Defunctland: A Roundabout History of the Ferris Wheel

A giant guillotine…gee, I wonder why they didn't build that?

The history of Caseoh

The farmer's son tried growing oranges in Florida. Years later, the farmer's son's son would BUY hundreds of acres of orange groves in Florida…

Offering your competitors help in besting yourself is a baller move. I can only hope Eiffel did it wearing a ridiculous fake moustache while calling himself Mr. Leffie

5:35 holy shit, the guillotine idea rules tho

That's why June 21st in the United States is known as "Ferris Wheel Day" 😂😂😂😂😂😂

16:30 oh, right, this was pre-ww2…

25 more views we almost there

4:31 and respect for their country, back when that mattered!😂

Yeah, the US has long long long past that point, especially right now.

You could argue that it was always never fully there because of what happened to the indigenous population in the process of founding the US!

Milton Hershey went to Chicago and it changed his life. People tasted new treats, including something called a "hamburger." In one building with food exhibits, Milton saw something that made him stop in his tracks. A German candy company had made a temple out of chocolate. It stood thirty-eight feet tall* about as tall as a four-story building. Hershey was stunned. And in a building with machinery exhibits there were iron machines, clanking and puffing away. The machines were making chocolate. The J.M. Lehmann Company from Germany had set up a complete chocolate-making factory right there in the White City. A machine roasted the raw cacao beans. Another machine ground the roasted beans into powder. Into the powder went sugar and flavorings. Hershey watched the machine for hours. He asked endless questions. He returned again and again, even bringing friends and people from his company to see the machine.🍫

Wow, I loved the storytelling of this episode so much. Thanks Kevin for your great documentaries. That was very entertaining

Side note: refrigeration systems have existed in various degrees of availability and practicality since the late 18th century, however, the reason why the company at this world's fair was still showing off ice boxes was due to the fact that (A) the electricity needed to make a self-cooling ice box wasn't universally available yet in homes, (B) the industry responsible for producing the heat exchangers for large-format chillers was still relatively young and hadn't yet sorted out all the kinks required for effective application on a small scale, and (C) they were still working out a refrigerant that wouldn't kill consumers if their home refrigerator sprung a leak. The refrigerant of choice for most commercial chillers was, after all, ammonia. And it is a damn good refrigerant, still sometimes used in the industry due to its extremely high efficiency. The problem is that exposure to ammonia gas can cause respiratory damage, skin damage, nerve damage, and even death. The worst part is that if you manage to actually breathe it in deep enough for it to reach your lungs then you basically get instant pneumonia because it immediately damages the soft tissue in your lungs, causing them to fill with fluid. Breathe in too much and you suffocate to death because your lungs, damaged by the ammonia and filling with fluids, cannot process oxygen in sufficient quantities for you to survive. Pretty dire stuff and the companies definitely didn't want to get sued by consumers. Large businesses can have specialists to maintain their stuff so the risk can be managed, but consumers break things in new and unique ways every day. Hence why nearly 100 years after compression and decompression heat exchangers became technologically feasible, we still didn't have home refrigerators.