I realized early on that I was never going to have as much fun at the midway as some people do. I was seven years old, and the county fair had come to Tulia, Texas. The tiny midway only had a half-dozen rides, but I rode them all. Then, on the way home, I threw up in the back seat of my big brother’s Studebaker.
Since then I have continued to ride midway rides, but judiciously, in order to avoid unpleasant side-effects (there was another unfortunate accident in Weyburn involving a recently-ingested tuna fish sandwich that I’d rather not go into).
Some people, however, are completely enamored by these metal contraptions that whirl them around, turn them upside down, and dump all the change from their pockets. So whose clever idea was this, anyway?
To find out, I visited the Saskatchewan Science Centre, where “Thrill Ride: The Science of Fun” is playing at the Kramer IMAX Theatre. There I found out that most of the credit (or blame) falls to the Russians.
Catherine the Great invented the first thrill-machine, the protoypical roller coaster, in the 18th century. Aristocrats rode a sledlike carriage down a wooden track flanked by baroque balustrades, then up and down two subsequent slopes. As a result, the earliest roller coasters built in Europe were known as Russian Mountains–but it was North Americans that really latched onto them. They boomed in the early part of the 20th century, almost died out during the Depression, then came back with a vengeance in recent years, as more and more permanent amusement parks opened. Today, every amusement park worth its salt has one or more big coasters. They’re the centrepiece of any collection of rides.
Travelling midways obviously can’t compete with these 20-story-tall, multi-million dollar, one-of-kind contraptions. But with a variety of other rides, most of them high-speed variations on the venerable merry-go-round (which goes back centuries) and Ferris Wheel (invented for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago) they manage to produce many of the same thrills.
So what makes a ride thrilling? Well, “thrill,” in any other context, would be known as “fear.” Midway rides are thrilling because they provide the kind of sensory inputs to the body that would normally precede some horrifying, possibly fatal incident. Feeling itself plunging downward at a high rate of speed, for instance, the body naturally assumes it is falling. Thrown violently about, the body assumes it’s under attack. All of these sensations produce the same physiological results: they trigger the “fight or flight” syndrome, which floods us with adrenaline and other hormones. Our heart races, more blood is pumped to our muscles and less blood is routed to some of our internal organs. So with our pulse pounding and butterflies in our stomach (caused by the restricted blood vessels), we scream because “we’re having so much fun,” although a vocal analysis would probably find no difference between that scream and one emitted by someone being mauled by a grizzly.
These “thrilling” sensations are caused by some pretty simple physics. The roller coaster, for instance, gets all its energy from gravity. That long, clacking climb to the top of the first hill builds potential energy (as well as anticipation), which turns into kinetic energy as you crest the hill and begin the descent. The first drop is therefore always the steepest and the fastest (up to 110 kilometres an hour). After that, energy is slowly scrubbed off by a series of climbs and descents, until, at the end of the ride, the energy is gone and so, occasionally, is someone’s lunch. (Even though the roller coaster is constantly slowing down, it doesn’t feel that way, because designers put some of the tightest turns and steepest drops toward the end of the ride.)
In most midway-type rides, the energy has to be supplied by powerful motors. Most of the effects on the passengers arise from inertia: the tendency of an object to continue moving in a straight line. This is what throws you against one side or the other of the car (or the person you’re riding with–if you don’t know them at the start of the ride, you’ll know them intimately by the end of it) as the ride spins and tumbles you around: your body, from the viewpoint of physics, really wants to go soaring in a nice arc out into the parking lot.
The other effect on the passengers, that of nausea, appears to arise because of excessive stimulation of the semicircular canals, located in the inner ears. Changes in position are normally recorded in the semicircular canals based on the swirling of liquid within them. Too much swirling, or chaotic swirling, produces nausea in some people and dizziness in just about everyone. (You feel dizzy because your body is still reading motion in your semicircular canals for a time after your body is actually standing still. As it tries to balance itself against non-existent motion, it instead staggers and sometimes even falls down.) Just why some people are susceptible to motion sickness and others aren’t remains a mystery. (And in my own defense, I’d like to say that I have ridden plenty of major roller coasters, from the Mindbender in Edmonton to Judge Roy Scream at Six Flags Over Texas, without the ill-effects I can feel after just a couple of minutes on the Tilt-a-Whirl.)
Also somewhat uncertain is why some people love to be “thrilled” half to death on roller coasters and midway rides while others prefer to suck on a caramel apple down by the concession booth and get their thrills by listening to their friends scream. One researcher’s theory is that there are both thrill-seeking, or “Big T” personalities, and non-thrill-seeking, or “Little-T” personalities. In his view, Little-T personalities are over-arousable: adrenaline surges and neural impulses go skittering through their brain with very little stimulation. Big T personalities require much greater levels of stimulation to achieve the same effect. Both types of personalities like to experience these neural impulses at about the same level, it’s just that it takes Big T types much more stimulation to achieve it. Hence, the bungeeists (you know who you are) and the non-bungeeists (that would be me…my skydiving experience of a few summers ago notwithstanding).
Fortunately, the midway offers something for both types of personalities, and even for those of us who get dizzy watching a dog turning around prior to going to sleep. The thrill-seekers can bungee, reverse bungee, or ride the Zipper all night; the non-thrill-seekers can waste $50 trying to win a $2 stuffed toy.
Something else I found out at the Science Centre, which has built its own “summer science carnival” to take advantage of the Thrill Ride movie: carnival games, like carnival rides, exploit physics: most carnival games are designed to look like they should be easy, while relying on physics to make sure they’re not. Take the bottle knock-over games: as CBC Marketplace reported earlier this year, they usually feature top-heavy bottles at the top which can be knocked over, convincing you it’s possible to knock them all over, and a heavy, bottom-weighted bottle at the bottom, which can’t be knocked over. Then there’s the basketball throw, which in some midways combines an oversized ball with an under-sized or slightly oval-shaped basket, making it very difficult to sink one. A variation (one I saw a friend once lose $20 at) asks you to throw a basketball into a peach basket. The barker will demonstrate–but he does it with a ball already in the basket. If that ball is in there, the next two balls thrown in can be made to stay. But if there’s no ball in the basket–which is the way you start–the next ball thrown in will bounce out.
The games aren’t exactly crooked–the midway will pay up if you somehow manage to win–but, like casino games, they’re definitely stacked in favor of the house.
If you’re tired of losing your lunch and your lunch-money, you might want to concentrate on eating. Corn-dogs, those wonderful little doughnuts and a variety of other high-fat, high-sugar, wonderfully tasty foods await you. But for my money, the quintessential carnival food is cotton candy.
Cotton candy is pure sugar–nothing more, nothing less. It’s made by a special machine (which the Science Centre will gladly demonstrate for you) that melts sugar (usually colored with pink, green or blue food-coloring) in a spinning tube covered with tiny holes. As the sugar melts, it streams out through those holes, quickly solidifying again, and thus forming long, thin strands. The candy maker thrusts in a paper cone to which the strands stick, and twirls it around so that the sugar sticks to the cone in the shape of a ball.
A roller coaster, a chance (however remote) to win your best girl a giant stuffed panda, a big puffy ball of pure sugar–with such elemental delights as these to offer, it’s no wonder carnivals continue to delight us summer after summer. There’s nothing else like ’em!
