Some roller coaster enthusiasts are obsessed with riding as many unique coasters as possible, while others prefer the engineering, architecture, or just watching coasters in action over physically riding them.
Coney Island in Brooklyn is the home of the first roller coaster in America. On June 16, 1884, the first roller coaster, known as Switchback Railway, was opened, designed by a young man called LaMarcus Adna Thompson. The design Thompson made was built upon another patent for Richard Knudson, filed in 1878. Knudson named his version the Inclined Plane Railway, with a design so similar to Thompson’s. The difference between them was that Thompson’s roller coaster was designed and built for the purpose of amusement rather than an existing rail line converted for that purpose.
Going back a bit to the main concept of the roller coasters, it is said that Thompson was inspired by a trip to the hills in eastern Pennsylvania, where he went on a ride in a railroad line running through Carbon County that had been converted from a coal transport into a tourist attraction.
Thompson ride consisted of two sets of parallel tracks, passengers climbed up stairs and rode a cart down tracks faced outward instead of forward so that they could enjoy the scenery.
In just a few months, more coaster builders arrived at Coney with a new ideas, each a little bigger and faster than the last. While Thompson spent the next years trying to improve his design, obtaining another 30 patents to build coasters in different cities across the country. In just four years, he had built 50 of them.
The original Switchback Railway was dismantled between 1903 and 1904 to replace it with a newer version that did not require park attendants to manually push the cars uphill to return them to the starting station.
Coney Island amusement parks had shut down in the 1960s as the area suffered from massive fires and a post-WWII economic decline, but it remains a popular tourist attraction and a home to the famous Cyclone wooden coaster, one of the country’s oldest coasters in operation today.
You can also visit the Coney Island History Project in New York to watch the archival photographs, and know more about the history of Thompson and his rides.
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