Google Doodle Celebrate Valentine’s Day With George Ferris Wheel
February 14 is what most of you celebrate as Valentine’s Day, but Google commemorates two different events on this day – Valentine’s Day and George Ferris’ birth anniversary – with a doodle. Celebrating the day of love and the 154th anniversary of George Ferris, the man behind the original Ferris wheel, Google has posted an interactive doodle on its homepage.
The doodle is interactive, as they often are. You can push the heart button over and over again to match up different animals who appear to be going out on different kinds of dates. This video Simon Rüger sent us shows some of the different match-ups, as well as the animation. Once you click the search icon in the doodle, you’ll be taken to search results for George Ferris, including Google’s Knowledge Graph panel for him.
According to the Wikipedia article about George Ferris
In 1891 the directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition issued a challenge to USA engineers to create a monument larger that the Eiffel Tower for the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition which were to be held in Chicago Illinois. The organizers wanted something different than the Eiffel Tower, or just a statue, something which were big, entertaining and even daring.
George Ferris came up with the idea to create the world’s first Ferris wheel, which had 36 cars and could fit 60 people onto the ride.
The Ferris Wheel had 36 cars, each fitted with 40 revolving chairs and able to accommodate up to 60 people, giving a total capacity of 2,160.[8] When the fair opened, it carried some 38,000 passengers daily, taking 20 minutes to complete two revolutions, the first involving six stops to allow passengers to exit and enter and the second a nine-minute non-stop rotation, for which the ticket holder paid 50 cents. It carried 2.5 million passengers before it was finally demolished in 1906.[9]
After the fair closed, George Ferris claimed that the exhibition management had robbed him and his investors of their rightful portion of the nearly $750,000 profit that his wheel brought in. He spent the next two years in litigation to see if he can get some money back from his invention.