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Designer Times
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The New York World's Fair in 1964 thru 1965 featured several very interesting ride systems that would convey very large numbers of guests per hour thru various shows. These were in the form of an endless loop of vehicles moving on a fixed track of more than 1,000 feet in length. All the individual vehicles were coupled to one another - sort of like elephants trunk to tail, except there was no lead or tail elephant. Some of these rides carried guests facing sideways, some with forward facing seats.
Guests in the sideways facing vehicles always saw a show by looking at series of passing show scenes. In the forward facing vehicles the guests would travel thru a series of dimensional scenes, looking in all directions around them. But they always faced the back of the seat row in front of them....sort of like a bus ride. Since the ride was continuous running, guests would load and unload from a moving walkway. Like General Motors, we used this technique also in the Ford Magic Skyway Ride at the Fair.
The most impressive ride was in the General Motors Exhibit. It could carry several thousand guests per hour, and was easily the highest capacity ride at the Fair. The ride looked very simple, just a row of seats on a segment of flat floor, open on both sides for quick on-off loading. The floor segments were such that each vehicle could make turns as well as travel up and down on gentle grades.
In 1966 I met the engineer who designed the General Motors propulsion system and was amazed how simple it was. Each vehicle was a wheeled pallet running on a track, with each car interconnected to the next. A vertical fin protruded below the wheel track surface and passed thru a series of squeeze drive units mounted the the stationary track. This drive consisted of two opposing cog belts driven by a single electric motor. Each belt was pressed against the fin by a group of spring loaded rollers. Like split a tread laying caterpillar tractor and make the treads face each other vertically so as to squeeze the passing fins between them.
Also in 1966 WED was exploring new ride configurations for the 1967 Disneyland New Tomorrowland project. During late 1965, Walt was interested in designing a new continuous ride system for the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. I designed a ride system for this project, but it never progressed any further than a concept design. But it did look very promising as a high capacity side facing ride.
As WED explored new ride ideas, John Hench and I were idly joshing around some ideas in his office one day. John wanted to know why we couldn't tell a story by allowing the moving guests to go up and down steep hills, and look in any direction, even behind them. I casually picked up a toy candied apple on a stick from his desk, twirled it in the air and said "like this?". "Yeah, like that". So I described how we would separate the seats from the vehicle chassis and allow the seats to tilt and rotate anywhere independent of what the chassis was doing. Now the track could travel up and down very steeply while the seats could stay level. Aha, we had it!
At the time I was an aviation buff and glider pilot familiar with an air traffic radio navigation system called "Omni VOR", meaning all-directional. I told John the guests could now look in all directions....Omni, as they moved thru the show.....move. Ergo.....Omnimover. As I left John's office all enthused over the ride idea, I began to wonder how we were gonna figure this wild scheme out.
Very quickly WED was in talks with Monsanto about an attraction where the guests would be shrunk into the atomic world.....and drift in all directions by Omnimover. I assigned a new engineer, Burt Brundage, to start the drawings from my design layouts, while WED made arrangements to use much of their new warehouse for an indoor test track.
The basic configuration of the Omnimover was a welded two-pipe rail track with U-shaped ties which allow a drive fin to pass thru squeezer drive units. Each interconnected chassis rides on the pipe rails with top load, bottom upstop, and side guide wheels. Mounted to the track are two variable-position cam pipe rails which position the body containing the guest seats using a series of gears and linkages. Since these linkages always have some slop, the Omnimover gives the guests sort of a strange wogga-wogga-wiggle motion. In the dark portions of the ride, this was kinda spooky.
As I was designing the body for the Monsanto Omnimover in late summer of 1966, I kept getting conflicting instructions. Up to that time, I was very lucky in that I always drew up exactly what I wanted on each project and Walt liked it.....no interference. But this time Walt would want the body a certain way, a few days later the president of Monsanto wanted me to do something else. Then Walt would see the changed mock up design and tell me to put it back where HE wanted. I think they eventually went away and I put it back where I wanted.
We built the test track and had very little developmental problems with it, and the full production ride also had very few glitches. We did however improve the drive unit design over the years on future attractions, deleting the belts and going straight to an all-powered pinch wheel design. I was always concerned that the Omnimover system was a monster in that it had more wheels, links, bearings, and mechanical doo-dads per linear foot than anything I saw before. But every time Disney built yet another Omnimover ride, I was assured that while complicated, the darn thing behaved itself OK.
I've lost track of how many versions of this candied apple gag have been built around the world for the various Disney Theme Parks. It started with Monsanto, then Haunted Mansion, on to Delta Dream Flight, etc. Sort of like the Energizer Bunny.....it goes and goes and goes. And it all started with John Hench's candied apple.
oOo
Next month: Invention Time - Autopia Automatic Clutch
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-- Bob Gurr
Bob Gurr began working with Disney in 1954. He retired in 1981 but occassionally consults for the Company. Since Disney he's worked on the sinking ship at Las Vegas' Treasure Island, Universal Studios' King Kong, Godzilla for the film by the same name and much more. Among his proudest accomplishments he lists "making Walt tickled pink that some of the things he wanted to build actually worked. You could tell how proud he was when he would show off things to his friends and the press. Lincoln and the Monorail were two big ones for him."
Designer Times is normally posted the second Wednesday of each month.
The opinions expressed by Bob Gurr, and all of our columnists, do not necessarily represent the feelings of LaughingPlace.com or any of its employees or advertisers. All speculation and rumors about the future of Disneyland and the Walt Disney Company are just that - speculation and rumors - and should be treated as such.
-- Posted October 10, 2002
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