This being the Saturday before Easter, right now Walt Disney World is not crowded. Not at all. What it is is CROWDED!!! For the people who are there waiting in line, this would be the perfect time to catch up on old Grinwout's entries. For the rest of us, this might be good time to design some new rides, so that these people won't have to wait in line for so long.
Yeah, right. I'm sure the Disney folks are just dying to hear from us.
It was only a generation or so ago when the idea of inventing amusement park rides might not seem so farfetched. America was a country of inventors and engineers. We could make anything we needed when we needed it. We had toys for kids who were the inventors of tomorrow (erector sets and chemistry sets) and we had magazines for the grownup inventors of the day (Popular Science and Popular Mechanics). To some extent these were probably inventor porn, just laying out all the things we could invent if in fact we invented anything but we never did, but then again, this was a golden age of electronic kits so that people could build their own stereos or radios or whatever. (Steve Wozniak was one of these build-it-yourselfers; the original Apple was entirely aimed at this market.) Maybe there really were a lot of DIY amusement park rides.
The June 1945 issue of Mechanix Illustrated (you've gotta love that futuristic x in Mechanix) explained how your inner inventor could make a fortune designing carnival rides. Because they were portable, every traveling carny in the country would want to buy one, as compared to the stodgier permanent parks. As a matter of fact, the "ride men" were apparently just waiting at their mailboxes for you to send in your designs, provided your designs were what the industry needed.
Safety, of course, is a prime consideration no matter what type of ride you create. All amusement riding devices are perfectly safe and no new ride will be considered unless it is safe not only for adults but for small children; a big slice of riding device income comes from small kids, and a ride operator doesn’t want to kill off his customers! It is possible, however, to make even the most violent ride perfectly safe. But you’d be surprised how many would-be inventors never give this vital factor a thought.
Even back in 1945, killing off your patrons was frowned on. Very sharp thinking on the part of the ride men!
There's jpgs of the original article, plus the transcribed text, at WANTED – A MILLION-DOLLAR RIDE (Jun, 1945).
Via Boing Boing.
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