Flying High
Have you ever ridden a roller coaster? These thrill rides can be found at many amusement parks around the country. Parks advertise their rides as the tallest, longest or fastest coasters, hoping to draw kids and adults to try them out.
This week, The Mini Page learns more about how roller coasters became so popular and the science behind them.
Riding on science
You don’t have time to think about it when you’re screaming your way through steep hills and loops on a roller coaster, but your ride is demonstrating several properties of physics (FIZZ-iks), the science of matter and energy.
Roller coasters convert potential energy, or the energy that’s built up as the car goes up the hill, into kinetic energy — the energy that takes you down the hill.
Roller coaster cars don’t have motors. They work because of gravity, the force that pulls items back toward the Earth. After the coaster cars are pulled up by a chain to the top of the steepest hill, gravity takes over to pull them down the track.
Momentum, or the force an object has when it is moving, keeps the cars going forward even as the track levels out or goes up a little bit. But friction, or the rubbing of the wheels on the tracks, slows the cars down.
As the roller coaster speeds up and slows down during the ride, your body feels different forces at work: gravity, acceleration and inertia (in-ER-sha). Inertia can be explained by saying that an object will stay still, or keep going, unless something else acts upon it. For instance, the roller coaster car would keep going forever if there were no friction or gravity to slow it down. These competing forces can make you feel as if you’re weightless.
Roller coasters also have brakes to slow the cars at certain points along the way and at the end of the ride. Which force is demonstrated through the use of brakes?
Roller coaster Fact-a-roonies
• The tallest coaster is Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey. It stands 456 feet tall and has the tallest drop of 418 feet.
• The fastest roller coaster is in Abu Dhabi, which is part of the United Arab Emirates. The ride, Formula Rossa, is at Ferrari World and goes just over 149 mph!
• The fastest wooden roller coaster is Lightning Rod at Dollywood in Tennessee, which goes 73 mph.
Sliding down
About 400 years ago, the Russians invented the first coasters. A rider climbed to the top of a tower, got into a sled and slid to the bottom over an ice-covered course. He or she would get off and climb to the top of a nearby tower and do it again. These rides were called Russian Mountains.
La Marcus Thompson was the father of the modern roller coaster. In the 1880s he invented the “switchback.” People climbed a tower, rode down and got off at the end. They then climbed another tower at the end and rode back to where they started.
Thompson’s Switchback Railway opened at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, in 1884. It was a wooden roller coaster.
Steel coasters
Disney opened its Matterhorn Bobsled coaster in 1959, the first to use a tubular steel track. Using steel, coaster designers can bend tracks in any direction, which means they can include loops and corkscrews in the ride.