VISUAL CULTURE

Re-inventing the Wheel – Speed in Slow Motion: The London Eye (Millennium Wheel)

Visual Culture in Britain, Vol.4, No.2, 2003, pp.21-40.

by Paul Overy

As part of the celebrations of the year 2000 in London two major ‘attractions’ appeared on the banks of the Thames: the ill-fated and much-maligned Millennium Dome at Greenwich, and the Millennium Wheel (christened ‘The London Eye’ by its sponsors British Airways) located diagonally across the river from the Houses of Parliament close to the South Bank cultural complex. The Dome, the ‘official’ government-sponsored millennial structure, was almost unanimously reviled in the British press and attracted far fewer visitors than projected¹. The Millennium Wheel on the other hand was received with almost unanimous praise on its opening although it had earlier been criticized because planning permission was obtained without proper discussion of its suitability for the site². Despite technical problems in the first months it has proved to be a continuing popular and critical success³.

Great Wheels ‘bracketed’ the twentieth century. La Grande Roue rivalled the Eiffel Tower at the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle, remaining a popular attraction until the First World War. It was celebrated by writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, and by painters like Fernand Léger and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who saw it as a complementary symbol of modernity to the Eiffel Tower⁴. The London Millennium Wheel signalled the start of the twenty-first century and the third millennium and seems likely to remain on its riverside central London site indefinitely. It has already become an emblem of the city on postcards and souvenirs, much as the Riesenrad – erected in the Prater pleasure gardens to celebrate the Emperor Franz Joseph’s fiftieth jubilee in 1898 – has come to signify Vienna⁵. The Millennium Wheel will inevitably feature in films set in London, as did the Riesenrad in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949)[6].

This essay compares the London Eye with the Great Wheels of the final years of the 19th century, in particular with the Vienna Riesenrad, the only surviving original example. While both celebrate modernity and modern life, both move very slowly (the Millennium Wheel considerably more slowly than the Riesenrad). Separated by the twentieth century, the ways in which these two Observation Wheels mediate perception are complex and often contradictory. They present those who ride on them with fragmented, overlaid glimpses of the city typical of modernity (and of modernist representation) but also with more distanced panoramic views that presume a centred and ‘objective’ gaze. Here I address these contradictions and offer explanations for the apparent necessity at the end of each century to ‘re-invent the Wheel’.

At 443 feet in height and 1392 feet in circumference the Millennium Wheel is over twice the height of the Vienna Riesenrad⁷. Although often referred to as a Ferris Wheel it differs in a number of ways from the Great Wheels of the late nineteenth century⁸. While Ferris Wheels are supported between two pylons like a bicycle wheel, the Millennium Wheel is dramatically suspended over the Thames from a single pylon or A-frame⁹. Unlike the cabins of a Ferris Wheel the passenger capsules of the Millennium Wheel are fully enclosed and air-conditioned. They are not suspended but directly cantilevered from the outside of the wheel structure resembling the engines of a jet plane. Not only does the Millennium Wheel move more slowly than a Ferris Wheel, it moves in a different way. The thirty-six cabins of the first Ferris Wheel in Chicago were loaded six at a time. The Wheel then moved a sixth of its circumference to load the next six cabins, and so on until it was fully loaded¹⁰. It then turned for a single revolution without stopping at a slightly higher speed, although ‘still not very fast’ according to a contemporary report¹¹. It took about thirty minutes to make a complete revolution¹². The slightly smaller Riesenrad originally had thirty cabins and loaded and turned in a similar way. Severely damaged during the Red Army advance on Vienna in 1944¹³, when it was restored in 1947-1948 the number of cabins was reduced to fifteen for safety reasons¹⁴. Passengers now board the Riesenrad one cabin at a time, the Wheel moving a fifteenth of its circumference to bring down the next cabin, which is then loaded, and so on until each cabin reaches the loading platform again after having made a complete revolution. Today the Riesenrad makes this single discontinuous revolution at a speed of 0.75 metres per second, taking approximately 20 minutes. The far larger Millennium Wheel takes thirty minutes to make a complete revolution moving at only 0.26 metres per second – so slowly that the spectators are able to board the cabins while the Wheel is in motion like passengers in a ‘paternoster’ lift, a nineteenth-century system of mechanical elevation today found mainly in Eastern and Central Europe but banned for safety reasons in the EC¹⁵.

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Notes

This essay is based on a paper delivered in the ‘Speed and Pace’ section of Time, the 30th International Congress of the History of Art (CIHA), held in London in September 2000. I would like to thank the co-convener of the section László Beke, and Tag Gronberg for comments and suggestions.

¹ The French president Jacques Chirac asked of the Dome ‘What is it for?’ This is reminiscent of Trotsky’s question about Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International although one is reluctant to flatter Chirac with the comparison. Like Tatlin’s projected but unrealized Tower, the Dome had a largely symbolic and ideological function.

² ‘The structure is a planning outrage. It is also a visual sensation.’ Simon Jenkins, ‘Welcome to London’s Age of Sensation’, Evening Standard, 2 September 1999.

³ The Millennium Wheel opened in February 2000. There were over 7 million passengers in the first two years of operation. According to the English Tourism Council it was the most popular admission-charging attraction in Britain in 2001. The Guardian, 26 August 2002.

⁴ It also appeared in paintings by Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera and Romaine Brooks.

⁵ The circular form of the Riesenrad with its cabins suspended from its outer rim is like an emblem of the Ringstrasse, the circular boulevard around the centre of Vienna built in the early years of Franz Josef’s reign on the site of the glacis (the military zone outside the former city walls), lined with imposing historicist buildings that house the great institutions of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Riesenrad could also be related to the image of the merry-go-round employed in Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde to represent the sexual promiscuity of fin-de-siècle Vienna.

⁶ The Riesenrad appears on the covers of guide books and maps of Vienna as well as on postcards and souvenirs.

⁷ The Vienna Wheel is 200 feet in diameter and about 212 feet above the ground at its highest point. The Chicago Ferris Wheel was 250 feet in diameter, 825 feet in circumference, 30 feet in width and elevated 15 feet above the ground. Its maximum height was 264 feet. It had thirty-six cabins, each 27 feet long, 9 feet high and 13 feet wide, which could hold 60 people. The largest original Great Wheel was erected in Paris for the 1900 Exposition Universelle with a diameter of 300 feet.

⁸ Although generally referred to as Ferris Wheels, only the first of the late-nineteenth-century Great Wheels was erected by George Washington Gale Ferris for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The four Great Wheels built between 1895 and 1900 in London, Blackpool, Vienna and Paris were constructed by the English engineer Walter Bassett. There were a number of differences. Although the London Wheel at Earls Court was basically similar to the Chicago Wheel in design and construction the Blackpool, Vienna and Paris Wheels differed in a number of ways. The inner and outer rim of the Chicago and London Wheels were much farther apart than those of the European Wheels. The cabins were suspended within these two rims whereas those of the three later European Wheels were cantilevered beyond the outer rim. The later European Wheels had a more elegant appearance and more closely resembled a bicycle wheel. The change may have been due to litigation over patents. But there were also aesthetic and functional gains. The later Wheels weighed less than a Wheel of the same size with cars suspended from the rims. See Norman Anderson, Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992, p.102. All the European Wheels were driven by electric motors. The Chicago Wheel was driven by steam although illuminated by electricity.

⁹ The original design – where the rim was braced by a single rigid latticed strut rather than with tension spokes – differed even more from the first Great Wheels.

¹⁰ Carl Snyder, ‘Engineer Ferris and his Wheel’, The Review of Reviews, Vol.VIII, No.44, September 1893, p.270.

¹¹ Robert Graves, ‘World’s Fair, June 28 – Special’, The Alleghenian, 1 July 1893.

¹² ‘266 Feet in Air’, Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, 17 June 1893.

¹³ ‘The wheel alone remained standing, but its cables were frayed, its struts and girders blackened by flame, and the charred remains of its shiny cars swung and creaked in the wind.’ Noel F. Busch, ‘The Giant Wheel: Vienna’s famous Ferris wheel has survived war, fire and enemy bombs’, Life, 13 October 1947, p.12.

¹⁴ Significantly the Riesenrad was rebuilt at the same time as the other great emblems of Vienna, St Stephens Cathedral, the Opera House and the Burgtheater.

¹⁵ The only exception to this is access for the disabled, when the Wheel stops completely. Free rides for the disabled and their helpers are offered on the Vienna Riesenrad.

© Paul Overy 2003