George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.

Background

George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. was born on February 14, 1859, at Galesburg, Illinois, the son of George Washington Gale Ferris, Sr. and Martha Hyde. In 1864, the family moved to Carson City, Nevada.

Education

After graduation from the military academy at Oakland, California, Ferris, Jr. entered the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from which he received his engineering degree in 1881.

Career

After a few months in the railroad contracting office of General J. H. Ledlie in New York City, Ferris, Jr. helped to locate seventy-eight miles of the proposed Baltimore, Cincinnati & Western Railroad in West Virginia, and a narrow-gauge road three and a half miles long in Putnam County, New York.

As engineer, and later general manager for the Queen City (West Virginia) Coal Mining Company (1882) he designed and built a coal trestle in the Kanawha River and located and built three 1, 800-foot tunnels.

Ferris, Jr. next became interested in bridge-building, was employed successively by several companies, and achieved something of a reputation for concrete work under heavy pressure in pneumatic caissons.

In 1885 he took charge, for the Kentucky and Indiana Bridge Company of Louisville, of the testing and inspection of steel and iron bought at Pittsburgh. Foreseeing an increase in the use of structural steel, at that time just being introduced in bridge work, he familiarized himself with the processes involved in its manufacture and from the duties and responsibilities of his inspecting position developed a new profession.

Eventually Ferris, Jr. organized the firm of G. W. G. Ferris & Company at Pittsburgh, with a corps of engineers and assistants to conduct mill and shop-work inspection and testing throughout the country. He was connected with this company until within about a week of his death. After the organization was functioning well, however, he turned his personal attention toward the promotion and financing of large engineering projects, and was concerned in the construction of bridges across the Ohio River at Wheeling, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh.

When Daniel H. Burnham, chief of construction for the World’s Columbian Exposition, challenged the civil engineers of the country to produce something to rival the Eiffel Tower of the Paris Exposition, Ferris’s imagination was fired, and in an effort to achieve something entirely new he designed the Ferris Wheel. He undertook its construction against the advice of friends and business associates.

In the midst of the severe financial depression which the country was experiencing in 1892, the financing of the proposition was rather a difficult matter; at first the scheme was looked upon as fantastic; not for some months was he granted a concession, and not until after the Fair had opened was the wheel completed. Rising 250 feet above the Midway, carrying thirty-six cars, each with a capacity of some forty passengers, revolving under perfect control, and stable against the strongest winds from Lake Michigan, it excited general attention. The daring and accuracy involved in its design and the precision of machine work involved in its construction won the admiration of engineers. The most spectacular feature of the Exposition, it proved also a profitable investment. George Ferris, Jr. died less than four years later on November 22, 1896, at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of typhoid fever.

Achievements

• George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. was a noted civil engineer and inventor of the Ferris wheel, which has become an American amusement park mainstay.

Connections

George Ferris, Jr. was married to Margaret Beatty of Canton, Ohio.

Father:

George Washington Gale Ferris, Sr.

Mother:

Martha Edgerton Ferris (Hyde)

Sister:

Mary Amanda Ardery (Ferris)

Sister:

Emma California Barber (Ferris)

Sister:

Martha Elizabeth Schulz (Ferris)

Sister:

Harriet Clementina Ferris

Sister:

Margaret Gale Dangberg (Ferris)

Wife:

Margaret Ferris (Beatty)

Brother:

Frederick Hyde Ferris

Brother:

Albert Roland Ferris

Brother:

Benjamin Hyde Ferris

References

• The Fantastic Ferris Wheel: The Story of Inventor George Ferris
• The Ferris Wheel