Today, the London Eye. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
Years ago, I did a program on
the original 1893 Ferris
Wheel -- a wondrous machine. It embodied
the very soul of invention, because its purpose was
simply to give pleasure -- probably as much to its
inventor as to its riders. (Well, it was also meant
to be America's answer to the Eiffel Tower.)
Back then I reported that Ferris's 250-foot
diameter wheel had never been outdone. Now, on a
June day in 2004, my wife and I have just visited
London's Greenwich Observatory. We stepped across
the prime meridian, saw Harrison's famous longitude
chronometers, and now a Thames River boat takes us
back to Westminster.
Just beyond the Tower of London and London Bridge
there suddenly looms the largest Ferris Wheel we've
ever seen. It leaves me gaping. I didn't see it on
my London map because it's not called a Ferris
Wheel. It's called the London Eye. And now
that I see it, I can almost forgive London for its
failure to honor George Ferris. This London Eye is
four hundred feet in diameter. Riders can
see twenty five miles on a clear day (if such a day
is to be found.)
capsules carry up to eight hundred people through
one thirty-minute rotation. They board each of
these gel-cap-shaped space-age capsules as it
slowly moves by. Yet, immense as it is, the London
Eye has only half the capacity that Ferris's Wheel
did. He took twenty minutes to load people; then he
gave them a much shorter and faster ride.
Both wheels frightened people with their seeming
flimsiness. The London Eye looks like a cosmic
bicycle wheel with pods around the tire. Its
delicate spokes are loaded only in tension. The
wheel does not ride upon the spokes --
rather it hangs upon them.
That much was also true of Ferris's wheel. A month
after it opened to passengers, Chicago suffered a
terrible windstorm. Ferris seized that opportunity
to take two people on a ride -- his wife and a
reporter. The reporter later wrote,
As the mad storm swept round the cars the blast
was deafening. It screamed through the thin
spider-like girders, and shook the windows with
savage fury. ... The inventor had faith in his
wheel; Mrs. Ferris in her husband. But ... at that
moment [I] believed neither in God nor man.
Now in London, my wife and I leave our boat to
stroll around this Ezekiel wheel, fading up into
the lowering sky above. No use riding it -- this
day, we'd have seen very little from the top.
Across the river, Parliament and Big Ben remain --
a century-and-a-half old, with some sections
that've been there for nine hun-dred years. But,
that evening, TV focuses upon the wheel. We watch a
reporter and a maintenance engineer climbing a
ladder in-side one of its two hundred foot
supporting struts to lubricate it.
So, at least for a while, London has its Eiffel
Tower, its Chrysler Building, its Space Needle. It
has its 21st-century personality, ascendant over
St. Paul's Dome, Parliament, and all the rest. This
great wheel now crowds them out of my
mind. It may be short-lived, but it is a powerful
icon for an old, old city.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
The London Eye, heavily supported by British Airways,
is not a permanent structure. But it is nevertheless
being widely promoted as a new symbol of London. For
more on the Eye, see:
Helen Stephenson's London Eye Construction Pictures.
The quote about George Ferris is from Terry Hogan.
See the following fine website: http://www.thezephyr.com/archives/bigwheel.htm
The London Eye (both photos by John
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2004 by John H.