ROLLERCOASTERS.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Cruise; or, Three Months on the Continent. First edition of one of the earliest English accounts and illustrations of a rollercoaster. In the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, the author finds the then-called "Russian mountains", a mechanical "sculpture" operated by horses and machinery. He witnesses "two people descend with surprising velocity" before "ascending a few feet almost perpendicularly", watched by "hundreds of people delighted with the view" (p. 101).Public pleasure gardens like the Tuileries Gardens were popular in 19th-century Europe as places for people to meet, spend their leisure time, and court their suitors. Other notable examples were Vauxhall Gardens in London and Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. They typically featured entertainments such as fireworks, music and dancing, but few offered thrills equivalent to the Russian mountains, where people could "experience the excited feelings of danger over the grounds of... security" (p. 102). Regretfully, this security was somewhat lacking in 1818: the author describes a recent tragedy in which two people had lost their lives when a wheel slipped from its axis. However, the genuine threat of danger does not seem to have dampened Parisian enthusiasm for this novel form of entertainment.

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