Helen Pitt

rides to the Buffalo World's Fair and he took them all over the country.

And in doing so, he met another entrepreneur who was perhaps more of a business mind by the name of Elmer Skip Dundee.

Scipio was his middle name.

And together they teamed to start a whole load of different rides that appeared in loads of different fairs at this stage.

So the pages of Jules Verne's 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, may have inspired modern day moon missions, but they also inspired this young guy called Fred Thompson.

And it's important to remember, Richard, at that time, at the turn of the century, everyone was captured by this idea of travel into space.

So he created this ride called A Trip to the Moon in 1901 at the Buffalo World's Fair there.

Well, it was pretty rudimentary, but it was like a kayak or a wooden vessel that flew up into the sky and you could look out the porthole and see sights of America like Niagara Falls that you were flying and then suddenly you looked out and you were into outer space.

And the idea is when you arrived...

You stepped out and you were served green cheese, according to the prevailing myth at the time that the mood was made of green cheese.

And it was served by dwarves that the two of them had met at the Chicago World's Fair.

Exactly.

Kind of a bit like the Wizard of Oz, who...

Bohm, who wrote The Wizard of Oz, had actually attended Chicago's World Fair.

So the World Fair changed America in so many ways, from it invented chewing gum, it invented the escalator, it invented the modern-day amusement park.

It's a surprise, like you would think, wouldn't you?

Given this ride is called A Trip to the Moon, the airship's called Luna, that that would be indeed why they called their permanent park Luna Park.

What happened was they were enticed to New York by a guy called George Tillew, who'd ridden the...

Ferris wheel in Chicago and said, I want this and I want a ride like a trip to the moon that he'd seen at Buffalo's World Fair.

So he enticed them down in 1902 and that first season they did very well on that ride, a trip to the moon, but they wanted their own part because they didn't want to give the profits to Tillew, who was the one who invented the very first face entry.