In 1893 George Washington Gale Ferris was the champion of U.S. technology, the engineer who had proved that America could top the Eiffel Tower. That summer, excited tourists waited in line for the ride of a lifetime on Ferris’s big mechanical wheel, which could carry 2,160 passengers at a time to a height equaling that of a twenty-six-story building, in an era when most people had never seen a skyscraper. Although the thirty-four-year-old Ferris was an unlikely celebrity, he quickly became famous as the press recounted his struggle to build the machine that other engineers had said couldn’t be built. There seemed to be no limits to what he could achieve.

Only three years later he was bankrupt and living alone in a hotel in Pittsburgh, estranged from his wife. On November 21, 1896, he died at Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital, with no one at his side. Obituaries reported that he had died of typhoid fever, tuberculosis, or a kidney ailment called Bright’s disease. His marital and financial problems gave rise to rumors of suicide, but no real evidence has ever surfaced that he killed himself. Fifteen months after Ferris’s death the crematorium was still holding his ashes, waiting for someone to claim them. Like his famous wheel, Ferris’s career had ascended to exhilarating heights, where anything seemed possible, before coming right back down to earth, where life could be harsh.

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