Kevin Conley Annals of Amusement: How High Can You Go? The New Yorker, 30 August 2004, pp. 48-55. 2004a, 1920s, 1895, 1884, 1827
" . . . By the late nineteen-twenties, there were more than fifteen hundred wooden coasters (but very few loops) at piers and pleasure gardens and trolley parks. Many had to fit into small and oddly shaped beach-front plots, so the designers came up with a whole list of "stunts"-side shakers, shimmies, camelbacks, kangaroo hops, fan curves, swoop curves, jump tracks, figure-eights, and spiral dips . . . then as now, a roller coaster was an engineer's way of telling jokes.
" . . . "