What Happened to the Original Ferris Wheel

On 1 November 1893 Exposition guards tried to close the Wheel. A contemporary report quotes Ferris refusing to pay $75,000 and intending to run until 30 November; lawsuits followed both ways.^{[1, p. 2][2, pp. 100–101]}A contemporary report quotes Ferris refusing a $75,000 Exposition demand in early November 1893. Weingardt dates the Exposition’s suit for that sum to 9 November. The filing date has not been independently read in a court record.^{[1, p. 2][2, p. 104][2, p. 116]}

Weingardt estimates the Exposition took about $225,000 clear from the Wheel and the company perhaps $150,000 to $163,000 before its own costs.^{[2, pp. 102, 104]}Those are later estimates, not the stockholders’ 1,453,611 paid-admissions figure from the fair season.

Weingardt records the Wheel dismantled in spring 1894 for $14,833 and stored on rail cars.^{[2, p. 106]}Weingardt has the Garden City patent suit dismissed on 3 July 1894 with $26.50 costs to Ferris, and states that Ferris never patented the Wheel. A 23 November 1893 New Jersey paper reported that the highest court had found infringement and royalties due. The case file has been located and not read; the outcome stays in dispute.^{[2, p. 107][2, p. 96][3, p. 3][4][5]}

William Somers’s U.S. Patent 489,238, filed 28 October 1891 and issued 3 January 1893, describes a wooden-rim roundabout with radial spokes, swinging seats, and a cable drive — the patent later asserted against Ferris.^{[2, pp. 93–94, 107][6][7]}The case file itself has not been read here in full; the public wording stays with what Weingardt and the issued patent establish.

Weingardt traces the Wheel’s re-erection at North Clark Street in 1895–96 and the neighbourhood opposition; the Illinois courts’ own history records the 1896 Supreme Court case.^{[2, pp. 108–111][8]}The Illinois courts’ own history records that the Supreme Court denied the Ferris Wheel Company a dram-shop permit for the Clark Street park in 1896; the exact reporter citation is still being checked.^{[2, pp. 108–111][8]}

Weingardt records the company bankrupt by November 1896; the Hyde Park Historical Society reprints the Tribune’s 1903 note of an $1,800 receiver’s sale.^{[2, pp. 111, 118][9]}Two months after Ferris’s death, Weingardt records, the court gave the Exposition an $84,000 judgment against the company.^{[2, p. 116]}

Sold to the Chicago House Wrecking Company in 1903, the Wheel was moved by rail to St. Louis for the 1904 fair. Harris’s later study gives 175 freight cars; a St. Louis library article gives 178.^{[2, pp. 118–119][10, pp. 1, 4–9][11, pp. 2–7][12, Item 8]}The 1903 salvage sale is reported as $1,800 in a Chicago Tribune item of 3 June and as $8,150 in later St. Louis summaries of 7 June; both figures stay on the page until the original notices are compared.^{[2, pp. 118–119][9][11, pp. 2–7]}

The Wheel ran at the 1904 St. Louis fair. Company-family papers later published by Leo Harris give 175 freight cars and $267,000 gross; Weingardt had $215,000 and “over a million” riders. A St. Louis library summary says 178 cars.^{[2, pp. 118–119][10, pp. 1, 4–9][11, pp. 2–7]}

A St. Louis County Library summary, following local papers, dates the last revolution to 13 January 1906, with three people aboard.^{[2, p. 120][11, pp. 2–7]}The Wheel was dynamited on 11 May 1906 — 200 pounds in two stages, according to the Chicago Tribune dispatch — and scrapped; what became of the great axle is unresolved.^{[2, p. 120][12, Item 8][13, p. 8 (Chicago Tribune dispatch of 12 May)]}

The axle’s fate is unresolved. One line of evidence, from Chicago House Wrecking Company records, says it was cut up in Chicago around 1919; St. Louis searches in 1943 and 2007 looked for a buried shaft and did not excavate.^{[2, p. 120][10, pp. 4–9][11, pp. 2–7][13, p. 8][14]}

Weingardt traces the first imitations: Basset’s great wheels in London, Blackpool, Vienna and Paris, and Sullivan’s portable wheels from Jacksonville, Illinois.^{[2, pp. 96, 105, 109–110, 121]}Those later wheels are not this machine. The original is the 1893 tension wheel whose parts were sold for scrap in 1906.