1880-1890 Conley

Kevin Conley Annals of Amusement: How High Can You Go? The New Yorker, 30 August 2004, pp. 48-55. 2004a, 1920s, 1895, 1884, 1827

     "There is general agreement that the country's first roller coaster was the Switch Back Railway; the debate concerns which one. The Mauch Chunk-Summit Hill and Switch Back Railway, an eighteen-mile gravity railroad, was built in 1827 to carry coal in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Forty-five years later, when the big rail carriers rendered it obsolete, Josiah White turned the Switch Back into a thrill ride suitable for the Victorian era: you could bring a picnic. The other Switch Back Railway, which covered a gentle six-hundred-foot circuit of bunny hills at a speed of six m.p.h., was built in 1884, and was a tourist attraction from the start. At a nickel a ride, it earned back its fifteeen-hundred-dollar construction costs in three days. Its inventor, LaMarcus Thompson, became the first coaster entrepreneur, building fifty variations on his creation in the next four years."

(Back to Sources)

 Kelyn Roberts 2017