Sliding down hills of ice
The ancestors of the roller coaster were not railways but winter amusements. In Russia, from the 1600s onward, people built tall wooden ramps covered with ice and slid down them on blocks of ice or sleds. These “Russian mountains” were popular in places such as St. Petersburg and were built for fairs and festivals. The idea spread to France, where in the early 1800s inventors tried to recreate it in warm weather. Instead of ice, the cars ran on wheels along a fixed track, and amusement parks in Paris in the 1810s and 1820s offered rides called “Russian mountains” (montagnes russes) with wheeled cars. Records from this period are sparse, and exact dates for individual rides should be treated with caution.
Mine railways and the Switchback
The second ancestor was industrial. In Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, a gravity railroad was built in the late 1820s to carry coal down from the mines to the Lehigh Canal. Loaded cars rolled downhill under gravity, and mules were taken down to pull the empty cars back up; later, a steam-powered system hauled cars up the slope. Visitors started to pay to ride in the cars, and by the 1870s the line was a tourist attraction, known as the Switchback Railway. This is often described as a forerunner of the American roller coaster, although it was a working railroad first.
In 1884, LaMarcus Adna Thompson opened a Switchback Railway at Coney Island in New York. Riders climbed a staircase, boarded a car at the top of a wooden structure, and rolled down gentle hills, with an attendant braking at the end. The ride was simple and relatively slow, but it earned money and many imitators followed. Other builders produced similar gravity rides in the same decade, so Thompson is best seen as an early and influential builder rather than a sole inventor.
Wooden coasters and the golden age
From the 1890s into the 1920s, coasters became larger and faster. Chain lifts replaced staircases, and engineers added steeper drops, banked turns and cars locked onto the track with additional wheels beneath it to stop the car lifting off. In the 1920s, a very large number of coasters were built across the United States, and the Cyclone at Coney Island, opened in 1927, is one of the best-known surviving wooden examples. The Great Depression and then the Second World War closed many parks, and by the 1950s only a small share of the earlier rides remained.
Designers worked by combining rules of thumb with trial and error. The potential energy gained by lifting a train to the top of the first hill is converted into speed on the drop. Later hills must be lower than the first because friction and air resistance steal some of that energy along the way. That is why most traditional coasters have their tallest point first, and why they are sometimes described as gravity rides with a lifting mechanism.
Steel track and new shapes
A major change came with tubular steel track, introduced by Arrow Development for the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland in 1959. Steel tubes could be bent into complex curves and had smoother, more precise geometry than wooden track. That made possible corkscrews and loops that wood could not handle. Earlier loops had been tried in the 1800s and early 1900s, but they were often uncomfortable because they used circular shapes that produced very high forces on riders.
Modern looping coasters use a teardrop-shaped loop, which is narrower at the top, to keep forces more manageable. The Revolution at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California, opened in 1976, is often described as the first modern steel coaster with a vertical loop to be a lasting commercial success. Later designers added launch systems, inversions, and cars where the rider’s seat hangs below or even beyond the edge of the track.
Safety and design
Because rides carry the public, safety rules have grown over time. Restraints, track inspection, braking systems and speed limits are regulated in many countries, and operators and designers use computer models to estimate forces. Modern coasters use blocks, like the train signaling blocks, so that two trains on the same circuit cannot collide; that idea comes directly from railways. Riders still feel strong forces, and rides have age, height and health restrictions for good reason.
A mixed family tree
The roller coaster is a hybrid of different ideas: sliding ice slopes, gravity-fed mine railways, and amusement parks that sell a controlled thrill. These amusement rides are part engineering and part showmanship. The details of who built the first one vary with the definition used, but it is clear that the combination of a track, a lift, gravity and a crowd is what turned industrial hardware into entertainment.