the needs of the day, not simply the implacable advance of technical knowledge. The man who took up the challenge to American pride was George Washington Gale Ferris, a Pittsburgh engineer. Inspiration, he later said, struck him at a dinner in a Chicago chophouse: "I would build a wheel, a monster."
Ferris's wheel was not entirely original. An English traveler wrote of seeing a "pleasure wheel" in 17th-century Bulgaria, and there were pleasure wheels some 50 feet in diameter...