March 1957: 'A new Big Wheel era for fairgrounds'

The Engineer readers on a ride when the UK was introduced to what funfair enthusiast PW Bradley called 'a new big wheel era for fairgrounds'

Battersea Park's "Flying Saucer" fairground machine

The world’s tallest big wheel can be found in Las Vegas where the High Roller stands at a height of 168m and has been entertaining the public since March 2014.

This achievement would no doubt have enthralled PW Bradley, a funfair enthusiast who contributed ‘Further notes on the development of fairground machinery’ in the 22 March 1957 edition of The Engineer.

Bradley had already contributed to this journal on fairground matters and reappeared to focus on big wheels, the development of which goes back as far as 1620, a fact brought to readers’ attention by way of historical waypoint and technological baseline.

Alerting readers to Volume 1 of The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, Bradley recalled a journey that took Mundy to a fair in Philippopolis, southern Bulgaria, where three kinds of amusement were observed: two being crude versions of the roundabout and swing, and the third “like a crane wheel at the Custom House Quay and turned in that manner, whereon children sit on little seats hung round about in several parts thereof, and though it turns right up and down, and that the children are sometimes on the upper part of the wheel and sometimes on the lower, yet they always sit upright”.