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1897
The wheel was built in 1897 to celebrate a Golden Jubilee
The Wiener Riesenrad was designed by the British engineers Harry Hitchins and Hubert Cecil Booth and constructed in 1897 by the English engineer Walter Basset Bassett. Its purpose was to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef I.
The height
It was not the tallest in 1897, but it was the tallest extant in 1920
In 1897 the wheel was 64.75 metres tall, and the Ferris Wheel in the US and the Great Wheel in England were taller. When the Grande Roue de Paris was demolished in 1920, the Riesenrad became the world's tallest extant Ferris wheel, and it remained so until 1985.
64.75-metreheight of the wheel when it was built in 1897
Survival
A permit for demolition in 1916 went unused for lack of funds
A permit for its demolition was issued in 1916, but because of a lack of funds the wheel survived. It was built with 30 gondolas, was severely damaged in World War II, and when it was rebuilt only 15 gondolas were replaced.
The drive
A circumferential cable drives the wheel, and its spokes are steel cables
The wheel is driven by a circumferential cable which leaves the wheel and passes through the drive mechanism under the base. Its spokes are steel cables, in tension.
On screen
The wheel appears in The Third Man of 1949 and in a James Bond film
The Riesenrad appeared in the post-World War II film noir The Third Man in 1949. The 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights has a lengthy romantic scene on the wheel.
Day 6, evening
It comes after Prater.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Wiener Riesenrad, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.