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.
"Eleven years later and a few blocks away, Paul Boynton opened Sea Lion Park, the first enclosed amusement park . . . profligate use of incandescent lights made Coney Island visible from thirty miles out to sea . . . the Flip Flap, the country's first looping coaster, which debuted . . . in 1895 . . .
". . . 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.
". . . "