How did the Ferris wheel get its name?

Ferris wheels are named for a man who built one wheel and died three years after it opened.

Etymonline dates the term to 1893 in American English. It is named for George W. G. Ferris (1859-1896), the American engineer who designed the structure for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago that year.

The Smithsonian Magazine tells the background. Paris had just built the Eiffel Tower, and no American proposal for the Chicago fair matched it. Daniel Burnham, who was planning the exposition, wanted something "novel, original, daring and unique." George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., then a 33-year-old Pittsburgh engineer, sketched a huge revolving steel wheel. Burnham first rejected it as too fragile.

Ferris did not invent the idea from nothing. The Smithsonian notes that William Somers had already built smaller wooden wheels at seaside resorts. What Ferris proposed was far larger. He put $25,000 of his own money into safety studies and recruited investors, and the wheel was accepted on December 16, 1892.

It opened on June 21, 1893. The Smithsonian gives a diameter of 250 feet, with 36 cars that each held up to 60 people. More than 1.4 million people paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride over 19 weeks. Etymonline also says about 250 feet, while Wikipedia gives a height of 264 feet and lists a different figure elsewhere, so the exact size depends on the source and on what is measured.

After the fair, Ferris was caught in lawsuits over debts owed to and by him. He went bankrupt, caught typhoid fever, and died in 1896 at age 37. The wheel was rebuilt in Chicago, then moved to the 1904 St. Louis fair, and it was dynamited into scrap in 1906.

The name did not die with it. The Smithsonian says "Ferris wheel" became the generic term for the many copies at fairs and boardwalks worldwide. It is now a common noun for any big upright wheel with passenger cars, though few riders know the person behind it.

Even the surname has a history. Etymonline says Ferris is thought to derive from a 16th-century spelling of Ferrers, the name of two English families who took it from two places called Ferrières in Normandy.