Wiener Riesenrad

The British engineer who built the ferris wheel died nearly bankrupt in 1907, and nine years later the Riesenrad received a demolition permit, but no one could afford to tear it down. A fire from a neighboring roller coaster in 1944 destroyed all 30 wooden gondolas while sparing the steel skeleton. When Paris’s Grande Roue was demolished in 1920, Vienna’s wheel became the world’s tallest extant Ferris wheel, holding that title for 65 years. Postwar reconstruction replaced only 15 cabins (half the original count), and for cost reasons, installed just four windows instead of six. Designed by British engineers Harry Hitchins and Hubert Cecil Booth and constructed by Lieutenant Walter Basset Bassett, the wheel opened July 3, 1897, to celebrate Emperor Franz Josef I’s Golden Jubilee. The structure weighs over 430 tonnes with a diameter of exactly 200 feet, a relic of the original English design.