George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.

George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. was an American engineer best known for designing the original Ferris Wheel for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The enormous rotating structure was intended to rival the engineering spectacle of the Eiffel Tower.

The wheel became one of the fair’s most popular attractions and gave Ferris’s name to an enduring type of amusement ride. Despite its success, disputes over finance and ownership overshadowed his final years.

In Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.’s enormous observation wheel becomes one of the fair’s defining attractions. Nearby, physician and confidence trickster H. H. Holmes operates a building later associated with fraud, disappearance and murder, exploiting the anonymity and movement created by the expanding city and the fair.