Take one.
Shall we?
Take a minute.
Look around you.
You probably never think about it,
but we are living in a time of incredible ingenuity.
Our lives are filled with fiendishly clever bits of tech that basically
make the modern world tick.
The problem is, we're now so used to these devices...
..that we have forgotten to remember how clever they are.
ALEXA: I don't have an answer for that.
I'm Professor Hannah Fry, your hammer-wielding,
tech-curious tour guide...
Woo!
..to the secret genius of everyday objects.
There is one law of physics that you need to know.
In each episode...
Whoa!
..I will take one seemingly ordinary item...
Oh! Immediately smoking.
..and I'll look at it in, frankly...
Yeah!
..obscene detail...
Two googly eyes.
It has 180-degree view.
..meet the people who helped make it...
This is the very first air fryer.
..and follow the twisty-turny journey through the history
of its invention.
ARCHIVE: If you overshoot the turning point, don't try to do this.
It's wobbly, Johnny!
Yeah, it's just the wind.
This time, it's the roller-coaster.
When you think about it, there is something slightly insane
about voluntarily strapping yourself to a piece of metal and hurtling
around a track at 80mph, upside down.
ROLLER-COASTER CRUNCHES
It's the crunch. Can you hear it?
SCREAMING
So how did we get the topsy-turvy joy that is
the modern roller-coaster?
It's the story of some dodgy French physics in the 19th century...
The early versions were basically a torture device that you paid
to go on.
..NASA rocket scientists in the 1970s...
We can simulate the forces experienced by whirling the man
around at a suitable rate.
..and the ambitious vision of a cartoonist called Walt.
He says, "Bobby, build this."
Build a mountain.
Knee-knocking, stomach-turning, scream-making,
high-capacity roller-coaster!
From water to wind, flumes to fly in,
there are nearly 6,000 of these scream machines in the world today.
But behind the thrills, the spills and the unfettered fun is some
seriously delicious physics and ingenious engineering,
all designed to give you a good time.
And I'm going to unpack how it does it.
The bigger the coaster, the bigger the thrill.
I'm at one of the biggest theme parks in the UK, Thorpe Park.
Ah!
Hi, guys.
If they had calculators, I would have signed them.
SHE LAUGHS
I'm getting a sneak preview of their brand-spanking,
state-of-the-art roller-coaster that is so new...
..it isn't even finished.
So I'm going to need you to wear these PPE.
Excellent. It's very much a live construction site.
Always love doing this.
And a bit of a construction site you've probably never
been on before. Very different.
Meet John Burton, the man with the best job in the world -
designing roller-coasters.
When's this supposed to be ready?
So we're opening this in 13 days.
Is that quite stressful to design that?
Just a bit. I mean, it's a first.
It's...it's a massive feat of engineering.
John's latest baby is called Hyperia, and it is
an absolute beast, four years in the designing, 18 months in the making.
And here's some more numbers to make your knuckles white.
Hyperia - she's 236ft tall, making her the UK's tallest roller-coaster.
Down the vertical drop, that is a 81mph drop
at the very bottom, making it the UK's fastest roller-coaster.
It's just under a kilometre long, and the whole idea of the ride
is it's that uplifting
"If you can ride Hyperia, you can do anything" mentality.
They're selling this ride on the slogan "find your fearless".
Well, let's hope I can find mine.
Strap in, funfair fans. We are going to take apart an entire
roller-coaster and look at everything from the bits that make
it roll - the wheels - to the bits that make you scream - the loops.
First up, the super-strong steel structure that sends you flying
through the sky.
It's the track.
Hyperia's track is the heart of this roller-coaster.
It's an enormous, kilometre-long, writhing, twisting mass of metal.
You're going to show me the track? Yeah. I can see it from here.
Yeah, but better if you can see it from up there.
That is Johnny Lowes, Hyperia's fittingly fearless titan
of the track, making sure you scream for all the right reasons.
I can see those steps there.
Yeah. And I have a strong suspicion about what's coming.
Apparently, I'm joining Johnny for this evening's
track inspection...on foot.
There's only one way up and one way down.
Oh, my gosh.
This is really a special view for my...for my last moments on Earth.
LAUGHTER
Towering above us, 232 tonnes of Hyperia's steel track snakes
and soars through the landscape.
And it's Johnny's job to check every inch of it.
It's wobbly, Johnny.
Yeah. It's just the wind.
It gets worse.
Maybe. What?! Who knows? Johnny!
You're nearly at 100ft.
Could you not have made it more rigid?
What is the actual track made of?
The track is, like, tubular steel and then...
As in it's hollow on the inside? Yeah.
Yes, he did just say hollow.
But thankfully, unlike me, hollow steel is tougher
than it sounds.
And it better be, because once Hyperia is fully operational,
this track will have ten tonnes of carriage hurtling
over it, up to 400 times a day.
Oh, it's so far down!
THEY LAUGH
Yeah. I think... Oh, Christ.
OK. I think you're about halfway.
Halfway?!
Johnny is looking for any cracks or defects, and for the bits
he can't reach, he uses a drone and special electromagnets
that can detect flaws in the steel.
I can see how high we are, and that's very high.
And the track looks fine to me.
Can we go down now, please?
All right, mate?
THEY LAUGH
How did you get up there?!
Climbed? What, on the track?
Yeah. I thought the stairs was bad enough.
While it was...fascinating seeing those tracks in situ,
to really appreciate their steely strength,
I've got a little demo for you.
OK. Welcome to the theme park strongman with a difference.
When it comes to designing a track,
you need to find a material that can be smooth enough that people
aren't rattling around as they're riding a roller-coaster,
but strong and sturdy enough to be able to sustain the weight
of all of those trains hurtling around at 80mph.
And so a good candidate for all of this is steel.
Now, here I have a half-kilo block of steel that someone very kind
has rolled out into
a steel rod for me. This is just a cylinder of steel, essentially.
So if this solid cylinder is my roller-coaster track, let's see
what happens when I add a heavy carriage and load
it with passengers.
So we've got one kilo on there at the moment.
Let's add on a few more.
There's three kilos. Five kilos.
Let's give it some.
Ten kilos.
15 kilos.
The rod is already sagging by 2cm.
But let's push this thing. So, 20 kilos.
27.
5cm.
5cm on 27 kilos.
Pathetic.
No-one wants a droopy roller-coaster, do they?
That solid steel rod has quite a bend.
It's just a bit too flexible.
Now let's see what happens when I run the same experiment
with the same amount of steel,
only this time my steel rod is hollow.
Ten kilos,
15 kilos.
Last time, my solid steel rod had a 2cm bend.
But now look at the hollow tube.
Barely 2mm.
Now, how can it be possible that you take the exact same
materials and run the same experiment
and get different results?
Well, it turns out that that tube makes a gigantic difference.
With the hollow tube, there is the same amount of steel,
but you've basically taken some from the middle and put
it around the outside, increasing the overall surface area.
Which means that when you add a vertical force on it, it is able
to distribute that weight all around the surface, meaning
that physics is basically giving you a free bit
of extra sturdiness here.
I mean, we can push this even further.
Let's see how we go.
At 27 kilos, the hollow tube gives barely 1cm of bend,
compared to a whopping 5cm sag from the solid rod.
Which is, for 27 kilos, a gigantic difference, especially
when you consider that these trains weigh tons.
And if you scale this whole thing up to the size of the roller-coaster,
you can just imagine the gigantic difference that tubular
steel will make.
Well done, tubey. You win.
To find out how we got the super-strong steel tube tracks
of today, let's go back to a time before roller-coasters were even
a thing.
600 years ago, the Russians got their kicks rocketing down
wooden slides while sitting inside giant blocks of ice,
like a sort of frozen log flume.
And then in the 1800s, the French locked carts
to sloping wooden tracks.
Accidents were not uncommon.
Zut alors!
But the American coaster craze began in 1870s Pennsylvania,
when a coal mine started charging locals to ride their coal wagon
down a steep wooden track.
This inspired a man called LaMarcus Thompson to build
the Gravity Switchback in Coney Island.
Basically, a gently trundling park bench.
But New York went wild for it, and by the 1920s, there were almost
2,000 wooden roller-coasters, or woodies, across the US.
By the end of the 1930s, though, the Great Depression had put
the brakes on the craze for wooden coasters and theme parks.
Until a cartoonist came along with a new vision...
..a theme park like no other, and a roller-coaster to match.
That man was Walt Disney.
And it's all done with a pencil and a straight edge.
So I've come to LA to meet one of Walt's
original Disneyland imagineers.
What I like about being in your house is the fondness
that you have for all of the different projects
that you...that you've been part of.
What's this one over here?
Oh, that's my Winky.
This is Bob Gurr.
Whatever Walt Disney wanted, Bob built it.
I paid 800 bucks for you,
and you are now worth $300,000.
Am I allowed to get in here or is it too expensive?
You will note the steering wheel is on the proper side.
THEY LAUGH
Time for a quick Disney download.
The funfairs of Walt's childhood were ramshackle affairs run by dodgy
characters, so he'd always dreamed of building a safe
family theme park.
And in 1954, his fantasy became a reality.
Now we want you to share with us our latest and greatest dream.
That's it, right here.
Disneyland.
Bob was one of the originals in Walt's team of artists,
designers and engineers.
Tell me, what was Walt like?
Were some of the ideas quite crazy?
Sometimes the ideas were so wild, I'd think, "Oh, my God."
One of Walt's wildest ideas came in 1958.
While holidaying with his wife in Switzerland,
he took a shine to one of their most iconic mountains.
Walt was so enchanted with the Matterhorn mountain, he took
a postcard and he wrote on, "Build this."
Build a mountain. Yes.
At what point did he decide that he wanted there to be a
roller-coaster in the mountain?
Was that always part of the plan?
Well, now, here's where it got very, very funny.
He says, "Bobby,"
he says, "I want you to put a track inside this mountain."
Then he walked out of the room, and there was my assignment.
Walt gave his dream team just nine months to design and build
the Matterhorn bobsled ride, Disneyland's
very first roller-coaster.
But building a wooden-tracked coaster to that deadline
would be impossible.
We had a timeframe problem, and their answer was, "We can go faster
"by bending pipe."
If wood was the problem, steel was the solution.
Tubular steel had been used to build bridges and hold up buildings,
but never for coaster tracks.
Were there ever any concerns about these hollow tubes,
that they would sustain the weight of these roller-coasters?
We had sections of pipe that were pressurised with air.
We had a little pressure gauge on them. If there was a leak
from a crack,
the air would start to go out and we'd see the gauge
pressure go down.
Very clever. Very clever.
It was very simple to do that.
This was a world first, and no easy feat for Bob to design.
Roller-coasters are a gravity ride.
I have to design as many ups and downs that I can put in it,
but I have to do turns at the same time.
It's phenomenally complicated.
I'm going to draw it with pencil, paper and a little twirly compass.
I mean, if you have a computer, you can just zoom through it,
but you're having to think in slices.
I am doing a three-dimensional thing in 2D.
Yeah. In my head. Yeah.
Not bad for a boy who got an F in geometry.
Nine months later, the Matterhorn was finally ready for a test run.
I remember the first day when we actually...testing the track,
and then we had hay bales there, just in case it went too fast,
and we had guys to catch it.
We had sandbags in. Guys to catch it!
We kept putting the sandbags in.
My boss looked at me and he says, "Robert, you designed it,
"you ride it."
And I got in the car. It went round.
It was rattling and shaky,
of course, you know, construction dust and everything.
Came down and the car stopped beautifully, just like it should.
Today, that is still the roughest roller-coaster I know of,
and it's been years since I've ever ridden it.
I just tell people I am not going to ride that thing
one more time. It's just too doggone rough for me.
People do that.
The Matterhorn bobsled was the world's first steel-tube-tracked
coaster, and it opened to the public in 1959.
And that switch from wood to steel, all done in a mad rush to meet
Walt's deadline, would accidentally change
roller-coaster design forever.
Because steel tubes weren't just faster to build, they were also
far easier to bend and twist into almost any shape, bringing
new ways to thrill and terrify us.
That was the most sensational thing I've ever done.
Our next component is the scream-inducing, stomach-churning
bit that uses physics and a clever bit of maths to send you completely,
and safely, round the bend.
It's the loop.
It does seem mad to send ourselves hurtling at speed around
a high track, but we do because we love the thrill of it.
Some of us do, anyway.
SCREAMING
Were you one of those kids who really loved
going to theme parks?
I mean, when I was very young, I was terrified.
It totally captivated me, but I would definitely be on a log flume,
crying as we went down the drop with my parents,
and I'd be saying, "Hold me in."
It's like his villain origin story.
I'm back at Thorpe Park with coaster king John,
who has dedicated his life to terrifying the rest of us.
And the perfect tool for that terror/delight is the coaster loop.
As you reach this bottom part, we then reach this final piece
here where we hold you upside down.
So imagine going into a loop, but actually you don't come straight
out of it. We're going to hold you upside down in that looped position
before then diving down towards the ground over the top of the lake.
All of that looping has the effect of totally messing
with how you experience gravity.
Most roller-coasters at the bottom of this pit will be pulling
the highest positive G-forces.
Pushing you in your seat? Pushing you into your seat.
That actually makes you...
In this case, we're looking at around four times heavier
than you actually are.
Hang on a second.
Time for a quick intro to the roller-coaster
designer's best friend...
..G-force.
ARCHIVE: The normal weight of any body is due to the force of gravity.
Because centrifugal force changes your effective weight,
we measure it in terms of the pull of gravity and use the expression G.
1G is baseline, normal, boring, everyday gravity we feel
when sitting still.
I sat back, not at all sure I was going to enjoy the next 60 seconds.
But when we get moving, G-force can be positive or negative,
depending on its direction.
Oh, it's the end of the world. No. We're about 100ft.
We're going backwards around the loop again.
Oh!
Positive G-force is what happens when you move
in the opposite direction to gravity.
Like when the coaster is speeding upwards.
It pushes you down and makes you feel heavy.
What John, our master manipulator of G-force, has done on Hyperia
is push negative G-force,
when you move in the same direction as gravity, to its limits...
ARCHIVE: Blood is forced towards the head.
Your stomach is shoved up toward your chest.
BURPING
Pardon me.
..to create a feeling of weightlessness.
Like you're floating. Like you're floating.
A bit like an astronaut in space.
So, essentially, the ride has been designed to create as much
of that weightless sensation as possible.
As real people aren't allowed on Hyperia yet,
the first lucky riders to experience her loops
are these water-filled dummies.
When do you get to ride it, do you reckon?
Once we've completed all our testing of the attraction,
we then get given the thumbs-up, and I'm hoping in the next week
or so, might get given that green light to have a go.
After years of planning and months of careful ride-testing by John
and the Hyperia team, it finally opened to the public in May 2024,
with a very snazzy launch.
ANNOUNCER: It's time to find your fearless.
Three, two, one...
EXPLOSION
And then, er, it closed again with some technical
teething problems.
And reopened!
The UK's tallest roller-coaster has
reopened today after a breakdown left passengers stranded
for an hour yesterday.
After a few false starts, Hyperia is back on track and I can finally
experience the dark art of John's loops.
Take a seat.
Thank you. And then pull down on your harness.
Do you scream when you go round?
Sometimes.
THEY LAUGH
Do you? Yes.
Here we go.
May the G-force be with me.
Woof! Here we go.
Little teaser... Little teaser.
..how it's going to be.
And it takes 17 seconds to get to the very top.
You'll be up there before you know it.
Well, this is a much more pleasant way to get to the top.
Oh, my goodness.
Such an amazing view.
We're at the very top, 236ft.
Here we go.
Whoa!
Oh, my God!
Wow!
SHE LAUGHS
Oh, wow, that is unreal!
Oh, my goodness me!
OK, let's hold that fear face right there.
Here I am, upside down.
So what is the wizardry
pinning me to my seat and stopping the entire carriage from plummeting
to the ground?
Time to crack open the physics again.
Can I have an orange pop, please?
I want to tell you about centripetal force.
Thank you very much.
And I'm going to do it with this tray,
a bit of string, my fizzy pop and a plastic poncho.
Lesson number one.
Every object wants to continue travelling in a straight line.
That is unless something like a tray gets in the way.
Now, if I start slowly swinging
this back and forth, there are two
important things that happen.
The cup wants to travel
in a straight line.
It wants to fly off in that
direction, but the tray keeps
getting in its way.
And as a result, the cup is feeling
a continual force upwards
towards my hand.
That, my friends,
is the centripetal force.
So, centripetal force keeps an object moving on a curved path.
For the tray, it's the string
forcing it to rotate.
For a coaster, it's the track.
Every force has an equal
and opposite reaction.
That means that
the feeling, the sensation,
of the cup and the drink is one
of being pushed downwards
into the tray.
Even - hopefully, we'll see -
if I go all the way around.
LAUGHING: Oh, my God!
There's a reason I'm wearing a poncho, right?
Oh!
SHE LAUGHS
I'm probably going to reposition it to the centre
cos it's already slipped.
Look at that!
And the faster I go,
the more it pushes into the tray.
Woo!
OK, time to put my fizzy physics where my mouth is
and upscale this demo.
You're going to be washing my dungarees in your hotel sink
if this goes wrong, OK? Thank you.
# See the carousel turning round and round... #
Oh, wow!
LAUGHING: Oh, wow.
# Take a ride, you'll see
# It takes us so long... #
I drank some upside down.
So where did the idea of turning ourselves upside down and
round and round for fun come from?
The story of how we ended up with "le loop" begins back
in the playgrounds of 19th-century Paris.
I want you to picture the scene.
It's the 1800s, the Parisian streets,
and there's all these chic little French kids who are playing
with the hottest toy of the summer,
which in the 1800s was this.
This charmingly simple game then inspired a crazy engineer called
Clavier, who thought it would be way more fun to do a version
for grown-ups.
After more than a decade of tinkering, he opened this
deadly-looking ride at the Frascati Gardens in Paris.
Oh, don't worry, love,
they tested it using sandbags and monkeys before they deemed
it fit for humans.
In 1895, the Americans got in the loop, too,
with the Coney Island Flip Flap.
There was just one teeny, tiny problem, which is that the early
versions were one hell of a ride.
It was basically a torture device that you paid to go on.
You could end up with bruises, with neck injuries, even broken
bones, which I would say overall is not ideal for a day
at the funfair.
Now, the reason these rides were more pain than pleasure
was all down to the shape of the loop.
Let me demonstrate with my stunning contribution to coaster design.
Hope it makes John proud.
Welcome to the grand unveiling
of the roller-coaster that everyone's been talking about.
It is the Hannah-go-round, and you can see
here that this is a perfect scale replica of what they were building
in the 19th century, with these perfectly circular loop-the-loops.
I'm a maths professor, and if I say that's circular, then it's circular.
The problem with perfect circles is they are a right pain in the hoop
when it comes to G-force.
Now, I want to demonstrate to you the extreme G-forces
that are generated by a track of this shape.
To show you, I have a mini me on a mini train that is fitted
with an accelerometer to measure those G-forces.
OK, are you ready?
Woo!
SHE LAUGHS
On the circular loop, mini me experienced a whopping 4G.
That is four times her body weight pushing down on her.
At this point,
the train is travelling in this perfectly straight line,
and the people onboard are experiencing 1G.
That's just the gravitational pull of the Earth.
But while the train and everyone onboard wants to carry on going
in that direction, the track very rudely interrupts them.
And this abrupt change of direction causes this very sharp increase
in the G-forces, of 4G, as we've just seen there.
Now, you have to think about the effect of that on all
of the spines and the skulls
and the necks of the people that are on board.
What we are talking about here is whiplash in action.
Clearly, this design wasn't going to be the future of fun.
But then, in 1901, American inventor Edwin Prescott
had a very bright idea.
What if you squished the circle into a teardrop shape?
It's a much smoother transition
from one part of the roller-coaster
to the next, and you can see the difference that that makes
in terms of G-forces.
Let me show you.
They go 2G on that one, half as bad on your neck.
Prescott's loop was a big improvement, but sadly
for those early thrill-seekers, it never really took off.
Prescott, he didn't really understand the physics of why
this made a difference, he just knew that it did.
But, unfortunately, there are a few other flaws to his design.
It was a really small loop,
it could only carry four people at a time.
So, although it was an advance in roller-coaster terms, it was also
a bit of a commercial flop.
For over 70 years, loops languished in the design dustbin, lost
and unloved, to be pulled from obscurity by one man
determined to make loops great again.
Let me tell you something,
a life without coaster and loops
is meaningless and boring.
THEY LAUGH
This is Werner Stengel,
the grandaddy of coaster design.
He basically invented the modern looping roller-coaster.
Werner was a structural engineer
when the coaster bug caught him.
By the 1970s, he was the go-to
for every crazy coaster idea in the world.
And that is when a new theme park in California, called
Magic Mountain, approached him.
The American people asked me,
"Can we today build a loop without hurting people?"
And I answered, "Give me three days."
My idea was, in the back of my brain,
it must be a curve, a special curve,
what we today call a teardrop.
In the 70 years since the first attempt at the teardrop loop,
our understanding about how much G-force the body
can take had come on in leaps and bounds.
We can simulate the forces experienced by whirling the man
round at a suitable rate.
And so Werner turned to the ultimate G-force experts - astronauts.
I asked them, "Can you do me a favour and look at NASA,
"about how many accelerations can people stand?"
The answer was revealing.
The astronauts, 3.5G.
We have on a roller-coaster now, 6G.
But one second, the astronauts have to stand six minutes.
So duration was the key.
The human body can cope with a high G-force, but only for a very short
amount of time.
This was very important - to make
the time limit, the duration
of the acceleration, one second or less, not more.
Werner worked out that the maximum safe G-force on the loops
should be 6G for one second.
I'm proud about those numbers because those numbers are now used
in Russia, in China, in Japan, US.
Werner's numbers - his formula for fun, if you like - debuted
in California in May 1976 with The Great American Revolution,
the world's first modern vertical looping roller-coaster,
and it is still in operation today, almost 50 years on.
When people are coming out of the car and they are crying,
"I do it again,"
then I say, "Werner, you have done a big job," and I can be proud.
So next time you're hanging upside down, worrying your organs
are about to spill out of your mouth,
you know who to thank.
Talking of which, let's loop back to Thorpe Park and my terrified face.
Oh, my goodness me!
There's, like, the slowing down,
it takes your breath away!
Wow! Wow!
You know it's a good roller-coaster when there's
a minor wardrobe malfunction.
Oh, my goodness me, what you did is amazing!
Did you enjoy it?
It's so good! That's incredible!
OK, my hair looks crazy.
SHE LAUGHS
You've got a new hairdo.
Me and my hair had a total blast.
But thrill-seeking isn't for all of us.
So scientists essentially say that there are really two kinds
of people in the world.
The sensation seekers...
Give me the roller-coaster, any time.
..and then a group called the sensation-duckers -
at least, that's the name I'm giving them.
Those are people who would rather just avoid this sort of
thing altogether.
I'm absolutely terrified.
In one experiment, scientists looked at the dopamine levels and cortisol
levels of people as they completed something like riding
round on a roller-coaster, and found that the sensation-seekers
had higher levels of dopamine -
that's a sort of pleasure hormone -
and lower levels of cortisol,
which is the stress hormone.
Meanwhile, the people who were really born to be mild
had the exact opposite.
So, whether you are hyped for Hyperia or would rather stick pins
in your eyes, just remember it's not you, it's your brain chemistry.
HE SCREAMS, SHE LAUGHS
No! Where are we...?
SHE LAUGHS
Next up, the critical component that keeps bums in seats
while you hurtle through the sky at 80mph.
Brace yourselves, everyone - it's the restraint.
There you go!
SHE CHUCKLES
Would you like to guess which bit of a roller-coaster sends people's
hearts racing the most?
I mean, if it was me,
I would guess something like maybe round about where they are now,
just as you get to the top.
Or maybe the first very sharp drop,
maybe the twisty, loopy bits, maybe the upside down bit.
No, none of those.
Scientists ran a study where they monitored people's
heart rate and found that it peaked at the moment
that the restraint comes down.
Yes, it's the point where you realise there's no turning back.
But before you get anywhere near a restraint, there is,
of course, the queue,
and today, Hyperia's queue is 75 minutes long. Arms up.
75 minutes is a long time to have a serious conversation
with yourself about your life choices.
Good luck!
Some of them look a bit more nervous than others.
I mean, it's an intimidating ride. It's huge.
Has anyone ever cried? Yeah.
Have they? Yeah. People cry,
but then by the time they get off, they're fine.
That is Kai De Souza.
He's Hyperia's chief rider wrangler.
His job is to make sure your restraint is secure so you,
you know, don't die.
Just look at their faces. Ha!
Has anyone ever vomited while going round?
No. No, that doesn't really happen.
Kai and his team of ride assistants, or hosts, run a very well-oiled
machine that can shift 800 people through the ride every hour.
It is a quick turnaround for each new ride, but don't let
this speed fool you -
there is a lot going on to make sure each rider is fully fastened in.
I mean, this is a very slick operation. Yes.
How does it work?
How do you get people in and out so quickly?
Everyone will sit down, get them to pull their bars
down so they can be checked straight away.
Do you want to take them off? Yes. Yeah?
And then the hosts will then go down the train, making sure
they're doing thorough checks, checking the restraints, doing
visual checks of the guests to make sure they're not distressed
or anything, and make sure they don't have any loose items.
No-one's crying. Make sure no-one's crying.
They'll do a nice big thumbs-up to the operator
up on the console there, press their buttons,
and then the operator will press theirs,
and then the ride will dispatch.
But they don't just rely on humans.
Each restraint has a sensor telling the control room which seats
are occupied and which are locked,
and the train cannot go unless every
restraint is down and locked.
What would happen if you went around without the restraint on?
Would you fly off? Probably, yeah.
Which is, you know, again, why it has such
a complicated safety system.
You might have noticed that Hyperia's restraints seem
a little...restrained, given the mad positions that this ride
will put you in.
I appreciate this thing
looks quite low-key, but there's actually some very clever design
tricks that have gone into this.
The first you should notice is the seat itself.
So this is sort of tilted backwards, which means
that it puts your pelvis right
into the seat to really reduce
the chance of you slipping out.
And then you have the lap restraint.
But this thing is quite different to the ones that you used to find
at fairgrounds that were just made of metal.
This thing is padded, and so it contours itself to your body.
But the real secret weapon of this seat is the hydraulic system
that it uses to lock you in place.
Hydraulics use a pressurised liquid to move or control
a mechanical function.
Because this is hydraulic, it's basically infinitely adjustable,
which means that it can pin you perfectly in place, regardless
of your size.
So how did we get the sophisticated safety systems of today?
THEY SCREAM
Well, the early coasters had no restraints, which was mostly OK,
since top speeds of 6mph were unlikely to send
you into orbit.
But in 1907, the first high-speed coaster was invented by a carpenter
called Feucht, who had been so inspired by a model coaster
at his dentist's surgery, he teamed up with his dentist to build
a full-size one.
Drop the Dip was so extreme they had to add a lap bar to stop
riders falling out, a precaution that would soon become commonplace.
Still, probably more fun than a root canal!
But as rides started getting bigger, faster and even more dangerous,
it soon became clear that the bar on safety restraints
had to be raised.
So, with the roller-coasters, it can be rather hard work on the upper
chest of ladies, so you need to be well-supported.
SHE LAUGHS
To understand how we got a radical new kind of restraint,
let's reverse back in time to a decade when big and brash
were best, and restraint was hardly a buzzword.
So I want you to imagine it's the 1970s, it's California,
and there is one very particular
roller-coaster dreams factory, called Arrow.
So Arrow wanted to do something that had never been attempted before -
they wanted to build this massive Corkscrew roller-coaster
that would send people around on these two
barrel-rolls, upside down.
The only problem is that these are a bit more serious
than just a standard loop-the-loop,
and so a normal lap bar wasn't going to cut it.
They were going to need something that was much more heavy-duty.
Enter Arrow engineer and son of the company's
co-founder, Dana Morgan.
Dana had two great loves in his life - roller-coasters, sure,
but also race cars.
And when he encountered this lap-bar problem, he turned
to his cars for inspiration.
The thing about race cars, they've got a couple of extra
additions to make sure that you stay in your seat.
So, first up, they've got a harness.
Now, this is much more than just a normal seat belt,
this is something that goes both around your waist,
but also over your shoulders, just
to really pin you to your seat,
so that even if you end up flipping your very expensive race car,
you will just dangle there in place until somebody comes to rescue you.
But also, the way that race cars are designed is that you are sitting
back in your seat with your knees held high, and it's this combination
that was going to be absolutely
perfect for those barrel rolls.
ENGINE STARTS
Racing cars in the '70s were regularly hitting speeds twice
as fast as roller-coasters.
LAUGHING: Woo!
I feel really cool.
Drivers faced some pretty big G-forces in all directions
and could often end up upside down.
Oh, BLEEP! Sorry.
Need a ride?
SHE CHUCKLES
But Dana Morgan knew that those racing car harnesses needed proper
product testing for his roller-coaster.
And so he built a backyard roller-coaster prototype,
strapped himself and his head engineer in with
a couple of racing car harnesses,
flung themselves down through the double barrel roll,
and no-one fell out.
They knew then that this harness was the right sort of shape.
The problem is, it's a bit fiddly, especially if you're trying to get
it on loads of passengers quickly.
So what they needed to do next was to design
a more mechanical version.
They took the harness design but developed it into a steel-framed,
padded restraint that, for the first time, went over a rider's head.
Arrow staff members had the fun task of testing each iteration
until the Arrow over-the-shoulder restraint was patented and then used
on the Corkscrew, the world's
first-ever double-inverted steel coaster,
in California, in 1975.
Over-the-shoulder restraints ushered in a whole new era
of daredevil thrill rides.
But in the 50 years since Corkscrew turned our lives upside down,
restraint design has come full circle, with the lap bar making
a high-tech comeback.
I mean, computer-aided,
sensor-assisted, Hyperia-style lap bars.
Instead of being stapled in by shoulder straps,
thrill-seekers like me get more freedom to really feel those Gs.
It is, suspended in time!
Our final component is "wheelie" important.
It's the bit that lets a roller-coaster
literally roll and coast
while staying firmly on the track.
It's the wheels.
To understand how the humble wheel became the real hidden hero
of roller-coaster evolution, I've come to
the belly of the beast - Hyperia's lair, if you like.
Do you consider yourself big into wheels? I do,
I'm very big into wheels. Do you?
Yes. I have to be, it's for a roller-coaster.
That is Thorpe Park's details man,
Rikki Walliker.
Think of him as a sort of Alfred,
tinkering in the Batcave.
This is where we do all our maintenance and storage
for the Hyperia trains.
Sleep in here overnight?
Yeah, they do have a bit of a sleep in here at night-times.
They don't have to sit in the rain? No, we keep them dry. It makes it
easier for the maintenance, for the team to work on.
Hyperia's 144 wheels
take a real hammering, with each wheel expected to shoulder
7.5 tonnes of weight up to 400 times a day.
I mean, this thing's going around, like, continually, all summer.
Yes. Do these end up wearing away?
They do slowly wear down over time.
So, as part of our daily checks,
we'll check the diameter of the wheel.
These are our calliper tools. It's like a comedy magnet, innit?
It is. So if it had worn away, it would be a skinnier wheel
and would go into the red? Exactly right, yeah.
You can't help but notice there's just so many of them.
All looks a bit complicated.
The three differently-angled wheels all have a different role to play,
designed to keep the coaster moving smoothly, but hugging the track
from three sides to ensure complete safety.
Do you like going on them yourself?
I do go on the roller-coasters.
I do tend to continuously engineer my way through it and look
for different things,
a way I can fix or adapt or improve it as I go round.
Do you really? So I'm not a screamer, per se.
An engineer through and through.
To keep the ride silky-smooth, Rikki's team lovingly slathers every
wheel with this stuff every day.
Just getting a nice level on your brush.
What actually is this stuff? It's a wax lubricant.
You know that phrase, "greasing the wheels"?
Well, we're taking it to a different level here.
It's actually for real.
But to understand why modern coasters have so many wheels,
we have to jump back to the 1900s, a time when roller-coasters
had far fewer wheels, and many were basically
just demonic shopping trolleys.
Time to hop on - or, I should say, under - a coaster of yesteryear.
You know those trainsets that you get for kids
that are really annoying and continually come off the tracks?
That's basically what this is.
This old girl is Great Yarmouth's Scenic Railway.
She's nearly 100 years old
and one of the only coasters left
in the world with this type of wheel set-up.
If you ever wondered what the underside of a 100-year-old
roller-coaster train looked like, this is it.
You've got four wheels, and they're just balanced,
they're literally balanced on the track, with a little bit
of a lip on this side.
That is it. You go over a bump, you're off.
I don't normally get that nervous on roller-coasters, but I think
I'm going to be a bit nervous on this one.
But this coaster's creators knew they had a problem with so few
wheels, and so they built in an extra safety feature,
a surprisingly chatty safety feature.
It's my baby. Is it?
Yeah. Has she got a name? This is the Ferrari.
"The Ferrari"! It's the red one. THEY LAUGH
This is Matt Hopwood, and if Matt had a motto, it would be,
"Scream if you want to go slower."
My job, basically, control the speed of the car.
So the official title for it would be a brakeman or brake person.
Sorry, what? It's the brakes,
that's how it operates, that's how it stops.
Because the wheels are few in number
and need to remain balanced on the rails,
Matt's job is to brake at all the right points so the carriages
stay on track.
Hey, no pressure!
What happens if you don't brake?
If you don't brake, you won't stop.
Rest assured, Matt has spent 18 years perfecting his
boss-level braking skills.
But, I mean, how hard can it be?
I want to see how heavy it is.
Both your feet down.
So back and like that.
And when you've finished,
just release it back again, but don't release the clip.
If you... Oh, my God, that is really hard to do.
I would not, I would not. No,
absolutely not. Absolutely not. No way.
OK, let's leave it to the expert.
Oh, my God.
Did you just give it a push on? 100%. It's just gravity-fed,
so without that, it wouldn't move at all.
Amazing.
OK, get ready on that brake, my friend.
Here we go!
SHE LAUGHS
Biggest drop coming up!
Woo!
Ooh!
SHE LAUGHS
Do you brake it here? Yep.
What would happen if you didn't?
The back end would lift up.
Oh, what? It would come off.
No!
It's funny how you can really feel the back pushing you down,
like, you can feel when the back goes, "Woo!"
Back in the 1900s, not every brakeman acted
with Matt's professionalism -
some took the banks and turns without braking.
In 1910, 16 passengers were flung from their seats and four died
on Rough Riders, one of Coney Island's most notorious rides.
Five years later, three more people were killed on the same ride.
But then, in 1919, one man had a brilliant idea.
In rolls John A Miller, known as the Thomas Edison
of the roller-coaster world.
He's like, "Why are we only using one wheel, one pathetic wheel,
"on these things? Why not add in a few more?"
And so he goes on to patent what's known as the up-stop wheel.
Now, you might imagine that adding more wheels to an extremely
fast-moving train would be a very bad idea, but, actually,
this is a complete game-changer when it comes to safety,
because you have your wheel on top,
as before, but now you have a guide wheel on the side and, crucially,
another wheel underneath
that effectively locks your train to the track.
So, looping back to Hyperia and her 144 well-waxed wheels seems
much less complicated now.
There's the roadwheel, the workhorse that carries
you up the lift and around the track, the sidewheel, keeping
you safe on the corners, and the all-important up-stop
for the upside down bits.
Safety in numbers.
Miller's multi-wheel solution
has been keeping the biggest, fastest
and scariest roller-coasters attached to the tracks
for the last 100 years.
MICHAEL RODD: Headlong dives from giddy heights,
high-speed travel over tortuous routes.
Above all, the total abandonment of the dreamer to a situation
over which he has no control.
And because the roller-coaster arms race never stops, wheels will keep
evolving, like these extra-large bad boys on the latest
record-smashing coaster being built in Saudi Arabia.
These wheels have special cooling rims to deal with extreme heat
and extreme speeds of up to 156mph.
Now, that, my friends, is a full-on roaster-coaster.
For over 150 years, we've been throwing ourselves down
death-defying drops and whizzing around upside down,
all in the pursuit of fun.
But what if taller, faster, and loopier isn't
the only way forward?
This is the future.
NEWSREEL: The never-stopping
People Mover introduces Tomorrowland,
a constantly changing look at things to come.
Back in the 1950s, the roller-coaster imagineers
weren't afraid to dream big.
One ride makes you feel as if you're being shrunk
as you enter the world of the microscope.
Next, you're being sent on a trip to the moon.
The evolution of roller-coasters
has always been "go big or go home".
But what if - and stay with me here - what if the future isn't
"go big or go home", but "go dark"?
There are things on roller-coasters you can't experience, and that's
where dark rides come in.
"Dark rides"? Is that what they call them? Yeah.
Why do they call them that?
Well, mainly cos they're indoors.
That is Sarah Aftelak,
doyenne of dark rides at multi-media ride manufacturers Simworx.
It's an indoor theme park ride that relies on media-based attractions,
but basically it follows a narrative, so you're in the story,
being either guided along or making choices.
What, so you can actually interact with the story itself?
Yeah, yeah.
Who says it's no fun staying indoors?
These very techy rides combine all kinds of 3D visuals
with increasingly sophisticated mechanics,
with super-immersive results.
This is a different kind of roller-coaster
that you're making here, right?
Traditional roller-coasters will usually run on a track.
Ours is completely trackless.
Riders can make the decision,
you can have a choice of left or right,
or even - maybe in the future - driving it yourself.
So, you've got no tracks, you've got no trains -
is it even really a ride?
It is. Our AGV is a very, very cool ride.
"AGV"? Yeah, automated guided vehicle.
OK.
Right... I mean, I'm not sure I really understand it.
Does that, like, move around?
Yeah. So, it's like you're sort of pretending you're sitting
in a police car?
This isn't any old police car -
it has got some tricks up its sleeve,
and I am one of the first to try it.
Take her for a spin.
Brakes are off.
LAUGHTER
I mean, she's moving.
We've got full degree of motion here, so left, right,
back, forth, up and down.
Yeah. I mean, you do tilt forward quite a lot, don't you?
Yeah, yeah, there's a good range of motion on it.
It doesn't need a lot of motion in order for you to experience
what you need to on a ride, so if you're watching a screen
and, say, like, you're in a police car and you're setting off
really fast, all it takes, really, is a little tilt back,
you're pushed back in your seat,
as you would be if you speed off in a car.
I mean, it's cool, but we've had ride simulators since the 1980s,
and then we swapped bumping around in a box for VR,
basically bumping around in a chair with goggles on.
But this is different.
For now, we are just shuffling around in a big garage,
but, once released, this AGV will be programmed to speed around
a specially-designed building,
interacting with 3D video installations,
sound effects, even smells.
Similar rides already exist...
..but this new generation of AGVs will allow riders to choose
their own journeys and interact with other vehicles.
Show me what she can do.
Open her up. OK, here we go. Ooh!
LAUGHTER
And that's not all.
When finished, this will be the fastest trackless dark ride
in the industry.
With dark rides like this, it's about the acceleration
because you're experiencing...
You're not going a really long way,
but just having that little bit of acceleration straight off,
you feel it, you feel like you're going fast.
You get the amazing Gs on a roller-coaster and it's really fun,
but then you can go next door and experience a ride
like this with a story,
with the kind of emotions it brings up.
Yeah, on this one, you can fully immerse yourself.
Ooh!
LAUGHTER
This hasn't been released into the wild just yet,
and it's all a bit hush-hush.
How long do I have to wait, then?
How long until this kind of thing might be something
you could actually visit?
We do have a ride currently in production,
although I can't say any details about it at the moment. Ooh...
But are we talking two years? Five years? Ten years?
Hmm... Someone's keeping their cards close to their chest.
Will it be in the UK?
I can't say.
Will it be in a country that rhymes with boo-kay?
I can't say that either!
So, coming to a theme park somewhere at some point.
I...I think I now know why they're called dark rides.
Amusement parks have been amusing us for a century-and-a-half.
They have come a long way since, er,
drunk dad spinning and launching your children into orbit,
from the sedate Switchback Railway to the Scream Machines of the '70s,
to the sophisticated and simple tech
merging the physical and digital worlds today.
Aaaaaargh!
Now, that is clearly the correct use of a laundry basket.
So, I was thinking about it,
and I was really struggling to think of another job that is so much about
just maximising people's joy.
But to do that, roller-coaster designers have to be continually
pushing the boundaries, right?
They're making rides taller and faster and more G-forces,
and they're adding different emotions,
they're adding drama, they're adding story.
And that, I think, is what makes this space really unique.
There is so much innovation going on all of the time,
just purely to make people happier.
Next time, it's the smart doorbell, but this isn't just any
old standard ding-dong -
it's the story of a garage tinkerer who hit the jackpot...
In 2018, sold to Amazon for $1 billion.
..some Soviet spy tech...
Are you sure you haven't just made a sort of futuristic disco ball?
..and a student desperate for a drink.
We did not think this was a big deal at the time.
We just were having fun.
And we were thirsty.
HE CHUCKLES
The Open University has produced a free poster, exploring what lies
behind the genius of some everyday objects.
To order a copy, call...
..scan the QR code, or go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.