"flying horses" depicted in 1721

[George Thompson]

Searching Google for "rowlandson bartholomew fair" will turn up various
versions of a plate by George Rowlandson from 1808 from a book; (perhaps
earlier as a separate print).  There is a ribbed contrivance in the lower
left that my source says is a flying horses.  Very likely, but none of the
versions I can find are quite clear enough to show people riding it.  Can't
image what else it could be. though.
On the right side of the print, in the middle distance, there is a
ferris-wheel like ride, and in the foreground something like a carriage body
on a swing.

My source is Thomas M. Garrett's dissertation on pleasure gardens in NYC, up
to 1865, p. 229, footnote.

As for the Hogarth print, I have that in a fine large page collection of his
etchings, published by Dover decades ago.
There is a hallucinatory element to the print, which probably affects the
representation of the flying horses.  In particular, the ride is pretty high
above the heads of the people, and would have required a very tall ladder to
mount and dismount.  Hard to suppose that a ride requiring that could be a
paying proposition.
Hogarth represents the horses as all facing outward, unlike modern
merry-go-rounds, but perhaps the point of the ride was not the sense of a
chase after the horse in front of you, but the view outward over the heads
on the crowd & seeing the whole fair.  There's a ride at Coney Island right
now, one sort of like the revolving restaurants at the top of tall
buildings, but without the bad meals.  A large round room is slowing raised
a hundred feet or so on a central column, rotated, and then lowered again.
 The point is the view, not any sense of giddiness from speedy movement.

In any event, it seems that flying horses (the thing) existed from the
early-mid 18th C, though the name is only found in the late 18th C.
This also raises the question -- "begs the question", in modern parlance --
what was the Ferris wheel called, before Mr Ferris?

Is no one going to rummage about and find an earlier origin than the late
1930s of symbolically catching the brass ring?

GAT

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

> As Judith Anderson Stuart wrote [on another list], a 1721 print
> containing a carousel with what could be called "flying horses" (they
> are up in the air!) appears in the Wikipedia article "William Hogarth
> - The South Sea Scheme".  I wonder how true it is to (amusement?)
> devices of the time.  For example, I can't imagine it being
> comfortable for country fair patrons to mount. And it reminds me more
> of a device of torture (I assume that was intentional to
> Hogarth?).  There was, of course, "riding the horse", "riding the rail".
>
> Several points interest me, assuming this carousel is to some degree
> true to life:
> 1)  If I am seeing the Wikipedia image correctly, this "Wheel Ride"
> was turned by manpower via a bar extending through the axle on both sides
> 2)   There are definitely horses being ridden ... although I'm not
> sure all the mounts are horses.
> 3)   The horses are not on chains, so they do not "fly" out as the wheel
> turns.
>
> Joel
>
> At 8/12/2011 09:45 AM, John Dussinger wrote:
>
>> Postscript to my last:
>>
>> It just dawned on me (sorry Dawn!) that we can see these "flying
>> horses" in Hogarth's "South Sea" print of 1721. The caption on top
>> of the ride's post, "Who'l Ride," is similar to Lovelace's mimicry
>> of the hawkers at the fair: "Who rides next! Who rides next!"
>> Richardson may have had his friend's print in mind while
>> categorizing libertines as gamblers destructive of the state. I wish
>> that I could reproduce this print here. I have it hanging in my study.
>>
>
> ------------------------------**------------------------------
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>



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

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