The Daily Lesson

On August 16, 1898, Edwin Prescott patented the first vertical looping roller coaster, which is a roller coaster that goes upside down.  Wheee!  This is considered the birth of the modern rollercoaster.  Workers would manually push the rollercoaster cars to the top of a platform, where folks would get on, and then they’d let gravity do the rest. 

Rollercoasters started with the Russian Ice Slide, which consisted of a very tall wooden platform, upwards of 80 feet, which people would climb.  Then they’d get into a hollowed out piece of ice or a sled, and slide down an ice covered 50 degree slope.  Put into perspective, straight up is 90 degrees.  They could hit speeds up to 50 miles per hour.  That’s fast.  Apparently these were incredibly dangerous, but that didn’t stop anybody.  Ice slides first appeared in the 15th and 16th centuries, and peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Toward the end they were using wheeled carts so the fun didn’t have to stop in the summer.  Seriously!  Were these people nuts?

The first wheeled rollercoaster, with wheels that locked to a track so you were reasonably assured the car you were riding in didn’t go flying off into space, opened in Paris in 1812.  It was named after the Russian Ice Slides:  Les Montagnes Russes a Belleville.  French rollercoasters are still called Russian Mountains, only in French.  The first American rollercoaster, the Switchback Railway, opened on June 16, 1884, at Coney Island.  For a nickel you could go 6 miles an hour.  OK.  Maybe this one wouldn’t kill you.

Since then rollercoasters have gotten a bit more... sophisticated.  Going upside down is the norm.  There are now 4-D rollercoasters, which are said to be the scariest.  Apparently, that’s what the rollercoasting public wants.  They want a rollercoaster where the seats spin in any direction conceivable, independent of the car and track, so you never know where you’re at or what to expect.  Some even have optical illusions to purposefully disorient the riders. 

The longest rollercoaster in the world is The Falcon’s Flight at Six Flags Qiddiya City, which is just outside of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, if you’re interested in going.  It’s 13,943.6 feet long.  That’s over two and a half miles.  It’s also the tallest at 535.8 feet.  That’s the equivalent of a fifty story building.  But why stop there?  It’s the fastest, topping out at 155.3 miles per hour.  Each car has an aerodynamic windshield.  It’s the fastest, tallest, and longest... until somebody else builds one longer, taller, and faster... and maybe even scarier.

If you want to ride The Falcon’s Flight, don’t go when it’s busy.  You could wait up to two and a half hours.  But here’s the good news:  It’s free!  Well, once you get in the park.  That will set you back around $90.  Of course, you do have to get there.  But that’s true for any rollercoaster.  The average wait times for major rollercoasters in the US range from 45 minutes to two hours on a busy day, while the average ride time is from 1 to 3 minutes (The Falcon’s Flight is 3 minutes and 25 seconds).  Which means on any given roller coaster 95% of your time is going to be waiting in line.  The average cost to ride a rollercoaster in the US is from $7 to $12.  Most, though, are included with the daily park fee, which runs anywhere from $40 to $150.  So you’re really paying a lot of money for a very short ride, after standing around doing nothing for most of the afternoon. 

Even though the chances of getting killed on a rollercoaster are extremely rare – about one in a billion, billions of people ride rollercoasters every year.  2 to 4 people die on rollercoasters every year in the United States.  Worldwide it’s around 10 a year.  Most of the people who die aren’t killed by the coaster, but by pre-existing conditions, such as a heart attack, or acting stupid.  You really shouldn’t get out of the car in the middle of the ride.  But that’s most.  Rollercoasters do malfunction.  And when they do, they often get their quota of deaths for the year all at once.

Rollercoasters would not exist without “thoosies,” also known as coaster junkies, or morons.  These are people obsessed with riding rollercoasters.  They anxiously await new roller-coaster and then take vacations just to ride them.  They’re the type of people who set world records.  For instance, a guy named Richard Rodriguez holds the world record for riding a rollercoaster:  405 hours and 40 minutes.  Do the math.  That’s right at 17 days.  Never mind when he ate or slept.  When did he go to the bathroom?  And then there were the four people who managed to ride 74 different rollercoasters in ten different parks in four different states – all within 24 hours, which required a helicopter to get them there quickly.  That, too, is a world record.  How much money would you have to have to even consider something like that?

And that about sums up the rollercoasting public:  People who are willing to pay, and pay well, to stand in line on the off chance that eventually they could be killed.  Seriously!  What is wrong with people?