How do I explain it to my child?: Who we have to thank for the roller coaster

Sometimes the world is allowed to stand upside down.

At least for a second.

Then it continues to turn again as soon as the little car has completely whizzed through its loop.

But in that tiny moment, your heart is pounding and your stomach is tingling, like we've swallowed an anthill.

That may sound a bit crazy, admittedly, but that's why it's best if you just try it out for yourself: riding a roller coaster.

Anna Lena Niemann

Editor in the “Technology and Engine” department.

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The ups and downs, curves and roundabouts can look scary, but it's normal to be a little scared.

Fear is even part of it, researchers say.

Because when we have dared to do something like this, we reward ourselves with many happy hormones afterwards.

If you look at the other passengers on the roller coaster, you might even be able to see it: At first they shiver in the queue, but when they have the fast ride behind them, they laugh quite happily.

But to whom do we actually owe this great pleasure?

Historians believe that giant ice slides were the forerunners.

The residents of St. Petersburg in Russia built it more than three hundred years ago.

To do this, they built wooden slides and poured water over them in the cold winter.

It froze and there was a slippery slide to whiz down.

When the French saw this, they wanted to have this kind of fun at home, but preferably all year round.

So the ice slides became wooden tracks on which little carts drove.

Although the railways looked different and were located in Paris, the French called them "Montagnes Russes" - Russian mountains.

A mountain, but a different one, also gave a few Americans a similar idea.

There, workers built a railway down their mountain to bring coal quickly down to the valley in small wagons.

Mules then had to pull the wagons up again, but then the animals just stood on top.

So what to do?

Instead of letting the four-legged friends run down the mountain, the coal workers simply put them in a wagon - and off we went!

What the brave mules didn't seem to mind

Of course, people wanted to try it too.

Many even.

When the coal mine closed at some point, the fourteen-kilometer descent remained open and became a real magnet for visitors.

Almost a bit like weightlessness

But did the people of St. Petersburg, the French or the coal miners invent the roller coaster?

Well, actually not all of them, even if they have to contribute.

Officially, an American named John G. Taylor can be celebrated as an inventor.

This year even for the 150th time.

That's how long ago he went to the patent office with his idea of ​​a rollercoaster.

A patent says to the whole world: Look what is written on this paper, I thought it up, it's my idea.

On paper, the first official roller coaster existed in 1872, but no one knows today whether it was actually built.

That's why John G. Taylor has to share his fame with a fellow countryman.

His name was LaMarcus A. Thompson.

Not only did he register a patent for a rolling roller coaster 13 years later,

That too was a kind of roller coaster ride.

These ups and downs are still part of roller coaster rides today.

First screwing yourself up and then plunging down - that does something to our body.

Put simply, it can be explained like this: When we rush over the hilltop, it feels for a moment as if the wagon were falling back down without us.

Of course, that's not possible, because we're held in place by a bracket, but it just feels that way for a moment.

We feel so light, it's almost like weightlessness.

If we shoot through the valley, the opposite happens.

Then it feels as if we are suddenly much heavier, maybe as heavy as a mule, as if our mule weight is pressing us deep into the seat.

In physics this is called g-forces.

The more variety a roller coaster offers us, the better.

Only high, or only fast, that is not so important.

But the choice is big enough.

There are said to be more than 13,000 roller coasters in the world.

So many - that's also possible because the railways have been made of steel for about sixty years.

Steel is stronger than wood, so the engineers really had a blast.

By the way, there were loopings very early on.

But they looked different than today.

Namely like the two O's in a loop - perfectly round.

They just weren't really having fun.

But on the contrary.

Looping used to be really uncomfortable and could even hurt your neck and back, all because of the O shape.

So they disappeared from the amusement parks again.

It would be decades before a young engineer from Germany took another close look at the loop and figured out how to build it in a way that was both exciting and enjoyable to ride through.

Walter Stengel is his name and he's quite famous because we owe him hundreds of roller coasters around the world.

In addition, he was and is quite a math whiz.

In the 1960s, he began to precisely calculate roller coaster rides: can the body take it?

Does it toss the passengers back and forth too much?

Such things for example.

And because Walter Stengel calculated so precisely, he was not only able to build roller coasters that no one previously thought capable of.

He also found that a loop is perfect when it doesn't look like an O, but like a drop, pointed at the bottom and rounded at the top.

And so he gave us the modern loop, where our feet can briefly touch the sky without hurting ourselves or falling down.