April 25, 2024 • 48 mins
In the history of roller coasters, one thing became clear: the public wanted extremes -- the fastest, the highest, the most dangerous of rides. In part two of this week's series, the guys explore the rise of the first legitimate roller coaster tycoon, and ask their fellow Ridiculous Historians for help finding the best roller coasters of the modern day.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio, previously on Ridiculous History.
(00:38):
Welcome back to the show Ridiculous his Stories. Think who
has always so much for tuning in. Let's give a
big shout out to our super producer, mister Max the
Tycoon Williams. I am ben Bullen joy does always with
the man, the myth, the legend, a tycoon in his
own right, Mister Noel Brown Noles. We've had We've had
(01:00):
a heck of a time with this roller coaster series, right,
A lot of oh no, no, it's okay, we'll allow it. Yeah,
no ups and downs.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
To be sure, I think we've roughly reached approaching modern times,
but not not not not quite. We still have a
little bit of history again.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Oh yeah, just like the experience of writing a roller coaster,
we're having form follow function, or form and function be interrelated.
Because our previous episode, part one was kind of a
up the hill, all right, and now we are at
a titular point. Now we are at an apex of
(01:44):
roller coaster history because you see, with the dawning of
the world's first legit roller coaster, Tycoon La Marcus. I
just love to say his name uh, he triggered and
arms race amidst the roller coaster manufacturers of the world.
(02:06):
I mean, within just a few months after he becomes
the roller coaster king of Coney Island, people start moving
in on his territory. That's right.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I mean he held a virtual monopoly on coasters, you know,
at least in this country at Coney Island. But enter
Charles Alcoke, who had built a kind of more of
a scenic people mover type situation, a slow scenic railroad.
The connected the ends of the tracks in a continuous
(02:39):
loop to make it more of a pleasure cruise.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I like that, a pleasure cruise people mover, a people
moving pleasure cruise. Yes, so this coaster gets close to
the record set by Thompson Switchback Railway, but Philip Hinkle
makes a breakthrough in eighteen eighty five. His coaster has
(03:03):
an elliptical route and a powered hoist that pulls cars
back to the top of the first hill, and because
of the speed at which it moves, it's a more
exciting ride than the relatively slow moving switchback. And at
this point, to be clear, no one has beaten that
(03:24):
original train powered scenic railway from episode one that ended
at like sixty five miles an hour.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Right, And when I say we're roughly approaching modern coaster times,
what I mean is this technology in a lot of
ways is still kind of how things are done.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like you said, these a lot
of these are what we will call simple machines with
further pieces of technology added on top of them. At
this point, all of them, at least all the rides
at Coney Island are leveraging gravity to work. They're just
approaching gravity and interesting ways, there's a ride called the
(04:05):
Steeplechase by a guy named George C. Till You, which
is an interesting last name. I wonder what the etymology
of that is. I don't know. It's spelt like it's
spelled like t I L you, so it's like until
you with me again.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I don't know this this ride actually, you know, Steeplechase
being a famous is it a specific horse race or
is it just a style.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Of horse racing.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
I can't remember if it's like a particular event, but
either way, Steeplechase is a horse race scenario, and this
one kind of mimic that with these mechanical horses that
descend it on kind of a wavy track, and it
was very very popular amongst early coaster heads.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
I also like coaster heads. I think it's steeplechase, isn't
that the one where the horses have to jump over obstacles,
like they don't run, and they run and they jump
over different fences or different ditches, So it kind of
mimics what you would experience on a roller coaster. It's
an obstacle race in athletics, but it is named after the.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Steeplechase in horse racing, which, to your point, Ben was
involved jumping over hurdles and things like that. But a
steeple chase in like an Olympic type event, involves going
through water, you know, jumping over hurdles and all of
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
So this was named for the horse race, the original
version of a steeple chase, because of the ups and downs,
and there were there were other things like the cannon coaster. Yes,
the cannon coaster is a little bit dystopian. Already. There
(05:45):
is a gap in the rails. Ooh, yeah, that seems
a little bit dangerous. Well, often often the cars made
it across the gap. Yeah, when one would hope it
would work out that way for you. There was also
something called the mystic screw, which also sounds a little dirty.
(06:06):
Maybe my mind is just in the gut of perpetually
and this trick it was a yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
This involved a kind of a helix type pattern and
then the writers would descend around seventy five feet.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yeah. Pass around this time, our friends of Encyclopedia Britannic
and note people start experimenting with something called inversions.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, and whenever you are are looking at, you know,
guides for roller coasters written by coaster heads, inversions are
a big feature that are always you know discussed, like
how many inversions does a ride happen, what's their height?
And also things like corkscrews that might send you kind
of circling. It's not a full inversion exactly. It's more
(06:58):
of like a sideways kind of like inversion.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
I always thought loops loops were so cool because it
is just from a physics standpoint, it's such an interesting experiment.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, It's like taking a bucket of water and swinging
it upside down over your head. It's not gonna come
out because of you know, mother gravity. Just hold that
holding that stuff in and early inversions didn't even have
lap bars or what do you call them, like, you know, harnesses.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
We were literally held in place.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
By gravity, which we know is gonna work unless the
coaster fails or something, you know, and then you just
PLoP right out.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Gravity does its thing once again. Yeah, yeah, because the
one constant force in all of these things, one thing
that never breaks is gravity. So you just have to
stay on gravity's good side. It doesn't care about you.
It's what it's gonna do. It's very focused on it.
It's like one thing that it's good at. So these
(07:59):
loop track rides, people had tried them in Paris before
in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, and the rides
were similar to the Bucket of Water example from earlier.
The rides are based on a toy for kids that
keeps a small ball rolling on a loop track without
falling off. However, at least in Paris, people found these
(08:23):
inversions uncomfortable and dangerous, and so the idea was scrapped
until eighteen ninety five, when Lena Beecher installs something called
the Flip Flap Railway at Paul Boyton's Sea Lion Park
and Coney Island. Their main attraction was sea lions, but
they also of course had what they called the Railway.
(08:44):
It was uncomfortable, it was still dangerous, but it had
this big twenty five foot circular loop that became wildly
popular and went viral, as we would say in the
parlance of today, and it shut down after only a
few years. And it was so potentially dangerous that a
(09:04):
lot of folks would just show up to watch others
ride it, which I can relate to again with my
kind of building back up my courage to ride the coasters.
If I go to an amusement park and haven't been
in a while, I will sometimes just kind of watch
a few of the coasters to kind of build up
my moxie, you know, to go for a ride myself. Yeah.
I think people found the excel the slight acceleration, g forces,
(09:29):
gravitational forces uncomfortable. Oh yeah, well it kind of is
a little bit so, right. So this is where we
get to a guy named Edward Prescott who builds something
called the loop de loop.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
And that is sort of the stand in parlance for
these kind of inversions. You know, people will often call
them a loop, the loop, uh, and that this is
also a Coney Island, had a bit of a gentler slope,
more oval shaped design, and was much better in engineered
and constructed then the flippity flap.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
I'm sorry, I know it's not the flippity flap, but
I like that better. Oh sure, let's treat the phrase
flip flap with the gravity it deserves.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Hey, hey, jeez, the but it'd still be quite quite
a few more decades seventy five years in fact, before
a very fully successful vertical loop was was actually created.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And because it had a very low seating capacity, the loop.
The loop itself doesn't doesn't succeed long term. It's not
around now, but for the for the fans of coasters,
for the roller coaster folk, it is the coolest thing
(10:46):
in town, or indeed in the world, until a new
challenger emerges in this arms race for adrenaline, something called
drop the Dip, later to be called rough Riders.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Yeah, I think that's a little better. But rough Riders.
It makes me think of DMX. Wasn't he the rough
rider to the head of the rough Riders crew.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
It makes me think of Roosevelt.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I gotta jump in here. Remember when we were doing
our Model Trains. Episode I talked about the terrible idea
of a third track roller coaster.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
This is it. This is it?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, third track being a power rail that delivers electricity
to the coaster. But also, as we know if you've
ever been on like a subway station, those tracks are
way out of reach. They're down, you know, in the
in the pit kind of of the of the subway track.
But they are very clearly labeled do not touch the
third rail because you can get a deadly shock.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Exactly. And the issue here is not necessarily the mechanics
at play. The issue here is the human operators. Because
folks operating the rough rider would try to deliver the
maximum amount of fun, thrill and adrenaline to their passengers,
which meant they pushed it too hard. They pushed the
(12:04):
machine too hard, They used full power, even when folks
were already going down, taking the power leveraging the power
of gravity. In nineteen ten, one guy operating rough riders,
he took his train around a bend just way too fast.
He was all gased, no brakes. He threw two cars
(12:24):
loose from the ride. Sixteen passengers flew out over the
nearby surf avenue. And four of them died.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, and Britannica points out that these kind of upping
the ante here in terms of the danger quotient did
force some of that oversight that we were desperately lacking.
And obviously it takes a real gnarly tragedy like this,
you know, for folks to see the need for intervention
at this level. And so you started to see things
(12:54):
like lap bars, which got passengers in place right before that,
like I was saying, you were just in place by
the forces of gravity and the g force of the
vertical loop themselves. Train derailments, however, did kind of continue,
though they became a lot less common after some of these,
you know, safety measures were put in place around nineteen
(13:16):
twelve when John Miller, who was the chief engineer for
our boy LaMarcus, invented something called the under friction wheel.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah. It was sort of a big wig or as
Max wanted to say, a large hair piece in the
I appreciate in the roller coaster industry. Yeah, the under
friction wheel. Before we get to that, I got to
tell you guys, here's the story of how I almost
died on the American screen machine. It's due to a
lap bar. So the lap bar in these things works,
(13:48):
as you know, if you're seated two by two, the
lap bar is supposed to go down sort of like
on your crotch area, the bend between your hips and
your thighs, and as long as people relatively the same size,
you're gonna be all right. I was writing with an
adult friend of the family who was, you know, a grown,
(14:12):
a grown woman much larger than me as a young
Ben Bolan, and the lap bar clanked down on her
but didn't quite reach our young, our young protagonist. And
so thank god, the American Scream Machine did not have
loop de loops. It just had this old creaky wooden
(14:32):
thing where the first seri downhills, though it's got some
serious downhills, and I was replicating the experience of pre
lap bar people because I kid you not, guys. There
was a clear like six inches or so between my
body and the lap bar, so I was almost out
(14:54):
of the car well.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And that's the problem with community lap bars, because again
you're you're limited by the largest person in the scenario.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
I actually have a follow up on this because this
is how my friend David almost killed me on American
Scream machine in the exact same roller coaster. Really, my
friend David is a daredevil. He like, you know, I'm
afraid of heights. He has no fear of heights whatsoever. Sure,
and we were teenagers, probably like fifteen sixteen years old.
We're at six Flags, and what he would do is
he would always sit up as far as he possibly
(15:27):
could and see if people would not notice that he's
just like making it so the bar can't go all
the way down.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It was like it was like a Wednesday afternoon.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
We were there.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
The person that didn't really check, and so.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Then we're rolling out, he stands up completely out of
his seat. Does to show me how bad it is.
I'm just like cranking down in the seat, Belty Calf.
But I got the last laugh because a year later
we went to Cedar Point and I made him right
at top fill Dragster and I actually watched that man
cry before it went off, and he started to cry.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
You'll love to see it. Good to be in touch
with your emotions, I guess. But but yes, so this
idea here and also out to everybody who survived a
roller coaster where you almost died. And Carol, if you're
hearing this, I forgive you. John Miller's invention of the
(16:14):
under friction wheel is a massive game changer because it
keeps the train bolted down beneath the track with a
third set of wheels. So if gravity, if you get
on the bad side of gravity, you have an opposing
force attaching your car to the rail, kind of like
(16:35):
clamping something. So like the previous ones had maybe side
friction wheels that were meant to function kind of as
insurance of ice rolling on the inside or the inner
edges of the track. But this is this is just
a much better answer. It stops so many accidental derailments.
(16:57):
Our guy John Miller is also responsible for others safety innovations,
like a safety chain lift, which means, okay, I didn't
know this, but it makes sense. Back in the day
roller coasters rolling up that first till that we were
talking about, sometimes they didn't make it. There's real backwards
(17:20):
that's not good.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, And then I mean, was there any safety measure
in place to stop them from just like slamming to
a halt at the end when they dropped back.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Down hopefully after the first few times. I would hope
after the first few anyway, there's a weird thing that
occurs here because this progress in terms of safety also
enables these absolutely mad cap roller coaster engineers to get
even more extreme with their designs. You know, a side
(17:51):
friction wheel had limited velocity and you couldn't plunge at
certain inclides, but this under friction wheel allows you to
go even faster, even higher and lower. And Miller himself
is kind of this crazy it's kind of pushing the
envelope of physics when you think about it. The Russian
(18:12):
mountain builders would be astounded by this because they would
be like, literally in the ice age of roller coasters,
that joke is worth it.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
It's more than worth it pen and you know, and
you know, you really started to see that arms rays
kind of playing out where people were trying to top,
you know, existing coasters so they could be known as
the fastest, the scariest, whatever it might be. And Miller
actually really pushed the envelope of physics itself with his
(18:42):
Jack Rabbit attraction at Kennywood Park, which had a significantly
precipitous dive into kind of like almost like a valley,
and then his Cyclone in Cleveland, Ohio, which used the
cliffs and gorges, natural attractions at the appuritus springs to
(19:03):
create these kind of v shaped, you know, paths.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah, and this is where we get to the golden
age of roller coasters, and once more, credit where it's due.
We want to shout out American Experience WABPPS dot org.
You can find it. This is a relatively comprehensive history.
By the nineteen twenties, says American Experience, the roller coaster
(19:31):
street name the scream Machine was making more screams than
ever before. The US had like maybe fifteen hundred separate
roller coasters. Sure, they're all chasing hyperbole and superlatives like
one is one hundred and thirty eight feet high, the
fastest goes sixty one miles an hour. And there were
(19:55):
more and more complex iterations of the basic principles tiger curves,
steeper drop spirals, figure eights that would just blow your mind.
There was even once upon a time, we talked about
this an episode of car stuff. Once upon a time
in Los Angeles there was an auto coaster, which was
(20:18):
a roller coaster you rode in your car. Yikes, I
don't know about that, guys. Just now. It didn't work out.
Don't really see those too much these days, if at.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
All, I'm going to say not at all, because I've
certainly never heard of one outside of this. It was,
like you said, Ben, consider the golden age of the
roller coaster specifically, though, you know, like we have our
ice age and all that stuff in our bronze age.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
This was the wooden age. M yeah, yeah, And this
is this is sort of the grandfather of things like
the American scream machine. These are the ones that are
clattery and jittery. They're lurching, they're they're made pretty much
entirely of wood. Perhaps the most famous is the Coney
(21:03):
Island Cyclone, which is built in nineteen twenty seven by
Vernon Keaton and Harry Baker. Even notables of the day
like Charles Lindbergh would get off this ride and say
that is actually scarier to me than flying in an airplane.
Eighty five foot drop, sixty miles an hour. This is
the gold standard for most of modern roller coasters. It
(21:27):
truly freaks.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Me out the idea of something like that being held
with such force, you know, of being exerted on it
on the regular, being held together by like nails and boards.
I don't understand how they don't just come crashing down.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, the Woodies, right, Ben, the Woodies, that's right. Yeah.
And the King of the Woodies is a guy named
Harry Guy Traver, A guy named Harry Guy Traver. Guy's
actually his mill named. In the nineteen twenties, he starts
building his own version of cyclone across the nation, and
his most famous creation is the cyclone at Canada's Crystal
(22:08):
Beach Park. At this point, just a context new. You know,
in the early days, they were calling a lot of
these rides scenic railways wherever they were. Now they're calling
them cyclone like it's not necessarily patented, they're not cyclones
or guess. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
And this particular cyclone, like you said, Ben, at Crystal
Beach Park up there in Canada, actually had a staff
nurse on hand in case people experience any kind of
medical issues as a result of riding the ride. Another
one in the same kind of era and style was
something called the aeroplane at a place called Playland Amusement
(22:47):
Park in Rye Beach, New York, which was constructed with
assistance from Frederick Church. The airplane really relied on this
first kind of corkscrew kind of spirally dropped that drops
so steeply with such forests that riders were slammed against
the side of the cars. And again we see that
(23:08):
with things like the remaining woodies that like you know,
the Great American Scream Machine in six Flags, or some
of the old style coasters at Coney Island. They are
really jarring and they do kind of tend to give
you a little bit of shell shock just from having
your head banged around. And I guess this was a feature,
not a bug here where they described that as simulating
(23:32):
the experience of being in a plane.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Crash, which doesn't sound particularly fun to me. M h true, right,
And I wonder whether there are now VR plane crash simulations.
I wonder if people do that for fun. Maybe I
don't doubt that it exists.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Ben, And I was just talking to my kid about
again our trip to Disney World a couple of years ago.
One of my favorite rides there was like this gravity
simular later of like what it feels like to be
in a spaceship launch and it literallyre just in this pod.
And that's I think the same technology that's used to
train you know, up and coming astronauts how to kind
(24:12):
of deal with g's G forces. It really does feel
like your whole body is being compressed against the back
of your seat, and it's very claustrophobic. And you know,
for being a pretty old attraction there at Disney, I
found it to be one of the most terrifying of
any of the things that we wrote.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I also think what we're learning is the older, the
older rides are going to inherently be more terrified. And
especially if you have knowledge of the history of roller coasters,
you might ask yourself, well, hey, guys, that's all good
and well, but why aren't any of these older rides
(24:50):
around now? Why have so many disappeared? Well, when we
think about the timeline, we see the same thing that
affected so many other stories of Americana, and the same
the Great Depression came, the Great Depression rolled in and
disposable income rolled away. Roller coasters were part of this.
(25:11):
With the onset of the Depression and World War Two
right after that, people just didn't have money to spend
on roller coasters. They were busy trying to you know,
buy food and water and sleep indoors.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, this came up on a recent episode as well,
I mean it always you know, you never expect the
Great Depression, but it does tend to throw a wrench
in any kind of leisure time activities, and folks that
have really liked invested their their livelihoods into these types
of attractions or these types of businesses.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Is going to be a sort of a slump inherent. Yeah,
So a lot of these things, even the legend God
to your Ones get torn down. The Traverse cyclone at
Crystal Beach Park is torn down in forty six. Nineteen
forty six, the Cody Island Tornado goes defunct. And by
the nineteen sixties, as a result of all these difficult times,
(26:10):
the US went from having fifteen hundred roller coasters to
more like two hundred. So it's a heck of a
rate of attrition. And it turns out that when we
look at the roller coaster today, not just in the
United States but around the world, we have to thank
Walt Disney because he got super into roller coasters. You know.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, he's very often credited as kind of rescuing the
concept of the roller coaster, which you know, it's credit
where credit is due. He absolutely did that, and he
also made them more accessible by not leaning so hard
into the absolute death defying kind of thrills of them all,
but making them more these sort of like very thoughtfully
(27:01):
designed experiences, you know, and themed like for example, the
Matterhorn bob Sled ride, which it holds up man. It's
super cool and a little bit scary. There's some parts
where you know, you look like you're about to jump
off the tracks, and then this yetti swoops in and
there's all of this animatronics around it.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
So it's more than just a coaster.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
It really is almost like riding a high speed like
Haunted House attraction or something.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
There's also a huge key innovation that the Disney crew makes.
The matter Horns tracks are not built of wood, they're
built of steel, so the ride smoother, quieter, it feels
less threatening. And this idea of making coasters out of
steel brings the industry back to life. It resurrects it.
(27:49):
Disneyland's massive success encourages all sorts of people dreaming of
the coaster game to open their own theme parks in
different regions of the US and the layer of the world.
There's Six Flags, which is you know everywhere. Now it's
a franchise. We have one in our fair metropolis of Atlanta,
(28:09):
King's Island near the Natty Bush Gardens in Tampa Bay, Florida,
And then there are more and more. It seems, even
when the economy is not doing so well, a lot
of these places survive. At least twenty thirty brings us
another great depression.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So in the nineteen sixties a company called Arrow who
actually designed the Matter Horn for Disney.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
They hired a guy named Ron.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Tumor who introduced a super successful line of rides that
could be recreated, like the Flume ride, for example, which
everyone knows is like sort of the log ride where
you go down like one single you know, incline and
get splashed.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Nice. Where are you guys at Nolan max on splash rides.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
If it's hot, I'm cool with it. It's like a
really really hot It's a nice little kind of you know,
relief a little bit. I go to water parks to
get wet.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
My problem with like water rice and world and like
amusement parks a lot of times is like I know,
people like, oh, we're sandals. I'm like, I'm walking around
all day. I don't I have like comfortable socks on
and coortle shoes on.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
That stuff doesn't do well when it gets wet.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
But granted, if it's like ninety five degrees outside, okay,
that's fine.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
I don't go to water parks, and I'm concerned that
you do because of all the pea.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
It's a lot of pea.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
There's a lot of pea.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Now I don't like I don't like water parks because
water parks you have to climb up those stairs and
being afraid of heights.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
It's awful.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yet, yeah, I feel you, man, Let's start a hot
air balloon amusement park.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
It's sort of out of this, Yes, it's sort of
out of this. You are you are really on this
hot hout for these air balloons. Ben Hey. There is
a park that's probably outside of the scope of this
particular episode, but it's called Action Park in New Jersey,
I often referred to as Class Action. It is a
water park that notoriously contained very poorly designed rides that
(30:06):
would just shoot people or water slides that would just
shoot people out into oblivion, you know, to be injured
in various ways. And one of the reasons apparently that
this was so common was that the designs of the ride,
or the designers of the ride did not seem to
have sufficient knowledge or training in physics and engineering.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Just shoot them and go with God, see what happens.
There's the Great American Revolution ride at six Flags Magic Mountain,
which is over in Valencia, California, that goes out in
nineteen seventy six, and it redefines the looping coaster game.
Now it's just called Revolution and it had a tear
(30:47):
drop loop. The technical term would be a clothoid or
clothoid loop. This was designed by a German engineer, Anton Schwartzkrop,
and the company that made this roller coaster is still
around to this day. They're called Intimate AG and so
they The innovations these guys made brought more and more
(31:10):
people back to amusement parks. And today if you go
to any modern major amusement park, like anything that's not
just a bunch of carnies in a parking lot, you're
going to see some kind of looping coaster. And there
was another arms race to get the maximum number of
loops or inversions in a single ride. I'm thinking of
(31:33):
stuff like Dragon Con and Spain Monte Macaia in Brazil.
And there's one quote This is probably one of my
favorite quotes from the research that John Allen, President of Philadelphia.
Toboggan said this, you don't need a degree in engineering
to design roller coasters. You need a degree in psychology. Noel,
(31:56):
can you help us unpack that? What does he mean?
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Well, that's right, because I mean a lot of it
is about weaponizing psychology in a way that she us
maximum thrills. We all talked about how oftentimes the scariest
part is the anticipation.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Is that click, click, click, up the hill.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Toboggan goes on to say, a roller coaster is as
theatrically contrived as a broadway play. These advancements in roller
coaster technology and design tech included a lot of very
specific engineering touches that really played with things like your expectations,
(32:32):
things like parabolic hill shapes where you couldn't see what
was coming around the next bend.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah, there we go. So it's always it's like Alfred
Hitchcock said, right, the monster off screen that you can't
see is always going to be scarier than the one
on screen. So not knowing what's coming next really messages
with your expectations your head. We also know that the
wooden coasters or woodies, which are you know, technologically speaking,
(33:02):
they're not as advanced as steel coasters. They are now
benefiting from the power of nostalgia. Ah yeah, hell of
a drug indeed, right, And these these wooden coasters, the woodies,
become instrumental in the rebirth of roller coasters as a cool,
(33:23):
fun thing. And now they're starting to be called mega
coasters at this point, around like the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Right, and you had mega coasters such as Racer, which
was a John Allen design that actually contained dual coasters,
so I believe these would have been side by side, right,
kind of going in tandem. Yeah, and then you also
had the Beast of nineteen seventy nine fame, which had
the title.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Of longest coaster in the world.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Both of these, the Beast and the Racer, were at
King's Island Amusement Park were.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
And are because I've been a couple of times in
my life, I've written both of these.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
The Racers Racers Cool.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Racer is fun because no matter what, you're just automatically
everyone is just talking massive ship to the other car.
But they don't always They used to run at one
part where one was going backwards. One was going forwards.
I don't know if they do that all the time now,
but The Beast is to the state the best roller
coaster I've ever written.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
It's been that.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
That first sentence you don't need a degree in engineering,
you need a degree in psychology, is like that because
you just walk up. The Beast is at like a
part of the park where it's just woods all behind it,
so you have no idea what it is.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
You look at.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah, you have no idea in so long, and it's
like a it's like a story, basically just writing a story,
and it's literally like all you can do on that
roller coaster is just laugh and joy.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
It is so amazing.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
It's despite its age, it's still like, especially for a
wooden coaster, Oh really smooth. A lot of these hold up, yeah,
if it's don't fix it, yeah, I mean, like obviously
they have to spend a lot of wooden coaster is
one of the big drawbacks wooden coasters. You have to
spend a lot of money mainta yeah, replacing the tracks.
But the Beast is one that's like, I mean, it's
been a number of years since I've written it, but
(35:06):
it was it's about it's probably the number one roller
coaster in my list. I got about three. I got
three in Tier A. Let's go, oh yeah, let's let's
let's get to that at the end. I'd love to
hear what all our favorites are. I've got a top
three in my head right now.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah, the uh, the as we're getting to that, let's uh,
let's you know what, Let's let's hurry up and get
to that part right now. What you need to know, folks,
without getting two into weeds, is that the arms race
for the superlatives continues. The titles for the fastest, biggest,
(35:42):
longest coaster are an issue of hot, intense debate every
single year. It's just sort of it's sort of similar
to the arms race for skyscrapers, you know what I mean,
everybody's trying to build the tallest building. And honestly, if
you're hearing this, congrats on the bergs Dubai. But should
we count the antennas at the top as part of
(36:03):
the height? Max says no, Maxican in thumbed out, I
don't think so either. Skyscraper episode on the way, we're
just yeah confessed it. Yeah, so okay, So we know this, right,
like the latest crop of coasters. Every time they come out,
they're trying to find at least some specific thing that
they are the best at, the biggest, the fastest, the
(36:24):
most loops, you know, the fewest injuries.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Indoor coasters, you know, indoor coasters. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you
have these. First of all, you have suspended coasters like
the Xcel R eight nineteen eighty four and six Flags
Astro World in Houston. You have stand up coasters, which well,
there's one called the King Kobra, but there is one
(36:49):
at six Flags that's called the Viper maybe or something
like that, but it's there's a stand up coaster at
the No, it's the Scorcher, the Georgia. Scorcher has six
laves over Georgia as end up coaster, and those are
really cool. They're fun because it really feels like you're
like flying.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Don't we have the Superman one too, where that's.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, you're like, yeah, I find that one to be
difficult because I just get kind of claustrophobic when I'm
like like like locked in in that way, and so
I'm got a little stressful.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
It's really restraining. I find I like scorture. But the
one that like the problem with stand up coasters just
in general is they don't handle g forces very well, right,
so you either have to tune it back a lot
or you get a little rough and scorture is like
kind of in the middle where it's not it's really fun.
But I've readen other stand up coasters, I've rit bigger
ones than that. I'm like, oh my god, this is horrible.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
It's a tricky one, you know what I mean. It's
kind of like building a three willed vehicle, right, but
there's like it's possible, right. But also, uh, I love
the Superman thing just because despite all the restraints you
have to wear, it replicates flying. It does. I wrote
it once. And it's also really really short.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I remember it being obscenely short, which probably for good
reason because it is so restraining.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Can we do this?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I just I remember the first coaster that really, you know,
blew my mind was the Batman Ride. Batman the Ride,
which I believe debuted at six Flags Great America in Illinois,
but has been at six a staple of six Flags.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Over Georgia, you know, for many, many years.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And that's one where I guess it's called an inverted
coaster where your legs are kind of dangling. And if
I'm not mistaken, somebody got killed on the Batman ride
at Six Flags because they tried to get their hat
from this sort of cordoned off area, and I believe
the the you know, one of the cars swooped down
and they were decapitated, if I'm.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Mistaken, And then someone on a ride called z Force
in six Flags broke their neck. You can find on
coaster pedia dot at a fairly comprehensive list of deadly
roller coaster accidents. To be fair to the industry, these
are isolated cases rare. They're very rare. It can sound scary,
(39:14):
and part of that, I would argue is a little
bit of like black bag psyop stuff in some of
the marketers. But to be absolutely transparent, everybody building roller coasters,
everybody charging you to ride one, they want you to
be as safe as possible. They want you to have
an amazing time. That's why there are like one hundred
(39:35):
and twenty different roller coaster operations opening across the world
by the end of the twentieth century, about half of
those fifty percent or in the United States. Because I
ask you, despite the Russian and French origin story, what
is more American than a roller coaster as a ride?
Saying like, I want to feel like I might die
(39:57):
for you know, two three minutes.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Yeah, there is a sort of cheating of death aspect
to it that that does have.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
A certain appeal.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
But you're right, you know, despite its origins, it has
become a pretty uniquely American thing. Well, you know, not
to say that there aren't cool coasters in other parts
of the world.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
There certainly are. Do you guys wanna as we as
we close out our series on the history of roller coasters,
thanks again to our research associate Max, do you guys
wanna tell us all a little bit about your favorite coasters?
Each said you have a top three? I do?
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I think for me, my number three would be Batman,
the ride at six Slives over Georgia. Why don't we
maybe go round robin until we get to our number ones?
Speaker 3 (40:38):
Yeah, no, I agree with that one. Play That one's
so much fun. It's also a great one that if
you're there on a night or it's slow and there's
not many people there that you can just binge that one.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
They'll like, they'll let you ride it a couple of times. Yeah,
sure that one.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
That one's great for that I'm gonna go with at
a theater point. There's this one called Maverick and it's
a weird roller coaster because it doesn't have chain lift
or anything like that. So it's like you were was
in constant motion the entire time and as like it
was the first ninety five degree drop, which is a
weird thing.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Like I'm Amurican on my that's not great but crazy
of an idea, and I wrote it.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
I'm like, oh, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen
because you're going underneath the track that you were just on,
but it just whips and turns and it's just this
beautifully scripted written roller coaster.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Very cool, Ben, you got a number three fave. I
don't really have, you know, I don't really have a
top list of roller coasters. Again, it's like the ice
cream comparison in episode one. You know, like if they're.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
There, I'll go stand out in your memory, whether it
be childhood.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
But I know, almost dying, like to the ice cream thing,
I don't wake up and then immediately travel the one
American scream Machine just because I conquered death on that one,
which is the inherent appeal of roller coasters. I wouldn't
say it's a great coaster by any means, uh, But
I fought it and I won.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Sonumber three well, okay, And speaking of fighting against great
adversity and winning as the underdog, my number two would
be the Goliath at six Flags over Georgia, which is
quite long and very high, with incredible scenic views of
the surrounding kind of wooded areas in that part of Atlanta,
(42:20):
and some serious drops, and every time I ride it,
I have to get over my fear of heights because
it is massively tall, and at night when they do
the fright Fest or whatever Fright Night I guess it's
called at six Flags. It is a wild one to
ride at night when you can see the full moon
up in the sky ahead of you.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
It's pretty incredible.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
So I was actually changing up my list kind of
on the fly right here, so that I talked about
the Beasts and how which I love that one, and
I was going to talk about Goliath. It's my number two,
so I'm going to change it for the sake of
having more and talk about Goliath Daddy, which is Magnum
x L, which is the first ever mega coaster in
the world. I think it's the late eighties at Suit Point.
(43:00):
It's basically it's very similar to Billie. It's not the
same script, and it's nowhere smooth as Goliath is, but
it's like it was one of the coolest things about
Cedar Point, which I gush about it if you let me
do it for too long. There's so many records were
set at that park, and it looked it was the
first two hundred foot roller coaster in the world, and
you can still ride to this day. It's just there's
(43:21):
just now two other roller coasters taller than it.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, because again it's it's like the skyscraper race. They're
also what are they called giga roller coasters. A giga
coaster Gego's three hundred and three three hundred to three
hundred and ninety nine feet it is, which is massive.
And I think there's what we're talking about too, is
this nomenclature. There's also the hyper coaster.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah, I think I said mega Hyper's two hundred to
three hundred right, right, So.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
We're throwing at the terms here too.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
You can tell Max is a real coasters in terms
like script you know, I mean, come now, you've done
your homeworks there.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Magnum XL is A is a hypercoaster. There are giga
coasters as as you mentioned. If I had to choose
a second one, you know what, I'm thinking more in
terms beyond just orthodox coasters. I really like the bungee
rides where they launch you out and you're attached to
(44:18):
a rope. No, no, thank you. I don't like those
straight drops, but I like the I like that. I
like the big swings. Those are terrified pasts.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
I've read it one time in my life, and I
will never not regret you.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Came through the fire. I'm proud of you. Max. All right,
So then that brings us to what number ones? Just
their number ones? Yeah? Max, you want to go first?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Sure, I can go first, because, uh Ben, you were
talking about giga coasters, so of course I'm want to
talk about the first giga coaster ever made, Millennium Force
at Cedar point three hundred foot. The coolest thing about
Millennium Force, well, ay, one thing that's really cool about
that is it has probably the fastest chain I've ever ridden,
going to three hundred feet and it's just like you
go so fast up and I'm like, okay, that's nice,
(45:01):
but as an eighty degree three and nude foot drop.
But the coolest thing it does is the first thing
it goes up and then turns and on the turn
you go I think one twenty, so your feet are
above your head on a turn and you only have
a lap bar on and it's just so smooth and
it's so excellent. The problem with Lannium Force is it's
(45:24):
like always broken. At least that's my knowledge. Like I've
been a Supard Point twice and I was only able
to one of the times.
Speaker 4 (45:30):
It was broken for the entire season.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
It's like there McDonald's ice cream.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
It really is the McDonald's ice cream. So if you're
in Ohio and Lenian Force is running, you should just
go to Santusky.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
All right, Chief Advice. And with that, mister Brown, your
number one coaster.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
The number one coaster for me was at Universal Studios, Orlando,
and it is the Incredible Hulk roller coaster. And it
is because I ever experienced anything like this where it wasn't.
It does this thing where you enter on the I
guess the uphill part. The very first little you know,
chain lift part and it click click click click click.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
You go to this tunnel that sort of.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Surrounded you with like gamma ray kind of lights, one
would presume, and you go click click click about halfway
and then it just shoots you out and you don't
know exactly what's gonna happen. And it's like, I don't
know how it's propelled or what the technology is behind it.
But something about the like the momentary, you know, familiar
thing of the chain lift click and then the note.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Screw this, bam and you're out.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
There's something about it that just really games your your
brain in a really interesting way and you just feel
like unstoppable and it has some incredible inversions and it's
just really really fast and really really fun and I
loved it.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
I've only ridden it once and I thought it was
next level. Nice nice with that will end with a
number one on my end. That is not a declaration,
it's a question. Ridiculous his story? Could you help it?
Could you help me find a number one roller coaster?
What is your favorite? Let us know at Ridiculous Historians
(47:10):
over our Facebook page. Yeah, we want to hear about
your adventures folks and I can't wait to can't wait
to return with even more strange, ridiculous history. This has
been such a not even an intentional pun, but I'll
keep it if we're okay with it. It's been such
a fun ride.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
A real ride, yeah, real journey of self discovery.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
And then Jois de viv No, it's good stuff. Man.
Without a line.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
No, no, no line requires ridiculous history. We're right there
for you.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Huge thanks to Max for the incredible research work on
this one, as well as aj Bahamas and Jonathan Strickland
the Puzzler and Quist respectively. Huge fan of lines, that guy.
Big big thanks to christ Rossiotis Eves, jeffco will Be
Eve Jeff Coat, and Ben Thompson, both of whom will
(48:03):
be appearing soon in the near future spoilers. Big big
thanks again to Alex Williams, who composed this slap and
bop and audio roller coaster all its own indeed, and Noel,
thanks to you. Ah to you as well. Ben. We'll
see you next time. Folks.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio, previously on Ridiculous History.
(00:38):
Welcome back to the show Ridiculous his Stories. Think who
has always so much for tuning in. Let's give a
big shout out to our super producer, mister Max the
Tycoon Williams. I am ben Bullen joy does always with
the man, the myth, the legend, a tycoon in his
own right, Mister Noel Brown Noles. We've had We've had
(01:00):
a heck of a time with this roller coaster series, right,
A lot of oh no, no, it's okay, we'll allow it. Yeah,
no ups and downs.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
To be sure, I think we've roughly reached approaching modern times,
but not not not not quite. We still have a
little bit of history again.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Oh yeah, just like the experience of writing a roller coaster,
we're having form follow function, or form and function be interrelated.
Because our previous episode, part one was kind of a
up the hill, all right, and now we are at
a titular point. Now we are at an apex of
(01:44):
roller coaster history because you see, with the dawning of
the world's first legit roller coaster, Tycoon La Marcus. I
just love to say his name uh, he triggered and
arms race amidst the roller coaster manufacturers of the world.
(02:06):
I mean, within just a few months after he becomes
the roller coaster king of Coney Island, people start moving
in on his territory. That's right.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I mean he held a virtual monopoly on coasters, you know,
at least in this country at Coney Island. But enter
Charles Alcoke, who had built a kind of more of
a scenic people mover type situation, a slow scenic railroad.
The connected the ends of the tracks in a continuous
(02:39):
loop to make it more of a pleasure cruise.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I like that, a pleasure cruise people mover, a people
moving pleasure cruise. Yes, so this coaster gets close to
the record set by Thompson Switchback Railway, but Philip Hinkle
makes a breakthrough in eighteen eighty five. His coaster has
(03:03):
an elliptical route and a powered hoist that pulls cars
back to the top of the first hill, and because
of the speed at which it moves, it's a more
exciting ride than the relatively slow moving switchback. And at
this point, to be clear, no one has beaten that
(03:24):
original train powered scenic railway from episode one that ended
at like sixty five miles an hour.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Right, And when I say we're roughly approaching modern coaster times,
what I mean is this technology in a lot of
ways is still kind of how things are done.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like you said, these a lot
of these are what we will call simple machines with
further pieces of technology added on top of them. At
this point, all of them, at least all the rides
at Coney Island are leveraging gravity to work. They're just
approaching gravity and interesting ways, there's a ride called the
(04:05):
Steeplechase by a guy named George C. Till You, which
is an interesting last name. I wonder what the etymology
of that is. I don't know. It's spelt like it's
spelled like t I L you, so it's like until
you with me again.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
I don't know this this ride actually, you know, Steeplechase
being a famous is it a specific horse race or
is it just a style.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Of horse racing.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
I can't remember if it's like a particular event, but
either way, Steeplechase is a horse race scenario, and this
one kind of mimic that with these mechanical horses that
descend it on kind of a wavy track, and it
was very very popular amongst early coaster heads.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
I also like coaster heads. I think it's steeplechase, isn't
that the one where the horses have to jump over obstacles,
like they don't run, and they run and they jump
over different fences or different ditches, So it kind of
mimics what you would experience on a roller coaster. It's
an obstacle race in athletics, but it is named after the.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Steeplechase in horse racing, which, to your point, Ben was
involved jumping over hurdles and things like that. But a
steeple chase in like an Olympic type event, involves going
through water, you know, jumping over hurdles and all of
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
So this was named for the horse race, the original
version of a steeple chase, because of the ups and downs,
and there were there were other things like the cannon coaster. Yes,
the cannon coaster is a little bit dystopian. Already. There
(05:45):
is a gap in the rails. Ooh, yeah, that seems
a little bit dangerous. Well, often often the cars made
it across the gap. Yeah, when one would hope it
would work out that way for you. There was also
something called the mystic screw, which also sounds a little dirty.
(06:06):
Maybe my mind is just in the gut of perpetually
and this trick it was a yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
This involved a kind of a helix type pattern and
then the writers would descend around seventy five feet.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yeah. Pass around this time, our friends of Encyclopedia Britannic
and note people start experimenting with something called inversions.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, and whenever you are are looking at, you know,
guides for roller coasters written by coaster heads, inversions are
a big feature that are always you know discussed, like
how many inversions does a ride happen, what's their height?
And also things like corkscrews that might send you kind
of circling. It's not a full inversion exactly. It's more
(06:58):
of like a sideways kind of like inversion.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
I always thought loops loops were so cool because it
is just from a physics standpoint, it's such an interesting experiment.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, It's like taking a bucket of water and swinging
it upside down over your head. It's not gonna come
out because of you know, mother gravity. Just hold that
holding that stuff in and early inversions didn't even have
lap bars or what do you call them, like, you know, harnesses.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
We were literally held in place.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
By gravity, which we know is gonna work unless the
coaster fails or something, you know, and then you just
PLoP right out.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Gravity does its thing once again. Yeah, yeah, because the
one constant force in all of these things, one thing
that never breaks is gravity. So you just have to
stay on gravity's good side. It doesn't care about you.
It's what it's gonna do. It's very focused on it.
It's like one thing that it's good at. So these
(07:59):
loop track rides, people had tried them in Paris before
in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, and the rides
were similar to the Bucket of Water example from earlier.
The rides are based on a toy for kids that
keeps a small ball rolling on a loop track without
falling off. However, at least in Paris, people found these
(08:23):
inversions uncomfortable and dangerous, and so the idea was scrapped
until eighteen ninety five, when Lena Beecher installs something called
the Flip Flap Railway at Paul Boyton's Sea Lion Park
and Coney Island. Their main attraction was sea lions, but
they also of course had what they called the Railway.
(08:44):
It was uncomfortable, it was still dangerous, but it had
this big twenty five foot circular loop that became wildly
popular and went viral, as we would say in the
parlance of today, and it shut down after only a
few years. And it was so potentially dangerous that a
(09:04):
lot of folks would just show up to watch others
ride it, which I can relate to again with my
kind of building back up my courage to ride the coasters.
If I go to an amusement park and haven't been
in a while, I will sometimes just kind of watch
a few of the coasters to kind of build up
my moxie, you know, to go for a ride myself. Yeah.
I think people found the excel the slight acceleration, g forces,
(09:29):
gravitational forces uncomfortable. Oh yeah, well it kind of is
a little bit so, right. So this is where we
get to a guy named Edward Prescott who builds something
called the loop de loop.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
And that is sort of the stand in parlance for
these kind of inversions. You know, people will often call
them a loop, the loop, uh, and that this is
also a Coney Island, had a bit of a gentler slope,
more oval shaped design, and was much better in engineered
and constructed then the flippity flap.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
I'm sorry, I know it's not the flippity flap, but
I like that better. Oh sure, let's treat the phrase
flip flap with the gravity it deserves.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Hey, hey, jeez, the but it'd still be quite quite
a few more decades seventy five years in fact, before
a very fully successful vertical loop was was actually created.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And because it had a very low seating capacity, the loop.
The loop itself doesn't doesn't succeed long term. It's not
around now, but for the for the fans of coasters,
for the roller coaster folk, it is the coolest thing
(10:46):
in town, or indeed in the world, until a new
challenger emerges in this arms race for adrenaline, something called
drop the Dip, later to be called rough Riders.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Yeah, I think that's a little better. But rough Riders.
It makes me think of DMX. Wasn't he the rough
rider to the head of the rough Riders crew.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
It makes me think of Roosevelt.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I gotta jump in here. Remember when we were doing
our Model Trains. Episode I talked about the terrible idea
of a third track roller coaster.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
This is it. This is it?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, third track being a power rail that delivers electricity
to the coaster. But also, as we know if you've
ever been on like a subway station, those tracks are
way out of reach. They're down, you know, in the
in the pit kind of of the of the subway track.
But they are very clearly labeled do not touch the
third rail because you can get a deadly shock.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Exactly. And the issue here is not necessarily the mechanics
at play. The issue here is the human operators. Because
folks operating the rough rider would try to deliver the
maximum amount of fun, thrill and adrenaline to their passengers,
which meant they pushed it too hard. They pushed the
(12:04):
machine too hard, They used full power, even when folks
were already going down, taking the power leveraging the power
of gravity. In nineteen ten, one guy operating rough riders,
he took his train around a bend just way too fast.
He was all gased, no brakes. He threw two cars
(12:24):
loose from the ride. Sixteen passengers flew out over the
nearby surf avenue. And four of them died.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, and Britannica points out that these kind of upping
the ante here in terms of the danger quotient did
force some of that oversight that we were desperately lacking.
And obviously it takes a real gnarly tragedy like this,
you know, for folks to see the need for intervention
at this level. And so you started to see things
(12:54):
like lap bars, which got passengers in place right before that,
like I was saying, you were just in place by
the forces of gravity and the g force of the
vertical loop themselves. Train derailments, however, did kind of continue,
though they became a lot less common after some of these,
you know, safety measures were put in place around nineteen
(13:16):
twelve when John Miller, who was the chief engineer for
our boy LaMarcus, invented something called the under friction wheel.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah. It was sort of a big wig or as
Max wanted to say, a large hair piece in the
I appreciate in the roller coaster industry. Yeah, the under
friction wheel. Before we get to that, I got to
tell you guys, here's the story of how I almost
died on the American screen machine. It's due to a
lap bar. So the lap bar in these things works,
(13:48):
as you know, if you're seated two by two, the
lap bar is supposed to go down sort of like
on your crotch area, the bend between your hips and
your thighs, and as long as people relatively the same size,
you're gonna be all right. I was writing with an
adult friend of the family who was, you know, a grown,
(14:12):
a grown woman much larger than me as a young
Ben Bolan, and the lap bar clanked down on her
but didn't quite reach our young, our young protagonist. And
so thank god, the American Scream Machine did not have
loop de loops. It just had this old creaky wooden
(14:32):
thing where the first seri downhills, though it's got some
serious downhills, and I was replicating the experience of pre
lap bar people because I kid you not, guys. There
was a clear like six inches or so between my
body and the lap bar, so I was almost out
(14:54):
of the car well.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And that's the problem with community lap bars, because again
you're you're limited by the largest person in the scenario.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
I actually have a follow up on this because this
is how my friend David almost killed me on American
Scream machine in the exact same roller coaster. Really, my
friend David is a daredevil. He like, you know, I'm
afraid of heights. He has no fear of heights whatsoever. Sure,
and we were teenagers, probably like fifteen sixteen years old.
We're at six Flags, and what he would do is
he would always sit up as far as he possibly
(15:27):
could and see if people would not notice that he's
just like making it so the bar can't go all
the way down.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It was like it was like a Wednesday afternoon.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
We were there.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
The person that didn't really check, and so.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Then we're rolling out, he stands up completely out of
his seat. Does to show me how bad it is.
I'm just like cranking down in the seat, Belty Calf.
But I got the last laugh because a year later
we went to Cedar Point and I made him right
at top fill Dragster and I actually watched that man
cry before it went off, and he started to cry.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
You'll love to see it. Good to be in touch
with your emotions, I guess. But but yes, so this
idea here and also out to everybody who survived a
roller coaster where you almost died. And Carol, if you're
hearing this, I forgive you. John Miller's invention of the
(16:14):
under friction wheel is a massive game changer because it
keeps the train bolted down beneath the track with a
third set of wheels. So if gravity, if you get
on the bad side of gravity, you have an opposing
force attaching your car to the rail, kind of like
(16:35):
clamping something. So like the previous ones had maybe side
friction wheels that were meant to function kind of as
insurance of ice rolling on the inside or the inner
edges of the track. But this is this is just
a much better answer. It stops so many accidental derailments.
(16:57):
Our guy John Miller is also responsible for others safety innovations,
like a safety chain lift, which means, okay, I didn't
know this, but it makes sense. Back in the day
roller coasters rolling up that first till that we were
talking about, sometimes they didn't make it. There's real backwards
(17:20):
that's not good.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, And then I mean, was there any safety measure
in place to stop them from just like slamming to
a halt at the end when they dropped back.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Down hopefully after the first few times. I would hope
after the first few anyway, there's a weird thing that
occurs here because this progress in terms of safety also
enables these absolutely mad cap roller coaster engineers to get
even more extreme with their designs. You know, a side
(17:51):
friction wheel had limited velocity and you couldn't plunge at
certain inclides, but this under friction wheel allows you to
go even faster, even higher and lower. And Miller himself
is kind of this crazy it's kind of pushing the
envelope of physics when you think about it. The Russian
(18:12):
mountain builders would be astounded by this because they would
be like, literally in the ice age of roller coasters,
that joke is worth it.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
It's more than worth it pen and you know, and
you know, you really started to see that arms rays
kind of playing out where people were trying to top,
you know, existing coasters so they could be known as
the fastest, the scariest, whatever it might be. And Miller
actually really pushed the envelope of physics itself with his
(18:42):
Jack Rabbit attraction at Kennywood Park, which had a significantly
precipitous dive into kind of like almost like a valley,
and then his Cyclone in Cleveland, Ohio, which used the
cliffs and gorges, natural attractions at the appuritus springs to
(19:03):
create these kind of v shaped, you know, paths.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah, and this is where we get to the golden
age of roller coasters, and once more, credit where it's due.
We want to shout out American Experience WABPPS dot org.
You can find it. This is a relatively comprehensive history.
By the nineteen twenties, says American Experience, the roller coaster
(19:31):
street name the scream Machine was making more screams than
ever before. The US had like maybe fifteen hundred separate
roller coasters. Sure, they're all chasing hyperbole and superlatives like
one is one hundred and thirty eight feet high, the
fastest goes sixty one miles an hour. And there were
(19:55):
more and more complex iterations of the basic principles tiger curves,
steeper drop spirals, figure eights that would just blow your mind.
There was even once upon a time, we talked about
this an episode of car stuff. Once upon a time
in Los Angeles there was an auto coaster, which was
(20:18):
a roller coaster you rode in your car. Yikes, I
don't know about that, guys. Just now. It didn't work out.
Don't really see those too much these days, if at.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
All, I'm going to say not at all, because I've
certainly never heard of one outside of this. It was,
like you said, Ben, consider the golden age of the
roller coaster specifically, though, you know, like we have our
ice age and all that stuff in our bronze age.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
This was the wooden age. M yeah, yeah, And this
is this is sort of the grandfather of things like
the American scream machine. These are the ones that are
clattery and jittery. They're lurching, they're they're made pretty much
entirely of wood. Perhaps the most famous is the Coney
(21:03):
Island Cyclone, which is built in nineteen twenty seven by
Vernon Keaton and Harry Baker. Even notables of the day
like Charles Lindbergh would get off this ride and say
that is actually scarier to me than flying in an airplane.
Eighty five foot drop, sixty miles an hour. This is
the gold standard for most of modern roller coasters. It
(21:27):
truly freaks.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Me out the idea of something like that being held
with such force, you know, of being exerted on it
on the regular, being held together by like nails and boards.
I don't understand how they don't just come crashing down.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, the Woodies, right, Ben, the Woodies, that's right. Yeah.
And the King of the Woodies is a guy named
Harry Guy Traver, A guy named Harry Guy Traver. Guy's
actually his mill named. In the nineteen twenties, he starts
building his own version of cyclone across the nation, and
his most famous creation is the cyclone at Canada's Crystal
(22:08):
Beach Park. At this point, just a context new. You know,
in the early days, they were calling a lot of
these rides scenic railways wherever they were. Now they're calling
them cyclone like it's not necessarily patented, they're not cyclones
or guess. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
And this particular cyclone, like you said, Ben, at Crystal
Beach Park up there in Canada, actually had a staff
nurse on hand in case people experience any kind of
medical issues as a result of riding the ride. Another
one in the same kind of era and style was
something called the aeroplane at a place called Playland Amusement
(22:47):
Park in Rye Beach, New York, which was constructed with
assistance from Frederick Church. The airplane really relied on this
first kind of corkscrew kind of spirally dropped that drops
so steeply with such forests that riders were slammed against
the side of the cars. And again we see that
(23:08):
with things like the remaining woodies that like you know,
the Great American Scream Machine in six Flags, or some
of the old style coasters at Coney Island. They are
really jarring and they do kind of tend to give
you a little bit of shell shock just from having
your head banged around. And I guess this was a feature,
not a bug here where they described that as simulating
(23:32):
the experience of being in a plane.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Crash, which doesn't sound particularly fun to me. M h true, right,
And I wonder whether there are now VR plane crash simulations.
I wonder if people do that for fun. Maybe I
don't doubt that it exists.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Ben, And I was just talking to my kid about
again our trip to Disney World a couple of years ago.
One of my favorite rides there was like this gravity
simular later of like what it feels like to be
in a spaceship launch and it literallyre just in this pod.
And that's I think the same technology that's used to
train you know, up and coming astronauts how to kind
(24:12):
of deal with g's G forces. It really does feel
like your whole body is being compressed against the back
of your seat, and it's very claustrophobic. And you know,
for being a pretty old attraction there at Disney, I
found it to be one of the most terrifying of
any of the things that we wrote.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I also think what we're learning is the older, the
older rides are going to inherently be more terrified. And
especially if you have knowledge of the history of roller coasters,
you might ask yourself, well, hey, guys, that's all good
and well, but why aren't any of these older rides
(24:50):
around now? Why have so many disappeared? Well, when we
think about the timeline, we see the same thing that
affected so many other stories of Americana, and the same
the Great Depression came, the Great Depression rolled in and
disposable income rolled away. Roller coasters were part of this.
(25:11):
With the onset of the Depression and World War Two
right after that, people just didn't have money to spend
on roller coasters. They were busy trying to you know,
buy food and water and sleep indoors.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, this came up on a recent episode as well,
I mean it always you know, you never expect the
Great Depression, but it does tend to throw a wrench
in any kind of leisure time activities, and folks that
have really liked invested their their livelihoods into these types
of attractions or these types of businesses.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Is going to be a sort of a slump inherent. Yeah,
So a lot of these things, even the legend God
to your Ones get torn down. The Traverse cyclone at
Crystal Beach Park is torn down in forty six. Nineteen
forty six, the Cody Island Tornado goes defunct. And by
the nineteen sixties, as a result of all these difficult times,
(26:10):
the US went from having fifteen hundred roller coasters to
more like two hundred. So it's a heck of a
rate of attrition. And it turns out that when we
look at the roller coaster today, not just in the
United States but around the world, we have to thank
Walt Disney because he got super into roller coasters. You know.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, he's very often credited as kind of rescuing the
concept of the roller coaster, which you know, it's credit
where credit is due. He absolutely did that, and he
also made them more accessible by not leaning so hard
into the absolute death defying kind of thrills of them all,
but making them more these sort of like very thoughtfully
(27:01):
designed experiences, you know, and themed like for example, the
Matterhorn bob Sled ride, which it holds up man. It's
super cool and a little bit scary. There's some parts
where you know, you look like you're about to jump
off the tracks, and then this yetti swoops in and
there's all of this animatronics around it.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
So it's more than just a coaster.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
It really is almost like riding a high speed like
Haunted House attraction or something.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
There's also a huge key innovation that the Disney crew makes.
The matter Horns tracks are not built of wood, they're
built of steel, so the ride smoother, quieter, it feels
less threatening. And this idea of making coasters out of
steel brings the industry back to life. It resurrects it.
(27:49):
Disneyland's massive success encourages all sorts of people dreaming of
the coaster game to open their own theme parks in
different regions of the US and the layer of the world.
There's Six Flags, which is you know everywhere. Now it's
a franchise. We have one in our fair metropolis of Atlanta,
(28:09):
King's Island near the Natty Bush Gardens in Tampa Bay, Florida,
And then there are more and more. It seems, even
when the economy is not doing so well, a lot
of these places survive. At least twenty thirty brings us
another great depression.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
So in the nineteen sixties a company called Arrow who
actually designed the Matter Horn for Disney.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
They hired a guy named Ron.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Tumor who introduced a super successful line of rides that
could be recreated, like the Flume ride, for example, which
everyone knows is like sort of the log ride where
you go down like one single you know, incline and
get splashed.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Nice. Where are you guys at Nolan max on splash rides.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
If it's hot, I'm cool with it. It's like a
really really hot It's a nice little kind of you know,
relief a little bit. I go to water parks to
get wet.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
My problem with like water rice and world and like
amusement parks a lot of times is like I know,
people like, oh, we're sandals. I'm like, I'm walking around
all day. I don't I have like comfortable socks on
and coortle shoes on.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
That stuff doesn't do well when it gets wet.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
But granted, if it's like ninety five degrees outside, okay,
that's fine.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
I don't go to water parks, and I'm concerned that
you do because of all the pea.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
It's a lot of pea.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
There's a lot of pea.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Now I don't like I don't like water parks because
water parks you have to climb up those stairs and
being afraid of heights.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
It's awful.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yet, yeah, I feel you, man, Let's start a hot
air balloon amusement park.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
It's sort of out of this, Yes, it's sort of
out of this. You are you are really on this
hot hout for these air balloons. Ben Hey. There is
a park that's probably outside of the scope of this
particular episode, but it's called Action Park in New Jersey,
I often referred to as Class Action. It is a
water park that notoriously contained very poorly designed rides that
(30:06):
would just shoot people or water slides that would just
shoot people out into oblivion, you know, to be injured
in various ways. And one of the reasons apparently that
this was so common was that the designs of the ride,
or the designers of the ride did not seem to
have sufficient knowledge or training in physics and engineering.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Just shoot them and go with God, see what happens.
There's the Great American Revolution ride at six Flags Magic Mountain,
which is over in Valencia, California, that goes out in
nineteen seventy six, and it redefines the looping coaster game.
Now it's just called Revolution and it had a tear
(30:47):
drop loop. The technical term would be a clothoid or
clothoid loop. This was designed by a German engineer, Anton Schwartzkrop,
and the company that made this roller coaster is still
around to this day. They're called Intimate AG and so
they The innovations these guys made brought more and more
(31:10):
people back to amusement parks. And today if you go
to any modern major amusement park, like anything that's not
just a bunch of carnies in a parking lot, you're
going to see some kind of looping coaster. And there
was another arms race to get the maximum number of
loops or inversions in a single ride. I'm thinking of
(31:33):
stuff like Dragon Con and Spain Monte Macaia in Brazil.
And there's one quote This is probably one of my
favorite quotes from the research that John Allen, President of Philadelphia.
Toboggan said this, you don't need a degree in engineering
to design roller coasters. You need a degree in psychology. Noel,
(31:56):
can you help us unpack that? What does he mean?
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Well, that's right, because I mean a lot of it
is about weaponizing psychology in a way that she us
maximum thrills. We all talked about how oftentimes the scariest
part is the anticipation.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Is that click, click, click, up the hill.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Toboggan goes on to say, a roller coaster is as
theatrically contrived as a broadway play. These advancements in roller
coaster technology and design tech included a lot of very
specific engineering touches that really played with things like your expectations,
(32:32):
things like parabolic hill shapes where you couldn't see what
was coming around the next bend.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah, there we go. So it's always it's like Alfred
Hitchcock said, right, the monster off screen that you can't
see is always going to be scarier than the one
on screen. So not knowing what's coming next really messages
with your expectations your head. We also know that the
wooden coasters or woodies, which are you know, technologically speaking,
(33:02):
they're not as advanced as steel coasters. They are now
benefiting from the power of nostalgia. Ah yeah, hell of
a drug indeed, right, And these these wooden coasters, the woodies,
become instrumental in the rebirth of roller coasters as a cool,
(33:23):
fun thing. And now they're starting to be called mega
coasters at this point, around like the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Right, and you had mega coasters such as Racer, which
was a John Allen design that actually contained dual coasters,
so I believe these would have been side by side, right,
kind of going in tandem. Yeah, and then you also
had the Beast of nineteen seventy nine fame, which had
the title.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Of longest coaster in the world.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Both of these, the Beast and the Racer, were at
King's Island Amusement Park were.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
And are because I've been a couple of times in
my life, I've written both of these.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
The Racers Racers Cool.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Racer is fun because no matter what, you're just automatically
everyone is just talking massive ship to the other car.
But they don't always They used to run at one
part where one was going backwards. One was going forwards.
I don't know if they do that all the time now,
but The Beast is to the state the best roller
coaster I've ever written.
Speaker 4 (34:21):
It's been that.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
That first sentence you don't need a degree in engineering,
you need a degree in psychology, is like that because
you just walk up. The Beast is at like a
part of the park where it's just woods all behind it,
so you have no idea what it is.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
You look at.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah, you have no idea in so long, and it's
like a it's like a story, basically just writing a story,
and it's literally like all you can do on that
roller coaster is just laugh and joy.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
It is so amazing.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
It's despite its age, it's still like, especially for a
wooden coaster, Oh really smooth. A lot of these hold up, yeah,
if it's don't fix it, yeah, I mean, like obviously
they have to spend a lot of wooden coaster is
one of the big drawbacks wooden coasters. You have to
spend a lot of money mainta yeah, replacing the tracks.
But the Beast is one that's like, I mean, it's
been a number of years since I've written it, but
(35:06):
it was it's about it's probably the number one roller
coaster in my list. I got about three. I got
three in Tier A. Let's go, oh yeah, let's let's
let's get to that at the end. I'd love to
hear what all our favorites are. I've got a top
three in my head right now.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah, the uh, the as we're getting to that, let's uh,
let's you know what, Let's let's hurry up and get
to that part right now. What you need to know, folks,
without getting two into weeds, is that the arms race
for the superlatives continues. The titles for the fastest, biggest,
(35:42):
longest coaster are an issue of hot, intense debate every
single year. It's just sort of it's sort of similar
to the arms race for skyscrapers, you know what I mean,
everybody's trying to build the tallest building. And honestly, if
you're hearing this, congrats on the bergs Dubai. But should
we count the antennas at the top as part of
(36:03):
the height? Max says no, Maxican in thumbed out, I
don't think so either. Skyscraper episode on the way, we're
just yeah confessed it. Yeah, so okay, So we know this, right,
like the latest crop of coasters. Every time they come out,
they're trying to find at least some specific thing that
they are the best at, the biggest, the fastest, the
(36:24):
most loops, you know, the fewest injuries.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Indoor coasters, you know, indoor coasters. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you
have these. First of all, you have suspended coasters like
the Xcel R eight nineteen eighty four and six Flags
Astro World in Houston. You have stand up coasters, which well,
there's one called the King Kobra, but there is one
(36:49):
at six Flags that's called the Viper maybe or something
like that, but it's there's a stand up coaster at
the No, it's the Scorcher, the Georgia. Scorcher has six
laves over Georgia as end up coaster, and those are
really cool. They're fun because it really feels like you're
like flying.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Don't we have the Superman one too, where that's.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Yeah, you're like, yeah, I find that one to be
difficult because I just get kind of claustrophobic when I'm
like like like locked in in that way, and so
I'm got a little stressful.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
It's really restraining. I find I like scorture. But the
one that like the problem with stand up coasters just
in general is they don't handle g forces very well, right,
so you either have to tune it back a lot
or you get a little rough and scorture is like
kind of in the middle where it's not it's really fun.
But I've readen other stand up coasters, I've rit bigger
ones than that. I'm like, oh my god, this is horrible.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
It's a tricky one, you know what I mean. It's
kind of like building a three willed vehicle, right, but
there's like it's possible, right. But also, uh, I love
the Superman thing just because despite all the restraints you
have to wear, it replicates flying. It does. I wrote
it once. And it's also really really short.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I remember it being obscenely short, which probably for good
reason because it is so restraining.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Can we do this?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I just I remember the first coaster that really, you know,
blew my mind was the Batman Ride. Batman the Ride,
which I believe debuted at six Flags Great America in Illinois,
but has been at six a staple of six Flags.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Over Georgia, you know, for many, many years.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And that's one where I guess it's called an inverted
coaster where your legs are kind of dangling. And if
I'm not mistaken, somebody got killed on the Batman ride
at Six Flags because they tried to get their hat
from this sort of cordoned off area, and I believe
the the you know, one of the cars swooped down
and they were decapitated, if I'm.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Mistaken, And then someone on a ride called z Force
in six Flags broke their neck. You can find on
coaster pedia dot at a fairly comprehensive list of deadly
roller coaster accidents. To be fair to the industry, these
are isolated cases rare. They're very rare. It can sound scary,
(39:14):
and part of that, I would argue is a little
bit of like black bag psyop stuff in some of
the marketers. But to be absolutely transparent, everybody building roller coasters,
everybody charging you to ride one, they want you to
be as safe as possible. They want you to have
an amazing time. That's why there are like one hundred
(39:35):
and twenty different roller coaster operations opening across the world
by the end of the twentieth century, about half of
those fifty percent or in the United States. Because I
ask you, despite the Russian and French origin story, what
is more American than a roller coaster as a ride?
Saying like, I want to feel like I might die
(39:57):
for you know, two three minutes.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Yeah, there is a sort of cheating of death aspect
to it that that does have.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
A certain appeal.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
But you're right, you know, despite its origins, it has
become a pretty uniquely American thing. Well, you know, not
to say that there aren't cool coasters in other parts
of the world.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
There certainly are. Do you guys wanna as we as
we close out our series on the history of roller coasters,
thanks again to our research associate Max, do you guys
wanna tell us all a little bit about your favorite coasters?
Each said you have a top three? I do?
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I think for me, my number three would be Batman,
the ride at six Slives over Georgia. Why don't we
maybe go round robin until we get to our number ones?
Speaker 3 (40:38):
Yeah, no, I agree with that one. Play That one's
so much fun. It's also a great one that if
you're there on a night or it's slow and there's
not many people there that you can just binge that one.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
They'll like, they'll let you ride it a couple of times. Yeah,
sure that one.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
That one's great for that I'm gonna go with at
a theater point. There's this one called Maverick and it's
a weird roller coaster because it doesn't have chain lift
or anything like that. So it's like you were was
in constant motion the entire time and as like it
was the first ninety five degree drop, which is a
weird thing.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Like I'm Amurican on my that's not great but crazy
of an idea, and I wrote it.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
I'm like, oh, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen
because you're going underneath the track that you were just on,
but it just whips and turns and it's just this
beautifully scripted written roller coaster.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Very cool, Ben, you got a number three fave. I
don't really have, you know, I don't really have a
top list of roller coasters. Again, it's like the ice
cream comparison in episode one. You know, like if they're.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
There, I'll go stand out in your memory, whether it
be childhood.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
But I know, almost dying, like to the ice cream thing,
I don't wake up and then immediately travel the one
American scream Machine just because I conquered death on that one,
which is the inherent appeal of roller coasters. I wouldn't
say it's a great coaster by any means, uh, But
I fought it and I won.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Sonumber three well, okay, And speaking of fighting against great
adversity and winning as the underdog, my number two would
be the Goliath at six Flags over Georgia, which is
quite long and very high, with incredible scenic views of
the surrounding kind of wooded areas in that part of Atlanta,
(42:20):
and some serious drops, and every time I ride it,
I have to get over my fear of heights because
it is massively tall, and at night when they do
the fright Fest or whatever Fright Night I guess it's
called at six Flags. It is a wild one to
ride at night when you can see the full moon
up in the sky ahead of you.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
It's pretty incredible.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
So I was actually changing up my list kind of
on the fly right here, so that I talked about
the Beasts and how which I love that one, and
I was going to talk about Goliath. It's my number two,
so I'm going to change it for the sake of
having more and talk about Goliath Daddy, which is Magnum
x L, which is the first ever mega coaster in
the world. I think it's the late eighties at Suit Point.
(43:00):
It's basically it's very similar to Billie. It's not the
same script, and it's nowhere smooth as Goliath is, but
it's like it was one of the coolest things about
Cedar Point, which I gush about it if you let me
do it for too long. There's so many records were
set at that park, and it looked it was the
first two hundred foot roller coaster in the world, and
you can still ride to this day. It's just there's
(43:21):
just now two other roller coasters taller than it.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Yeah, because again it's it's like the skyscraper race. They're
also what are they called giga roller coasters. A giga
coaster Gego's three hundred and three three hundred to three
hundred and ninety nine feet it is, which is massive.
And I think there's what we're talking about too, is
this nomenclature. There's also the hyper coaster.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Yeah, I think I said mega Hyper's two hundred to
three hundred right, right, So.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
We're throwing at the terms here too.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
You can tell Max is a real coasters in terms
like script you know, I mean, come now, you've done
your homeworks there.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Magnum XL is A is a hypercoaster. There are giga
coasters as as you mentioned. If I had to choose
a second one, you know what, I'm thinking more in
terms beyond just orthodox coasters. I really like the bungee
rides where they launch you out and you're attached to
(44:18):
a rope. No, no, thank you. I don't like those
straight drops, but I like the I like that. I
like the big swings. Those are terrified pasts.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
I've read it one time in my life, and I
will never not regret you.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
Came through the fire. I'm proud of you. Max. All right,
So then that brings us to what number ones? Just
their number ones? Yeah? Max, you want to go first?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Sure, I can go first, because, uh Ben, you were
talking about giga coasters, so of course I'm want to
talk about the first giga coaster ever made, Millennium Force
at Cedar point three hundred foot. The coolest thing about
Millennium Force, well, ay, one thing that's really cool about
that is it has probably the fastest chain I've ever ridden,
going to three hundred feet and it's just like you
go so fast up and I'm like, okay, that's nice,
(45:01):
but as an eighty degree three and nude foot drop.
But the coolest thing it does is the first thing
it goes up and then turns and on the turn
you go I think one twenty, so your feet are
above your head on a turn and you only have
a lap bar on and it's just so smooth and
it's so excellent. The problem with Lannium Force is it's
(45:24):
like always broken. At least that's my knowledge. Like I've
been a Supard Point twice and I was only able
to one of the times.
Speaker 4 (45:30):
It was broken for the entire season.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
It's like there McDonald's ice cream.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
It really is the McDonald's ice cream. So if you're
in Ohio and Lenian Force is running, you should just
go to Santusky.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
All right, Chief Advice. And with that, mister Brown, your
number one coaster.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
The number one coaster for me was at Universal Studios, Orlando,
and it is the Incredible Hulk roller coaster. And it
is because I ever experienced anything like this where it wasn't.
It does this thing where you enter on the I
guess the uphill part. The very first little you know,
chain lift part and it click click click click click.
Speaker 1 (46:11):
You go to this tunnel that sort of.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Surrounded you with like gamma ray kind of lights, one
would presume, and you go click click click about halfway
and then it just shoots you out and you don't
know exactly what's gonna happen. And it's like, I don't
know how it's propelled or what the technology is behind it.
But something about the like the momentary, you know, familiar
thing of the chain lift click and then the note.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Screw this, bam and you're out.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
There's something about it that just really games your your
brain in a really interesting way and you just feel
like unstoppable and it has some incredible inversions and it's
just really really fast and really really fun and I
loved it.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
I've only ridden it once and I thought it was
next level. Nice nice with that will end with a
number one on my end. That is not a declaration,
it's a question. Ridiculous his story? Could you help it?
Could you help me find a number one roller coaster?
What is your favorite? Let us know at Ridiculous Historians
(47:10):
over our Facebook page. Yeah, we want to hear about
your adventures folks and I can't wait to can't wait
to return with even more strange, ridiculous history. This has
been such a not even an intentional pun, but I'll
keep it if we're okay with it. It's been such
a fun ride.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
A real ride, yeah, real journey of self discovery.
Speaker 4 (47:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
And then Jois de viv No, it's good stuff. Man.
Without a line.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
No, no, no line requires ridiculous history. We're right there
for you.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Huge thanks to Max for the incredible research work on
this one, as well as aj Bahamas and Jonathan Strickland
the Puzzler and Quist respectively. Huge fan of lines, that guy.
Big big thanks to christ Rossiotis Eves, jeffco will Be
Eve Jeff Coat, and Ben Thompson, both of whom will
(48:03):
be appearing soon in the near future spoilers. Big big
thanks again to Alex Williams, who composed this slap and
bop and audio roller coaster all its own indeed, and Noel,
thanks to you. Ah to you as well. Ben. We'll
see you next time. Folks.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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