Roller coasters owe their terrifying existence not to adrenaline junkies or amusement park visionaries, but to Russian winter festivals in the seventeenth century that featured massive, ice-covered wooden slides.

A closer look

Roller coasters owe their terrifying existence not to adrenaline junkies or amusement park visionaries, but to Russian winter festivals in the seventeenth century that featured massive, ice-covered wooden slides. Eventually, a French entrepreneur decided to bring this freezing concept to Paris, but since it rarely snowed enough to maintain the ice, he slapped some wheels on the sleds and sent them hurtling down a wooden track instead. Later, in the United States, an abandoned gravity-powered railway originally constructed purely to haul massive loads of coal down a Pennsylvania mountain was cleverly repurposed as a tourist attraction. People actually paid good money to ride in these dirty, extremely dangerous coal carts just for a brief thrill. So next time you are strapped into a hyper-coaster pulling four Gs of force, remember that you are essentially participating in the modern evolution of nineteenth-century industrial mining logistics mixed with a dangerous sledding accident