"flying horses"

[George Thompson]

My past, I think, is pretty much coeval with yours; but we don't go back to
the late 18th century.

I do suppose that these flying horses were a merry-go-round, but I am
puzzled as to how they could have operated so as to be a source of exercise
for the riders.  A back-and-forth swing is exercise, either in kicking one's
feet against the ground at the nadir, or in throwing one's body back and
forth to move the center of gravity.  The riders on the railroad at Hoboken
in the 1830s sat in the car and moved it by turning a hand crank.  this must
have worked either by turning the wheels the car rolled on, (like pedalling
a bicycle), or by turning a cogwheel under the car that engaged something on
the track.

In a modern fair, we might see wooden horses sitting on a circular disk
which is rotated by a motor at the center, or wooden horses hanging from a
ribwork that's spun by a motor.
In the second contraption, without a motor, the riders could get exercise
and move themselves and each other by kicking against the ground; if there
were riders on several horses they would balance the thing and could move it
a bit faster by coordinating their kicks than a single rider could, but
still they wouldn't get the effect of centrifugal force that a motorized
ride does.
The first could, I suppose, be moved by hand cranks like the ride at
Hoboken, but sitting on a wooden horse at the outside of a 25 or 30 foot
radius disk while pedalling to move the disk doesn't sound like much fun,
even for people who thought that going 8 miles an hour was going too fast.

There's also the example of the Steeplechase ride at Steeplechase Park at
Coney Island, which I was actually on, when a little boy.  Long gone, now,
since the mid-50s.  In that ride, there were 5 or 6 horses each on a
separate track that ran around the outside of a large building.  Each horse
moved independently.  It was powered by gravity, but I suppose on a level
track the horses could have been moved by pedalling.   I rode the thing with
my father on the next horse, and quickly noticed that I could count on
beating him to the finish line if I took the horse nearest the building.
 This shows that I had the mental acuity to have been a successful jockey,
and if only I hadn't grown to be 6'2" and weigh 200 lbs, I might have had a
very different career than I have had.

GAT

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

> At 8/10/2011 04:40 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>
>>      Presumably these were all some sort of Whirligig, or Roundabout, or
>> Merry-go-round, &c.; though perhaps some sort of a back-and-forth swing?
>>
>
> I definitely associate "flying horses" with carousels
> (merry-go-rounds), not swings.  The ones that go up and down as the
> merry go round. (That is, I must have heard or read it at some
> time.)  But perhaps this is too far in the past for you young
> whipper-snappers.
>
> Joel
>
> ------------------------------**------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org