over the second, which is about five or six feet lower, just sufficient to allow for the friction and resistance, and so on to the last, from which they are conveyed by a gentle descent with nearly the same velocity over a piece of water into a little island. He went on to say, quote these slides, which are about a furlong and a half in length, are made of wood that they may be used in summer as well as in winter. The processes two or four persons fit in a little carriage, and one stands behind. For the more there are in it, the greater the swiftness with which it goes. That runs on casters and in grooves to keep it in its right direction, and it descends with a wonderful rapidity. Under the hills is a machine worked by horses for drawing the carriages back again with the company in them. Such a work as this would have been enormous in most countries for the labor and expense at cost, as well as the vast quantity of wood used in it. There's a little bit of conjecture around how the Russian flying mountains made their way to France and evolved into Montaigne Rouse. One likely scenario is that French soldiers saw them in eighteen twelve when Napoleon invaded the Russian Empire, although some of the sources used in this episode say the first one in France was actually built before that. Most of France really did not get cold enough in the winter to maintain a frozen sliding surface, so like the Russian empresses did during the summer, builders in France turned to vehicles that could roll down the hills on wheels. They had no safety equipment. People just had to hang on. Yeah, this episode just had a particularly large amount of sources saying totally contradictory things with absolute authorities. So I found some sources that said the very first of these were built in eighteen twelve, and then others that very confidently said that the first one was in like eighteen oh four, And which is right, I don't know. And in eighteen sixteen journal entry though armand Marie Antoinette Duplaci Marquise de Montcalm Gozon describes a French Montagne rouse this way quote. It is an inclined plane made of planks of sixty feet more or less, at the top of which is placed a sled on which one sits, and which brings you to the bottom with an extreme rapidity. This pleasure, which is not without danger, may be compared, according to the opinion of several people, to the impression that one would feel if one fell from a fourth floor window, which does not seem very seductive. These mountains are made of ice in Russia, and one hopes, in spite of the difference in climate, to imitate them in winter. A man said, in speaking of them, that he was surprised that this fashion does not elicit complaint against the influence of Russia, which is very common today to render responsible for everything. These amusements were extremely popular in France, and they were also known as promenade rienne or aerial walks. There were songs and plays about them, and people could buy all kinds of mountains souvenirs. Intense rivalries also developed between competing mountains, and in eighteen seventeen, these rivalries even inspired a satirical play called the Battle of the Mountains or bougeu faull. This popularity was somewhat ironic. Number one. These attractions seemed to have been most popular and most widespread in France in eighteen sixteen. In eighteen seventeen, in other words, during the year without a summer, which was much chillier and much rainier than normal, you can look out for an upcoming Saturday classic on the year without a summer. Number two. This was just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. France had been defeated in eighteen fifteen and Napoleon had abdicated for the second time under the Treaty of Paris of eighteen fifteen, which officially ended the war. France was occupied by the nations that had fought against and those occupiers included Russia. It's possible that the number of montagner Rouse, built in France during the Eighteenteens, was made possible by Russian occupiers who already knew how to do it. But it's also a little odd that French citizens seemed to have really fl and celebrated something that was so closely associated with Russia, something that the Marquis alluded to in her journal entry. Montagna Rouss also became a metaphor in France during this period, both in literature and in casual conversation. A lot like roller coaster can be used today to describe the various up and downs of life, among other things. Most of these attractions closed by the end of eighteen eighteen. Sending a wheeled vehicle down a wooden track at high speeds naturally caused a lot of wear, and these tracks weren't maintained very well, so they eventually broke down. The popularity of the Montagne Rousse also plummeted that year after two riders were killed when the car that they were in stopped suddenly. The post war occupation of France also ended in eighteen eighteen, and it's possible that after that point people did kind of want to get away from all the foreign influences. We should also take a moment here to note that French is not the only language to call roller coasters some variation on Russian or Russian mountains. A lot of other languages in Western Europe do, including Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, and Italian, among others. The next stretch of roller coaster history, kind of like this one was, is a little contradictory and sometimes vague, and we will get to it after a sponsor break. If you pull up five different articles about roller coasters, you may find at least that many completely different and yet totally authoritative declarations of which thing was the first roller coaster. Some of them also either named the Russian Flying Mountains or the French Montaigne Rouse that we already talked about, And to be fair, these do seem pretty similar to roller coasters, especially the ones that like specifically described going down this progressively smaller series of hills. We are going to talk about some of the other various contenders. In the eighteen thirties and forties, a number of centrifugal railways were built in various cities in Europe. There's some speculation that these were inspired by children's toys in which you would keep a marble or a ball rolling around on the inside of a wire track. A centrifugal railway was basically a downward slope leading into a circular vertical loop with an upward slope on the other side. Riders would get in the car on one end of the slope and ride through the vertical loop to the other side. Accounts of these centrifugal railways suggests that it was as much about the terrifying thrill of the experience as it was about watching other people do it and maybe not coming out unscathed. This was just not a smooth ride. It was full of jolts and bumps, and because the loop was shaped like a circle, the gravitational forces involved could be really intense. There also wasn't really any safety equipment, reportedly not even like seat belts. Centrifugal force was what was supposed to keep people in their seats, and that worked as long as nothing happened to cause the car to either slow down or stop suddenly. Builders tested these railways by sending a variety of inanimate objects through the loop like eggs or sandbags, as well as animals, including monkeys. In the eighteen sixties, a coal transport near what's now jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, became an amusement ride. Starting in eighteen twenty eight, the mock Chunk Switched Back Railway had carried coal about nine miles, mostly downhill, from the mines to the Lehigh Canal. A brakeman controlled the speed of the descent, and once enough cars had reached the bottom, a mule team would haul them back to the top. A return track with a steam powered hauler was added in eighteen forty four. This return track was ratcheted to keep the cars from sliding back down as the hauler stopped for some reason. Ratchet systems are still used on anti rollback devices on roller coasters today. That's what makes that repetitive clacking noise that you hear when a roller coaster is being pulled up a hill. In about eighteen sixty five, the Mock Chunks Switched Back Railway started carrying human tourists as passengers and the evenings when the mines weren't running. Then in the eighteen seventies, construction of a tunnel made the railway unnecessary for coal transport, and this railway became a tourist attraction full time. It ran as a tourist attraction until closing in nineteen thirty three. At around the same time that the mock Chunk Switchback Railway became a dedicated tourist attraction, other inventors in the United States were working on inclined railways. This term could have a few different meanings. Railways meant to pull loads up a hill, Funicular railways with two counterbalanced carriages connected by a cable, and roller coaster like amusement rides were all called inclined railways. John G. Taylor was granted a patent called Improvement of Inclined Railways in eighteen seventy two. His patent shows two parallel tracks, each of them with hills of various sizes, and the car would roll from the highest point down to the other end. His description makes it clear that there were already inclined railways being built, but that his was better because it had a switch that would move the car from one track to the other so that people could continue the journey in the other direction. Once passengers had disembarked, the car would be manually moved up a short hill before being switched back to the other track at the starting point. While Taylor's patent describes what he calls an improvement, it doesn't have all the details of a working device, like it doesn't say how the car would be stopped at the end of the line. While the illustration has a little set of steps suggesting where a passenger would disembark, the steps connect directly to one of the rails, and there's no corresponding platform for people to get on the railway, So older sources often described this as a patent that was issued for an idea, not an invention that Taylor ever actually made. However, there are multiple newspaper articles mentioning Taylor's patented inclined railway carrying actual passengers, and there is even at least one photo. As one example, the August fifteenth, eighteen seventy four, edition of the Middletown, Connecticut Daily Constitution claims that Taylor's railway carried two hundred and fifty thousand passengers the year before with no injuries. Richard Nudson was also issued a different patent for improvement and inclined plane railways in eighteen seventy eight. This one featured a lift at each end of the track for raising the car back up to the top. It's possible that Nudson built one of these, maybe even at Coney Island, which wasn't far away from where he lived, but if he did, no documentation has been found of that yet. We don't really know who coined the term roller coaster, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first written usage in English was in the Chicago Tribune in eighteen eighty three. There were some earlier uses than that, though, including in the Steuben Republican of Angola, Indiana, and the Saint Louis Post Dispatch. The Steuben Republican describes a roller coaster as the chief attraction at the tri State Fair, calling it quote a small improvement on the old time sport of riding downhill and trudging up the best way you can. The roller coaster described in this article is on an inclined, circular track about six hundred feet long, with fifteen or twenty people riding on a long bench like car for a ride that lasted about twelve seconds. The ride described in the Chicago Tribune a few days later was also circular, with a circumference of about four hundred thirty feet and a drop of about twenty two feet. The Saint Louis Post dispatch mention of roller coasters that came out around this time isn't a pair of ads. One of them is quote roller coaster sliding downhill on wheels, Lucas Place in twentieth Street, and the other is quote roller coaster the old fashioned sleigh ride. Don't fail to take a ride Lucas Place in twentieth And also, to further complicate this whole Oxford English Dictionary citation of the Chicago Tribune is the first mention. A few days before, the Tribune published an article about a roller coaster being built, which is what the OEED cites as the word's first use. It also published an ad. This ad specified that ec Hudson wanted to hire a man to act as the roller coasters manager, had a salary of twenty dollars a week, so before the building of the roller coaster was reported on, he was trying to hire somebody to run it. And now nearly two to the way through this episode, we are finally getting to someone who is very frequently described as the inventor of the roller coaster or the inventor of the first modern roller coaster or the inventor of the first commercially successful roller coaster. LaMarcus A. Thompson, who built the Switchback Gravity pleasure railway at Coney Island, New York in eighteen eighty four. Some accounts say he modeled it after Richard Knudsen's patent, and others after the mock chunk Switchback Railway. Thompson had invented other things, including a car coupler and a knitting machine, and some accounts he had worked himself to exhaustion on the knitting machine business and that had led his doctor to advise him to spend more time outside and that's what led him to build a roller coaster. In other accounts, he was a devout Christian and was concerned about the temptations of beer gardens and other vice ridden pastimes on young people, and he wanted to offer an alternative. It may have been both. I found zero primary sources confirming any of that, and every time I read some detail, I was like, where are you getting this? In addition to the fact that we've already talked about a whole lot of things that could be called the first roller coaster, Thompson's roller Coasting structure patented in eighteen eighty five, doesn't seem all that roller coaster e in a lot of ways. There were two parallel tracks, with the ends of the tracks at the same height, and riders would go out on one track and back on the other through a series of slopes that looked pretty gentle in the patent illustration. Since friction and air resistance and other factors meant that the car wouldn't be able to get to the top at the far end of the track by itself, it did so by quote means being provided to continue the car to the top. That meant that somebody pushed it the rest of the way. Passengers road sideways on what was basically a bench, and they traveled at about six miles an hour, So this was more about getting a view of Coney Islands than about any kind of extreme thrill seeking. Maybe riding a bench at six miles an hour would have felt really thrilling at the time. A lot of people run that fast found that a little amusing for that reason. Sometimes Thompson's rides are called scenic railways rather than roller coasters, but slower not Thompson's first ride at Coney Island was extremely popular. People paid five cents to ride it, and he recouped all the money he'd spent to build it in about three weeks. He also kept working on developments for his invention, and by eighteen eighty seven he held about thirty patents related to roller coasters. He also founded a company to build scenic railways, which often took riders past dioramas, scenery, and other theatrical and visual elements. There are a lot of comparisons to the It's a Small World ride at Disney, but on a railroad instead of well, it makes me think of the Disneyland Railway, which is like train ride that goes past dioramas and you're like, oh, dinosaurs. I've never been to Disneyland, so I don't know that one. It got reworked, and I don't I don't want to make any promises. I don't remember what all, if anything got added or subtracted there. But that's how it's worked for a long time. We call it rolling bench. It makes us so happy to just sit there and watch beautiful things. I'm gonna say on a couple of times that I have been to Disney in Florida, not in California. As an adult, I have delighted in the rides where you just sit down in a cool space and ride and look at things. Give me The people move all day long. So we're gonna move on to the spread of rides like these or faster versions of rides like these, after quick sponsor break. Before we talk about how roller coasters proliferated, especially in the United States, we should talk a little bit about the development of amusement parks, because, especially from this point on, roller coasters and amusement parks are very tightly linked. So there's not really one linear family tree of amusement parks. It's more like multiple possible influences going all the way back to the medieval period. Some of their earliest precursors were probably European trade fairs, such as Saint Bartholomew's Fair, which started in England in eleven thirty three. This was an annual event that incorporated both trade and entertainment, and through the centuries, Saint Bartholomew's and other fairs gradually became more and more focused on food, drink, and amusements, including rides. For example, there were early versions of ferris wheels at Saint Bartholomew's Fair in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Overlap with trade fairs were pleasure gardens, which operated during most or all of the year, rather than just for a few days or weeks at a time. Also had a lot of food and entertainments and rides. Sometimes these were built by the owners of inns or taverns who were looking for ways to bring in more clientele during their slower periods. Then, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of large international exhibitions or World's fairs, where the nations exhibiting at the fair showed off their new developments and accomplishments. Many of these fairs featured ethnological expositions that were essentially human zoos. The World's Colombian Exposition of eighteen ninety three also had an entertainment area that was separate from all the exhibitions, which it called the Midway, and it was like a carnival with side shows, food, and rides. This intersects with the rise of trolley parks toward the end of the nineteenth century, and many areas colley lines were charged a flat fee for electricity, regardless of how many trolleys were running, or how many passengers those trolleys were carrying, So something that was mostly happening in the United States, and a lot of trolley companies started investing in attractions at the end of the line to try to bring passengers onto the trolley on their day off of work. Often the entry to the park itself was free, and then people would pay for rides and food and drink. In nineteen oh two, day Allen Willie wrote of this quote, the expression trolley park may not as yet have come into common use, but no explanation of its meaning is necessary. The oldest of the trolley parks has been in existence but a few years. Yet today these resorts are to be found on the outskirts of nearly every city in the land. The fact is that the street and suburban railway companies, realizing the profit arising by catering to the pleasure of the masses, have entered into the amusement field on an extensive scale. There were other factors involved beside just the trolley lines wanting to make money. Among other things, increased urbanization meant that there were more city dwellers looking for some kind of outdoor recreation. By nineteen nineteen, almost every major city in the US had at least one trolley park. Coney Island in New York was one such destination. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had already become a seaside resort area thanks to its location at the southern tip of Brooklyn, New York. It shift into being associated with amusement parks started with the construction of individual rides, including the Switchback Gravity Pleasure Railway. The first enclosed amusement park built at Coney Island was Sea Lion Park, which opened in eighteen eighty five. The most famous of these parks was probably Luna Park, which opened in nineteen oh three and then became the namesake for a lot of other amusement parks all over the world. More trolley parks and more amusement parks meant more rides, including more roller coasters, and that led to a lot of developments being made really, really quickly. In eighteen eighty five, Philip Hinkel developed a hoist that pulled cars up to the top of the first hill, which let the cars start out higher and ultimately reach a faster speed. In eighteen ninety four, e Joy Morris produced the Figure eight side friction coaster, which had wheels rolling along the tracks inner edge and allowed for faster speeds and tighter turns. This was also the first widely mass produced roller coaster, making it possible for parks all over North America to buy and build one of their own. Over the next decades, a rise in mechanization and mass production techniques made it possible for more designers to create roller coasters that would give the same consistent ride every time, no matter where the coaster was built, at least fully in theory. In theory. Two people who were working on vertical loop roller coasters near the turn of the twentieth century were Lena Beecher and Edwin Prescott. Prescott was awarded a patent for the Loop. The Loop, which was installed at Coney Island. Like the centrifugal railways that had been built in Europe more than fifty years before, this beatured a circular vertical loop. In eighteen ninety nine, Lena Beecher developed another circular vertical loop roller coaster called the Flip Flap, which was also built at Coney Island. Then, in nineteen oh one, Edwin Prescott developed a looping roller coaster with a tear drop shaped loop, which reduced some of the excessive g forces that riders were subjected to in a circular loop. A lot of roller coaster loops still have that kind of tear drop shape design today, and then Beecher soon adopted a tear drop shape design for his own vertical roller coaster as well. John Miller worked with a number of different roller coaster designers, including LaMarcus Thompson, and he was issued his first patent in nineteen ten for a safety device called the chain lift, which kept roller coaster cars from rolling backwards. This was the first of many patents Miller was awarded a lot of them for safety features or for features that made it possible for roller coasters to go faster, higher, or through sharper turns than they did before without crashing or derailing. Another of his major innovations was under friction wheels, which helped prevent derailments, and he patented those in nineteen nineteen. By this point, amusement parks were being built in other parts of the world as well, often with American engineers or designers working as consultants or with American companies providing blueprints or even entire disassembled rides to be put together on site. In nineteen ten, this had reached the point that the US Department of State recognized usement parks as a trade opportunity and asked trade consoles to gather information about existing parks and opportunities to build new ones. All over the world. By the nineteen twenties, there were amusement parks on every continent except Antarctica, many of them pattern after the parks on Coney Island, and this was a really like a heyday for roller coasters. The Coney Islands Cyclone, built in nineteen twenty seven, reached speeds of fifty five miles or eighty nine kilometers per hour, and it had an eighty five foot drop, something that's not nearly as fast or tall as most newly built roller coasters today, but it was at the time groundbreaking. The Coney Islands Cyclone still stands today and is build as the second steepest wooden roller coaster in the world. The boom and trolley parks, amusement parks and roller coasters in the United States was also happening, alongside increasingly legislated racial segregation in many parts of the country. Many parks either allowed only white patrons or allowed patrons regardless of race, but also had segregated facilities like restrooms and only allowed white patrons in some areas like restaurants. But there were also black entrepreneurs who opened their own parks, such as joy Land in Chicago, which was the first black owned and operated amusement park in the United States. In the United States, amusement parks and their roller coasters started to go into a decline during the depression in World War Two. During the depression, people often just didn't have the money to visit an amusement park or to invest in building a new one. During and after World War Two, people became more focused on exercise based recreations, such as organized athletic teams. The post war baby boom also led to more parks that were focused specifically on recreation for children. As more people started driving cars and the US started building more roads and highways to accommodate them, the idea of taking a train or trolley to the park at the end of the line started to fall out of fashion. This was not as true in other parts of the world, though, As the amusement park economy cooled in the United States, American developers started intentionally focusing on other countries, some of which continued to build new parks all the way through the nineteen thirties and forties. These ongoing international efforts by American companies to build amusement parks and roller coasters in other countries maybe why In Russia, for example, roller coasters are not Russian mountains. They are americanski gorky or American slides basically. And there are a lot of other languages whose words for roller coaster include some version of American. These include Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. In the nineteen twenties, there had been thousands of roller coasters in the United States, but as the nineteen sixties approached, there were fewer than two two hundreds still in operation. But then there was another big shift with the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, on July seventeenth, nineteen fifty five, followed by the opening of the Matterhorn roller coaster there on June fourteenth, nineteen fifty nine. Sometimes the Matterhorn is described as the first steel track roller coaster, but there were earlier steel coasters. What set the matter Horn apart was that the tracks were tubular, meaning that the ride was a lot smoother than on earlier coasters. Disneyland is often credited with sparking a resurgence in the building of theme parks in the United States. Sometimes people use theme park and amusement park interchangeably, but there's a little new ones there. Basically, theme parks are abusement parks designed around a theme. It's pretty self explanatory. The development of tubular steel roller coaster tracks paved the way for so many other roller coaster innovations, just as some examples. The first cork screw roller coaster was the Roaring Twenties Corkscrew at Nottsbury Farm in California, which was later moved to Silverwood Theme Park in Idaho. The first shuttle launched coasters were developed in nineteen seventy seven, and the first roller coasters with interlocking vertical loops debut in nineteen seventy eight, one of those being the Lockness Monster at Bush Gardens in Virginia. The first suspended roller coasters opened in the nineteen eighties, with riders hanging below the rail rather than sitting above it in a car that could swing as it went around turns. The first inverted coasters, which have riders similarly below the track but don't swing out in that way, came out in the early nineteen nineties. Electromagnetic propulsion systems were introduced for roller coasters in the nineteen nineties, making it possible for coasters to be launched very quickly rather than pulled up hills to coast most or all of the rest of the way. Today's biggest fastest roller coasters so different from the ones that we talked about earlier in the show. Currently, the tallest roller coaster in the world is listed as the Kingdoka at six Flags Grade Adventure in New Jersey that is four hundred and fifty six feet or one hundred and thirty nine meters tall, and the fastest at this moment that we're reading is Formula RASA at Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, which reaches speeds of one hundred and forty nine point one miles an hour, which is two hundred and forty kilometers per hour. So of course, there have also been a lot of safety innovations throughout these same years to try to make it possible for coasters to go that high. And that fast without being just extraordinarily deadly. While fatal roller coaster disasters are rare at this point, less severe injuries are a lot more common. It's kind of tricky to give exact numbers because a lot of statistics group amusement park rides together rather than isolating roller coaster injuries specifically. Yeah, even with all the various like shoulder harnesses and you know, other ways to try to keep the passengers in these safe, Like it's still a lot of a lot of drops and a whipping around, and like there are opportunities for various physiological consequences of that. Yeah, Yeah, I'm sure we will talk some more about roller coasters on Friday. And in the meanwhile, I have listener mail from Jeff. Jeff wrote and said love the show. I've been listening for years. Just an added note on modern day use of military balloons. I was a paratrooper in Canada in the nineties. When paratroopers train with other Allied countries or airborne forces, they are often awarded that country's jump wings as an honorary sort of thing. My regiment sent soldiers to the UK to work with the Parachute Regiment. While there, they did basic UK parachute training and they were awarded their British jump wings. The training jumps they did were from balloons. I don't know if they still trained this way or not, but they did in the nineties. The balloon was on a winch that could be raised and lowered. The candidate got in the basket and the winch was spooled out to about a thousand feet. They opened the door on the side of the basket and performed their drills with the instructor and then jumped out of the basket and parachuted to the ground. The basket was then winched back down to pick up the next candidate. Here's a link, Jeff. I did not know that, Jeff, but that makes total sense that that could be a good way to get people trained on do them parachute jumps. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're all over social media. Ad missed in History, so we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you like to get door podcasts stuff. You missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I've mentioned on the show recently that I've been trying to improve my French on Duelingo and for some languages. Duolingo has these stories where the characters have this conversation in an at least hypothetically real world kind of scenario. And there's this one where two friends Lely and Zuri are having They're having a conversation in line to ride a roller coaster, and every time Duolingo has shown me this story, I have wound up mostly focused on the fact that the French word for roller coaster is montagnous or Russian mountains, and so every time I'm like, what is the story there? And that is how we got to this episode. So during this episode, we're going to be touching a little bit on amusement park history more and generally, because there becomes a point where these two things are very tightly interconnected. But one thing we're not really going to talk about much is like roller coaster crashes and derailments and other similar incidents because there have just been so many with so many different causes. It felt sort of like trying to mention all the car crashes in the building of the interstate highway system, right. It just it felt like a list of carnage that wasn't adding up to some sort of greater understanding of anything. So that is not really going to be a focus of this. And also, I know there are a lot of roller coasterficionados out there, and there are folks who have extremely strong opinions on specific roller coasters and types of roller coasters and roller coaster records and particular designers. So I just want to say upfront that this is not in any way an exhaustive chronicle of every single thing about roller coasters. If we did not mention your favorite thing. This is more of like the trajectory of how these rides evolved over the last centuries. That could be an entire podcast just called coasting. And I maybe it is somewhere Montagna rous got their start, as the name suggests, in Russia. Specifically in Russia in the seventeenth century, as a winter pastime, people built wooden ramps and covered them with water, and that water then froze into a slick surface, and then riders would climb stairs or a ladder to the top of this frozen ramp, get into some kind of vehicle like a sled or a hollowed out log, or even an ice block with a straw seat, and slide down. Often at night, water would be applied to the ramp so that it could freeze back over into a new and totally smooth, fresh surface by morning. These frozen hills were nicknamed flying mountains. They could be up to six hundred feet or one hundred and eighty three meters long, and riders reached speeds that were reportedly up to fifty miles an hour, which is about eighty kilometers an hour. Often, at the end of the ride you would come out at the base of a second tower, so you could climb up that and just do it all over again. The logs or the ice blocks were brought back up along a track to one side of the hill, or in some cases when people were using more lightweight sleds, they would just be carried up the steps by the riders. These were really popular public attractions, especially around Saint Petersburg, and wealthy people also built smaller versions of them. On their estates for their own enjoyment. Two different empresses have been noted as having a particular love for the flying mountains, Elizabeth, who reigned from seventeen forty one to seventeen sixty two, and Katherine the Second also known as Katherine the Great, who reigned from seventeen sixty two to seventeen ninety six. So super quick Russian history refresher. Catherine the Great did not directly follow Elizabeth. Elizabeth's successor was her nephew Peter the Third, who ruled as emperor for about six months before being overthrown and assassinated. Katherine definitely played a part in his overthrow. There is still some debate over her role in his death. If you watch the show The Great, that is a version not entirely historically accurate, but I love it. Yeah. So. Some sources say that Catherine the Great was the first person to have one of these mountains fitted with grooves that could accommodate carriage wheels so that they could be used in the summer. But English clergyman John glen King, who was chaplain to Saint Petersburg, wrote a letter in seventeen seventy eight in which he credited Elizabeth, saying that Elizabeth had a flying mountain built at the Imperial Palace at Zarskicello that was usable during the summer and the winter. Catherine does seem to have built more than one of them as well, including one at or Niniba Park in Saint Petersburg. King described the flying mountain this way, quote, you will observe that there are five mounts of unequal heights. The first and highest is full thirty feet perpendicular altitude the momentum with which they descend. This carries them over the second, which is about five or six feet lower, just sufficient to allow for the friction and resistance, and so on to the last, from which they are conveyed by a gentle descent with nearly the same velocity over a piece of water into a little island. He went on to say, quote these slides, which are about a furlong and a half in length, are made of wood that they may be used in summer as well as in winter. The processes two or four persons fit in a little carriage, and one stands behind. For the more there are in it, the greater the swiftness with which it goes. That runs on casters and in grooves to keep it in its right direction, and it descends with a wonderful rapidity. Under the hills is a machine worked by horses for drawing the carriages back again with the company in them. Such a work as this would have been enormous in most countries for the labor and expense at cost, as well as the vast quantity of wood used in it. There's a little bit of conjecture around how the Russian flying mountains made their way to France and evolved into Montaigne Rouse. One likely scenario is that French soldiers saw them in eighteen twelve when Napoleon invaded the Russian Empire, although some of the sources used in this episode say the first one in France was actually built before that. Most of France really did not get cold enough in the winter to maintain a frozen sliding surface, so like the Russian empresses did during the summer, builders in France turned to vehicles that could roll down the hills on wheels. They had no safety equipment. People just had to hang on. Yeah, this episode just had a particularly large amount of sources saying totally contradictory things with absolute authorities. So I found some sources that said the very first of these were built in eighteen twelve, and then others that very confidently said that the first one was in like eighteen oh four, And which is right, I don't know. And in eighteen sixteen journal entry though armand Marie Antoinette Duplaci Marquise de Montcalm Gozon describes a French Montagne rouse this way quote. It is an inclined plane made of planks of sixty feet more or less, at the top of which is placed a sled on which one sits, and which brings you to the bottom with an extreme rapidity. This pleasure, which is not without danger, may be compared, according to the opinion of several people, to the impression that one would feel if one fell from a fourth floor window, which does not seem very seductive. These mountains are made of ice in Russia, and one hopes, in spite of the difference in climate, to imitate them in winter. A man said, in speaking of them, that he was surprised that this fashion does not elicit complaint against the influence of Russia, which is very common today to render responsible for everything. These amusements were extremely popular in France, and they were also known as promenade rienne or aerial walks. There were songs and plays about them, and people could buy all kinds of mountains souvenirs. Intense rivalries also developed between competing mountains, and in eighteen seventeen, these rivalries even inspired a satirical play called the Battle of the Mountains or bougeu faull. This popularity was somewhat ironic. Number one. These attractions seemed to have been most popular and most widespread in France in eighteen sixteen. In eighteen seventeen, in other words, during the year without a summer, which was much chillier and much rainier than normal, you can look out for an upcoming Saturday classic on the year without a summer. Number two. This was just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. France had been defeated in eighteen fifteen and Napoleon had abdicated for the second time under the Treaty of Paris of eighteen fifteen, which officially ended the war. France was occupied by the nations that had fought against and those occupiers included Russia. It's possible that the number of montagner Rouse, built in France during the Eighteenteens, was made possible by Russian occupiers who already knew how to do it. But it's also a little odd that French citizens seemed to have really fl and celebrated something that was so closely associated with Russia, something that the Marquis alluded to in her journal entry. Montagna Rouss also became a metaphor in France during this period, both in literature and in casual conversation. A lot like roller coaster can be used today to describe the various up and downs of life, among other things. Most of these attractions closed by the end of eighteen eighteen. Sending a wheeled vehicle down a wooden track at high speeds naturally caused a lot of wear, and these tracks weren't maintained very well, so they eventually broke down. The popularity of the Montagne Rousse also plummeted that year after two riders were killed when the car that they were in stopped suddenly. The post war occupation of France also ended in eighteen eighteen, and it's possible that after that point people did kind of want to get away from all the foreign influences. We should also take a moment here to note that French is not the only language to call roller coasters some variation on Russian or Russian mountains. A lot of other languages in Western Europe do, including Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, and Italian, among others. The next stretch of roller coaster history, kind of like this one was, is a little contradictory and sometimes vague, and we will get to it after a sponsor break. If you pull up five different articles about roller coasters, you may find at least that many completely different and yet totally authoritative declarations of which thing was the first roller coaster. Some of them also either named the Russian Flying Mountains or the French Montaigne Rouse that we already talked about, And to be fair, these do seem pretty similar to roller coasters, especially the ones that like specifically described going down this progressively smaller series of hills. We are going to talk about some of the other various contenders. In the eighteen thirties and forties, a number of centrifugal railways were built in various cities in Europe. There's some speculation that these were inspired by children's toys in which you would keep a marble or a ball rolling around on the inside of a wire track. A centrifugal railway was basically a downward slope leading into a circular vertical loop with an upward slope on the other side. Riders would get in the car on one end of the slope and ride through the vertical loop to the other side. Accounts of these centrifugal railways suggests that it was as much about the terrifying thrill of the experience as it was about watching other people do it and maybe not coming out unscathed. This was just not a smooth ride. It was full of jolts and bumps, and because the loop was shaped like a circle, the gravitational forces involved could be really intense. There also wasn't really any safety equipment, reportedly not even like seat belts. Centrifugal force was what was supposed to keep people in their seats, and that worked as long as nothing happened to cause the car to either slow down or stop suddenly. Builders tested these railways by sending a variety of inanimate objects through the loop like eggs or sandbags, as well as animals, including monkeys. In the eighteen sixties, a coal transport near what's now jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, became an amusement ride. Starting in eighteen twenty eight, the mock Chunk Switched Back Railway had carried coal about nine miles, mostly downhill, from the mines to the Lehigh Canal. A brakeman controlled the speed of the descent, and once enough cars had reached the bottom, a mule team would haul them back to the top. A return track with a steam powered hauler was added in eighteen forty four. This return track was ratcheted to keep the cars from sliding back down as the hauler stopped for some reason. Ratchet systems are still used on anti rollback devices on roller coasters today. That's what makes that repetitive clacking noise that you hear when a roller coaster is being pulled up a hill. In about eighteen sixty five, the Mock Chunks Switched Back Railway started carrying human tourists as passengers and the evenings when the mines weren't running. Then in the eighteen seventies, construction of a tunnel made the railway unnecessary for coal transport, and this railway became a tourist attraction full time. It ran as a tourist attraction until closing in nineteen thirty three. At around the same time that the mock Chunk Switchback Railway became a dedicated tourist attraction, other inventors in the United States were working on inclined railways. This term could have a few different meanings. Railways meant to pull loads up a hill, Funicular railways with two counterbalanced carriages connected by a cable, and roller coaster like amusement rides were all called inclined railways. John G. Taylor was granted a patent called Improvement of Inclined Railways in eighteen seventy two. His patent shows two parallel tracks, each of them with hills of various sizes, and the car would roll from the highest point down to the other end. His description makes it clear that there were already inclined railways being built, but that his was better because it had a switch that would move the car from one track to the other so that people could continue the journey in the other direction. Once passengers had disembarked, the car would be manually moved up a short hill before being switched back to the other track at the starting point. While Taylor's patent describes what he calls an improvement, it doesn't have all the details of a working device, like it doesn't say how the car would be stopped at the end of the line. While the illustration has a little set of steps suggesting where a passenger would disembark, the steps connect directly to one of the rails, and there's no corresponding platform for people to get on the railway, So older sources often described this as a patent that was issued for an idea, not an invention that Taylor ever actually made. However, there are multiple newspaper articles mentioning Taylor's patented inclined railway carrying actual passengers, and there is even at least one photo. As one example, the August fifteenth, eighteen seventy four, edition of the Middletown, Connecticut Daily Constitution claims that Taylor's railway carried two hundred and fifty thousand passengers the year before with no injuries. Richard Nudson was also issued a different patent for improvement and inclined plane railways in eighteen seventy eight. This one featured a lift at each end of the track for raising the car back up to the top. It's possible that Nudson built one of these, maybe even at Coney Island, which wasn't far away from where he lived, but if he did, no documentation has been found of that yet. We don't really know who coined the term roller coaster, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first written usage in English was in the Chicago Tribune in eighteen eighty three. There were some earlier uses than that, though, including in the Steuben Republican of Angola, Indiana, and the Saint Louis Post Dispatch. The Steuben Republican describes a roller coaster as the chief attraction at the tri State Fair, calling it quote a small improvement on the old time sport of riding downhill and trudging up the best way you can. The roller coaster described in this article is on an inclined, circular track about six hundred feet long, with fifteen or twenty people riding on a long bench like car for a ride that lasted about twelve seconds. The ride described in the Chicago Tribune a few days later was also circular, with a circumference of about four hundred thirty feet and a drop of about twenty two feet. The Saint Louis Post dispatch mention of roller coasters that came out around this time isn't a pair of ads. One of them is quote roller coaster sliding downhill on wheels, Lucas Place in twentieth Street, and the other is quote roller coaster the old fashioned sleigh ride. Don't fail to take a ride Lucas Place in twentieth And also, to further complicate this whole Oxford English Dictionary citation of the Chicago Tribune is the first mention. A few days before, the Tribune published an article about a roller coaster being built, which is what the OEED cites as the word's first use. It also published an ad. This ad specified that ec Hudson wanted to hire a man to act as the roller coasters manager, had a salary of twenty dollars a week, so before the building of the roller coaster was reported on, he was trying to hire somebody to run it. And now nearly two to the way through this episode, we are finally getting to someone who is very frequently described as the inventor of the roller coaster or the inventor of the first modern roller coaster or the inventor of the first commercially successful roller coaster. LaMarcus A. Thompson, who built the Switchback Gravity pleasure railway at Coney Island, New York in eighteen eighty four. Some accounts say he modeled it after Richard Knudsen's patent, and others after the mock chunk Switchback Railway. Thompson had invented other things, including a car coupler and a knitting machine, and some accounts he had worked himself to exhaustion on the knitting machine business and that had led his doctor to advise him to spend more time outside and that's what led him to build a roller coaster. In other accounts, he was a devout Christian and was concerned about the temptations of beer gardens and other vice ridden pastimes on young people, and he wanted to offer an alternative. It may have been both. I found zero primary sources confirming any of that, and every time I read some detail, I was like, where are you getting this? In addition to the fact that we've already talked about a whole lot of things that could be called the first roller coaster, Thompson's roller Coasting structure patented in eighteen eighty five, doesn't seem all that roller coaster e in a lot of ways. There were two parallel tracks, with the ends of the tracks at the same height, and riders would go out on one track and back on the other through a series of slopes that looked pretty gentle in the patent illustration. Since friction and air resistance and other factors meant that the car wouldn't be able to get to the top at the far end of the track by itself, it did so by quote means being provided to continue the car to the top. That meant that somebody pushed it the rest of the way. Passengers road sideways on what was basically a bench, and they traveled at about six miles an hour, So this was more about getting a view of Coney Islands than about any kind of extreme thrill seeking. Maybe riding a bench at six miles an hour would have felt really thrilling at the time. A lot of people run that fast found that a little amusing for that reason. Sometimes Thompson's rides are called scenic railways rather than roller coasters, but slower not Thompson's first ride at Coney Island was extremely popular. People paid five cents to ride it, and he recouped all the money he'd spent to build it in about three weeks. He also kept working on developments for his invention, and by eighteen eighty seven he held about thirty patents related to roller coasters. He also founded a company to build scenic railways, which often took riders past dioramas, scenery, and other theatrical and visual elements. There are a lot of comparisons to the It's a Small World ride at Disney, but on a railroad instead of well, it makes me think of the Disneyland Railway, which is like train ride that goes past dioramas and you're like, oh, dinosaurs. I've never been to Disneyland, so I don't know that one. It got reworked, and I don't I don't want to make any promises. I don't remember what all, if anything got added or subtracted there. But that's how it's worked for a long time. We call it rolling bench. It makes us so happy to just sit there and watch beautiful things. I'm gonna say on a couple of times that I have been to Disney in Florida, not in California. As an adult, I have delighted in the rides where you just sit down in a cool space and ride and look at things. Give me The people move all day long. So we're gonna move on to the spread of rides like these or faster versions of rides like these, after quick sponsor break. Before we talk about how roller coasters proliferated, especially in the United States, we should talk a little bit about the development of amusement parks, because, especially from this point on, roller coasters and amusement parks are very tightly linked. So there's not really one linear family tree of amusement parks. It's more like multiple possible influences going all the way back to the medieval period. Some of their earliest precursors were probably European trade fairs, such as Saint Bartholomew's Fair, which started in England in eleven thirty three. This was an annual event that incorporated both trade and entertainment, and through the centuries, Saint Bartholomew's and other fairs gradually became more and more focused on food, drink, and amusements, including rides. For example, there were early versions of ferris wheels at Saint Bartholomew's Fair in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Overlap with trade fairs were pleasure gardens, which operated during most or all of the year, rather than just for a few days or weeks at a time. Also had a lot of food and entertainments and rides. Sometimes these were built by the owners of inns or taverns who were looking for ways to bring in more clientele during their slower periods. Then, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of large international exhibitions or World's fairs, where the nations exhibiting at the fair showed off their new developments and accomplishments. Many of these fairs featured ethnological expositions that were essentially human zoos. The World's Colombian Exposition of eighteen ninety three also had an entertainment area that was separate from all the exhibitions, which it called the Midway, and it was like a carnival with side shows, food, and rides. This intersects with the rise of trolley parks toward the end of the nineteenth century, and many areas colley lines were charged a flat fee for electricity, regardless of how many trolleys were running, or how many passengers those trolleys were carrying, So something that was mostly happening in the United States, and a lot of trolley companies started investing in attractions at the end of the line to try to bring passengers onto the trolley on their day off of work. Often the entry to the park itself was free, and then people would pay for rides and food and drink. In nineteen oh two, day Allen Willie wrote of this quote, the expression trolley park may not as yet have come into common use, but no explanation of its meaning is necessary. The oldest of the trolley parks has been in existence but a few years. Yet today these resorts are to be found on the outskirts of nearly every city in the land. The fact is that the street and suburban railway companies, realizing the profit arising by catering to the pleasure of the masses, have entered into the amusement field on an extensive scale. There were other factors involved beside just the trolley lines wanting to make money. Among other things, increased urbanization meant that there were more city dwellers looking for some kind of outdoor recreation. By nineteen nineteen, almost every major city in the US had at least one trolley park. Coney Island in New York was one such destination. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had already become a seaside resort area thanks to its location at the southern tip of Brooklyn, New York. It shift into being associated with amusement parks started with the construction of individual rides, including the Switchback Gravity Pleasure Railway. The first enclosed amusement park built at Coney Island was Sea Lion Park, which opened in eighteen eighty five. The most famous of these parks was probably Luna Park, which opened in nineteen oh three and then became the namesake for a lot of other amusement parks all over the world. More trolley parks and more amusement parks meant more rides, including more roller coasters, and that led to a lot of developments being made really, really quickly. In eighteen eighty five, Philip Hinkel developed a hoist that pulled cars up to the top of the first hill, which let the cars start out higher and ultimately reach a faster speed. In eighteen ninety four, e Joy Morris produced the Figure eight side friction coaster, which had wheels rolling along the tracks inner edge and allowed for faster speeds and tighter turns. This was also the first widely mass produced roller coaster, making it possible for parks all over North America to buy and build one of their own. Over the next decades, a rise in mechanization and mass production techniques made it possible for more designers to create roller coasters that would give the same consistent ride every time, no matter where the coaster was built, at least fully in theory. In theory. Two people who were working on vertical loop roller coasters near the turn of the twentieth century were Lena Beecher and Edwin Prescott. Prescott was awarded a patent for the Loop. The Loop, which was installed at Coney Island. Like the centrifugal railways that had been built in Europe more than fifty years before, this beatured a circular vertical loop. In eighteen ninety nine, Lena Beecher developed another circular vertical loop roller coaster called the Flip Flap, which was also built at Coney Island. Then, in nineteen oh one, Edwin Prescott developed a looping roller coaster with a tear drop shaped loop, which reduced some of the excessive g forces that riders were subjected to in a circular loop. A lot of roller coaster loops still have that kind of tear drop shape design today, and then Beecher soon adopted a tear drop shape design for his own vertical roller coaster as well. John Miller worked with a number of different roller coaster designers, including LaMarcus Thompson, and he was issued his first patent in nineteen ten for a safety device called the chain lift, which kept roller coaster cars from rolling backwards. This was the first of many patents Miller was awarded a lot of them for safety features or for features that made it possible for roller coasters to go faster, higher, or through sharper turns than they did before without crashing or derailing. Another of his major innovations was under friction wheels, which helped prevent derailments, and he patented those in nineteen nineteen. By this point, amusement parks were being built in other parts of the world as well, often with American engineers or designers working as consultants or with American companies providing blueprints or even entire disassembled rides to be put together on site. In nineteen ten, this had reached the point that the US Department of State recognized usement parks as a trade opportunity and asked trade consoles to gather information about existing parks and opportunities to build new ones. All over the world. By the nineteen twenties, there were amusement parks on every continent except Antarctica, many of them pattern after the parks on Coney Island, and this was a really like a heyday for roller coasters. The Coney Islands Cyclone, built in nineteen twenty seven, reached speeds of fifty five miles or eighty nine kilometers per hour, and it had an eighty five foot drop, something that's not nearly as fast or tall as most newly built roller coasters today, but it was at the time groundbreaking. The Coney Islands Cyclone still stands today and is build as the second steepest wooden roller coaster in the world. The boom and trolley parks, amusement parks and roller coasters in the United States was also happening, alongside increasingly legislated racial segregation in many parts of the country. Many parks either allowed only white patrons or allowed patrons regardless of race, but also had segregated facilities like restrooms and only allowed white patrons in some areas like restaurants. But there were also black entrepreneurs who opened their own parks, such as joy Land in Chicago, which was the first black owned and operated amusement park in the United States. In the United States, amusement parks and their roller coasters started to go into a decline during the depression in World War Two. During the depression, people often just didn't have the money to visit an amusement park or to invest in building a new one. During and after World War Two, people became more focused on exercise based recreations, such as organized athletic teams. The post war baby boom also led to more parks that were focused specifically on recreation for children. As more people started driving cars and the US started building more roads and highways to accommodate them, the idea of taking a train or trolley to the park at the end of the line started to fall out of fashion. This was not as true in other parts of the world, though, As the amusement park economy cooled in the United States, American developers started intentionally focusing on other countries, some of which continued to build new parks all the way through the nineteen thirties and forties. These ongoing international efforts by American companies to build amusement parks and roller coasters in other countries maybe why In Russia, for example, roller coasters are not Russian mountains. They are americanski gorky or American slides basically. And there are a lot of other languages whose words for roller coaster include some version of American. These include Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. In the nineteen twenties, there had been thousands of roller coasters in the United States, but as the nineteen sixties approached, there were fewer than two two hundreds still in operation. But then there was another big shift with the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, on July seventeenth, nineteen fifty five, followed by the opening of the Matterhorn roller coaster there on June fourteenth, nineteen fifty nine. Sometimes the Matterhorn is described as the first steel track roller coaster, but there were earlier steel coasters. What set the matter Horn apart was that the tracks were tubular, meaning that the ride was a lot smoother than on earlier coasters. Disneyland is often credited with sparking a resurgence in the building of theme parks in the United States. Sometimes people use theme park and amusement park interchangeably, but there's a little new ones there. Basically, theme parks are abusement parks designed around a theme. It's pretty self explanatory. The development of tubular steel roller coaster tracks paved the way for so many other roller coaster innovations, just as some examples. The first cork screw roller coaster was the Roaring Twenties Corkscrew at Nottsbury Farm in California, which was later moved to Silverwood Theme Park in Idaho. The first shuttle launched coasters were developed in nineteen seventy seven, and the first roller coasters with interlocking vertical loops debut in nineteen seventy eight, one of those being the Lockness Monster at Bush Gardens in Virginia. The first suspended roller coasters opened in the nineteen eighties, with riders hanging below the rail rather than sitting above it in a car that could swing as it went around turns. The first inverted coasters, which have riders similarly below the track but don't swing out in that way, came out in the early nineteen nineties. Electromagnetic propulsion systems were introduced for roller coasters in the nineteen nineties, making it possible for coasters to be launched very quickly rather than pulled up hills to coast most or all of the rest of the way. Today's biggest fastest roller coasters so different from the ones that we talked about earlier in the show. Currently, the tallest roller coaster in the world is listed as the Kingdoka at six Flags Grade Adventure in New Jersey that is four hundred and fifty six feet or one hundred and thirty nine meters tall, and the fastest at this moment that we're reading is Formula RASA at Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, which reaches speeds of one hundred and forty nine point one miles an hour, which is two hundred and forty kilometers per hour. So of course, there have also been a lot of safety innovations throughout these same years to try to make it possible for coasters to go that high. And that fast without being just extraordinarily deadly. While fatal roller coaster disasters are rare at this point, less severe injuries are a lot more common. It's kind of tricky to give exact numbers because a lot of statistics group amusement park rides together rather than isolating roller coaster injuries specifically. Yeah, even with all the various like shoulder harnesses and you know, other ways to try to keep the passengers in these safe, Like it's still a lot of a lot of drops and a whipping around, and like there are opportunities for various physiological consequences of that. Yeah, Yeah, I'm sure we will talk some more about roller coasters on Friday. And in the meanwhile, I have listener mail from Jeff. Jeff wrote and said love the show. I've been listening for years. Just an added note on modern day use of military balloons. I was a paratrooper in Canada in the nineties. When paratroopers train with other Allied countries or airborne forces, they are often awarded that country's jump wings as an honorary sort of thing. My regiment sent soldiers to the UK to work with the Parachute Regiment. While there, they did basic UK parachute training and they were awarded their British jump wings. The training jumps they did were from balloons. I don't know if they still trained this way or not, but they did in the nineties. The balloon was on a winch that could be raised and lowered. The candidate got in the basket and the winch was spooled out to about a thousand feet. They opened the door on the side of the basket and performed their drills with the instructor and then jumped out of the basket and parachuted to the ground. The basket was then winched back down to pick up the next candidate. Here's a link, Jeff. I did not know that, Jeff, but that makes total sense that that could be a good way to get people trained on do them parachute jumps. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're all over social media. 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