This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.

The world loved a world's fair.

And the exposition universal in Paris in 1889 just killed.

The exhibits in the grounds were unparalleled and impeccable.

And at the center of it all was this audacious steel structure that managed to be imposing and elegant

and the tallest thing on earth and unmistakably French all at once.

Paris had the Eiffel Tower and the men planning the next fair, the Colombian exposition in Chicago just a couple of years away.

Needed something that good, something Eiffel Tower good.

And that wasn't easy to find.

The proposals ran from the ridiculous, like a structure that would soar more than a thousand feet above the land of Lincoln

and they'd entirely out of stack logs in top with a replica of Abe's boyhood at home to the extra ridiculous.

Something so tall that visitors would take an elevator to the top of a slide that they'd ride down until it dropped them off in New York or San Francisco.

The fairs organizers were panicking.

They demanded that America's designers and engineers step up.

In a man named George Ferris, step forward.

When his Ferris wheel was completed that summer, it rose 264 feet above the ground, which was a lot shorter than the Eiffel Tower.

But whatever, that thing didn't even move.

The idea that something so massive, but that looks so fragile, like a bicycle wheel whose spokes looked too thin to keep a bike up, was thrilling and pretty terrifying.

Despite what the engineer said, despite the math and laws of physics, despite the many assurances of the Ferris organizers.

There were people who were sure that this ludicrous machine was going to be a disaster.

The people were going to die.

Not only was there no way that that flimsy thing could stand up to a prairie wind or a gale off the lake.

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