The man whose name is synonymous with the kinetic attraction he erected on the Midway Plaisance of the 1893 World’s Fair died of typhoid fever on November 22, 1896, at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh. Though now unforgettably linked to his engineering marvel, the name of George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. was unfamiliar to many fairgoers who walked by the great wheel, as shown in this story published in the October 29, 1893, issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Persist in Calling It the Paris Wheel.

“Strange as it may seem,” said one of the guides at the Ferris Wheel, “the man who conceived this work and superintended its construction will in thousands of cases never receive any credit for it. You know the penchant many people have for misnomer. I suppose I have heard at least 10,000 people ask me as they stood here how this wheel took in Paris. At first I was at a loss to understand it, but soon learned that they understood this to be the ‘Paris’ wheel. We have certainly done our part in having the man who conceived this receive the credit so far as his name is concerned, but there isn’t a day that people do not come in and ask about the ‘Paris’ wheel. I undertook to enlighten a kind looking old man about it, but he seemed to think I was trying to play a confidence game on him. He said to me finally, ‘I’m looking for the Paris wheel. That’s what, my son told me it was, and you can’t fool me with this windmill trap here,’ and he passed on refusing to come in.”

The “Paris Wheel” (the Grande Roue de Paris), built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, reached 64 feet higher into the sky than the earlier Ferris Wheel. [Image from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.]