![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Haverhill's roller coaster, 1887-1890
May. 10th, 2011 11:32 pmWhen I was geeking out about roller coasters last year I noticed an odd factoid, mentioned on the "roller coaster" Wikipedia page. Some people claim that the term "roller coaster" came from a ride that was right in my own town of Haverhill, Massachusetts, an indoor toboggan slide with a track bearing hundreds of small wheels, a literal roller coaster. The claim's disputed but at least superficially plausible.
I hadn't had much of an idea of the scale of the thing, though. It was fairly big, filling much of a three-story building that also contained a skating rink. There were vertical lifts to get the sleds back to the top. Here's a diagram. This seems to be a modern rendering based on the diagrams in Byron Floyd's patent 374736. The picture also omits some things, such as the walls that separated the skating rink from the roller-toboggan track, and the dark tunnel that it apparently went through at one point.
It only ran for three years, losing popularity possibly because of some accidents. But the builders of it seem to have had a business building similar rides for some time after that. The Haverhill Roller Toboggan Company was itself issued at least one patent for a more conventional side-friction roller-coaster design.
Where was it, exactly? Most sources describe the site as now occupied by "the 7-story Winchell building". Near as I can tell, that's no longer there, and the address appears on this list of EPA Superfund sites as 17 Locust Street. I think it's this public parking lot now, a couple of blocks from Railroad Square.
It was far from the first roller coaster; things we'd be more likely to call roller coasters had existed in France in the early 1800s. But they generally weren't called that.
I hadn't had much of an idea of the scale of the thing, though. It was fairly big, filling much of a three-story building that also contained a skating rink. There were vertical lifts to get the sleds back to the top. Here's a diagram. This seems to be a modern rendering based on the diagrams in Byron Floyd's patent 374736. The picture also omits some things, such as the walls that separated the skating rink from the roller-toboggan track, and the dark tunnel that it apparently went through at one point.
It only ran for three years, losing popularity possibly because of some accidents. But the builders of it seem to have had a business building similar rides for some time after that. The Haverhill Roller Toboggan Company was itself issued at least one patent for a more conventional side-friction roller-coaster design.
Where was it, exactly? Most sources describe the site as now occupied by "the 7-story Winchell building". Near as I can tell, that's no longer there, and the address appears on this list of EPA Superfund sites as 17 Locust Street. I think it's this public parking lot now, a couple of blocks from Railroad Square.
It was far from the first roller coaster; things we'd be more likely to call roller coasters had existed in France in the early 1800s. But they generally weren't called that.