[mellow pulsating music]
- Did you know there was a time when polo needed an airbag?
[dramatic music]
- [Rutledge] They started drawing crowds of 5,000 people
because they would show up for the competition,
but they would stay for the carnage.
[crowd cheering]
- Do you remember when your high dive partner
could be a horse?
- [Adam] A 1,000 pound horse will make contact
at roughly 30,000 pounds of force.
[water splashing]
- Or when connecting flights meant changing planes mid air?
[propellers buzzing]
- [Romi] You want to play a tennis match
a mile up in the air?
They actually set one up.
- But what an idea,
what an idea.
[dramatic music]
- These are the things we used to do for fun, for money,
or maybe out of boredom that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous?
Certainly.
Deadly?
Occasionally.
But boy, wasn't it exciting?
[mellow pulsating music]
Americans have always been thrill seekers
and we start young at the playground,
especially when the equipment seemed designed
for one purpose only, to try and break us.
[dramatic music]
- [Don] The late 1800s, into the 1900s,
millions of people arrived from Europe primarily
and they are crowding into these neighborhoods
of New York City and Boston and Philadelphia,
piled on top of each other.
Absolutely nowhere for kids to play.
So where do they go?
Out into the streets.
[dramatic music]
- [Steve] They'd be getting into trouble,
getting into fights.
We're talking thousands of kids.
- [Don] They are involved in gambling, drinking, smoking.
What kids do when they hang out on the streets.
They're also getting run over by trolleys.
Mothers, community leaders, politicians,
everyone starts to look for healthy
alternatives for these kids,
and what they come up with are playgrounds.
[mellow music]
- [Henry] The idea behind playgrounds
is to create a local spot
where kids can get all their bottled up energy out.
- They've got everything we think of
that a modern playground would have,
swings and monkey bars and slides.
- Any kid who's gone down any metal slide
knows that steel gets really, really hot,
like 150-degrees hot.
Your skin makes this screeching sound
as you get stuck going down. [screeching]
- [Henry] But there was one legendary piece of equipment
that was on nearly every playground
until it went extinct.
- One of the most popular pieces
of playground equipment is the miracle whirl.
It's a metal disc on an axis.
You run top speed, grab a handle,
and when you feel it's going fast enough,
you sort of throw caution and your life to the wind
and just jump on.
- [Brian] The park where I grew up had two miracle whirls.
It served one purpose,
and that was to see who
could throw up the fastest.
- It's a vomit machine.
There is always some kid spinning so fast
that other kids are puking
and if they're not puking,
they're falling off.
- [Henry] The miracle whirl's design
has numerous potential pitfalls.
- [Adam] The only thing holding you on this ride
is the strength of your grip.
A child's grip.
- [Austin] If for some reason
you are spun from the high end to the low end,
you can have your legs
trapped under the low end.
And should you be catapulted from the high side,
you're not landing on today's recycled rubber modular mats.
- Growing up in the 1970s,
there was no padding on the ground.
You took chances.
- [Austin] You're landing on whatever
was around that the town had.
Could be wood chips, could be asphalt, could be bare earth,
could be bricks.
[mellow music]
- [Henry] The miracle whirl goes through
several safety redesigns through the decades,
but eventually falls out of favor
in the 90s and early 2000s.
- When you're being raised in a world
where your parents are happy
to put you on the miracle whirl, you know you survived it.
But I just think that like if your childhood
starts from a place of torture devices for fun,
that you can handle almost anything life throws you.
I think.
But I don't have kids.
[laughing]
[mellow music]
- Once you survive the playground,
you are ready for the amusement park.
But back in the 80s, there was one notorious destination
that nobody was ready for.
[dramatic music]
- [Hakeem] In the 70s and 80s, water parks are a new concept
and Gene Mulvihill comes up
with an idea for Action Park.
He's gonna be in the center of it all
and he markets it as the park
for the ultimate thrill seeker.
- [Announcer] It's got cliff diving,
air slides, rapids, waterfalls.
- Gene Mulvihill kind of had this grandiose vision
of he was going to be the next Walt Disney,
but Action Park was probably one
of the most ill-advised
parks in the history
of amusement parks on earth.
[screaming]
- [Steve] Every one of my friends that went
came back with a cast and stitches.
- We would pull up to it talking
about which dangerous ride
that we were gonna go on to prove how tough we were
and our parents were like, here's money, get in there.
We'll be at the bar.
[dramatic music]
- [Edward] At the time in New Jersey,
there's an advisory board for amusement park rides,
but not a regulatory agency.
So Mulvihill doesn't need any permit
when he goes about building this thing.
- [Henry] With nothing holding him back,
Mulvihill dreams up one of the park's
most unforgettable rides.
It's the nation's first looping water slide,
the Cannon Ball Loop.
[mellow music]
- So the Cannon Ball is a
60-foot enclosed water slide
that has a 360-degree loop that spits you out at the bottom.
- It defied every engineering principle,
every mechanism for safety or risk.
- When I look at this, I'm like, this clearly was designed
by someone who has no engineering experience
and guess what?
It was.
- [Edward] Gene Mulvihill designed
the Cannonball Loop on the back of a napkin.
He's not an architect,
he's not a designer, he's not an engineer.
He has no business building this thing.
- [Brian] The Cannonball Loop was so dangerous looking
and so ill-conceived
that him and his workers didn't want to
try it out and test it.
- [Nicole] So Gene gets his son to test this water slide.
His son doesn't even have enough faith in Gene.
He decides, hey, I'm gonna go down it, dad,
but I'm gonna go down it in full-blown hockey gear.
And this is a slide designed
for people in bathing suits,
okay, not hockey gear.
- Gene Mulvihill using his son to test out this ride
just says so much about attitudes
around parenting from that era.
- [Henry] Then Mulvihill starts paying park employees,
mostly high school students, to go down.
- Mulvihill offers them $100
to be the guinea pigs, essentially.
So one by one they go down the water slide
and there's a problem.
[dramatic music]
- [Hakeem] When they enter the loop,
the riders have to have enough speed
to make it all the way around the loop.
If you didn't make it, you fall back down the tube
and now you're really stuck.
You can't go back up the 60-foot incline
and you can't go up the loop.
What do you do?
- The only way to get out eventually is they lower ropes
down the tube where the kids can latch onto it
and then they pull them
all the way back out.
- They finally decide that
there's enough people getting stuck
that they have to create this hatch to get people out.
- This was a ride that
had its own escape hatch.
That's how bad it was.
- [Henry] But amazingly, getting stuck
is not the worst possible outcome.
- [Brian] People would come out and be like,
why am I bleeding from here,
why am I bleeding from here?
It's a water ride.
How are people getting cut?
They open a hatch and they see that
people were losing
their teeth on the ride.
The teeth would get embedded into the ride
like shards of glass and then we would
just go on it and shoot around
and get cut up by people's teeth.
People's teeth!
- [Henry] The Cannonball Loop causes so much carnage
that responsible adults are forced to intervene.
- So many people had been injured
that the advisory board said,
hey, we got to put the brakes on this.
- [Henry] The ride is only open for a month,
but the park itself hangs on for another 11 years.
- A lot of these things
that we talk about
sound kind of dangerous and perhaps too risky for children
to be engaging with.
But as someone that like lived through that era,
there was a sense of pride in acknowledging
and surviving the danger.
That was Action Park
and I couldn't wait to go back next year.
- So many people got hurt at Action Park
that healthcare workers nicknamed the place
Traction Park.
- Americans have loved the thrill of auto races
since cars first hit the streets in the 1880s.
People wanted to see drivers push themselves
to breakneck speeds,
a term that for some early racers was quite literal.
[mellow music]
- It's hard to imagine
the newness of a car.
[engine clattering]
They come out of nowhere
and people want to see them.
Almost as soon as we have cars, we have car races.
[engines revving]
- [Nicole] Back in the day it was very lawless.
You did not have sanctioning bodies, you did not have rules.
[dramatic music]
- [Henry] By 1900 cars were able to reach
a speed up to 70 miles an hour
and that's when the craziness
of auto racing really takes off.
- This is still new technology
that now people are
pushing to the limits.
[brakes screeching]
- Keep in mind, there's no safety regulations.
[gears winding] [car crashing]
There's no seat belts.
[metal crunching]
There's definitely no helmets,
so a lot of times during the races,
these drivers were just getting thrown out
if they didn't catch on fire beforehand.
[mellow music]
- [Henry] By the 1920s the sport becomes so popular,
promoters roll out a new invention,
a type of racetrack called the motordrome.
- [Announcer] At Altoona, Pennsylvania,
they got rid of the dust
by building a wondrous wooden saucer,
which became more oil soaked and slippery.
[dramatic music]
- [Adam] Essentially, these were hastily
constructed cheap tracks that were made of planking,
but to make it the spectacle more exciting,
they began making banked tracks.
- [Rutledge] It was pretty cool
because you could see all the action,
they would be sort of contained and the track could travel,
but it was still just as dangerous
as any racing was before it.
[dramatic music]
- [Henry] Because the wooden planks
of a board track can be disassembled and reassembled,
it moves around frequently to different venues,
which also makes it very unstable.
- You have relatively inexperienced drivers
on relatively unproven pieces of machinery,
hurtling around a hastily made track
that would sometimes disintegrate
while driving on it.
And if it sounds scary,
it's because it was
freaking terrifying.
[engines revving]
- So you also have to worry
about the actual track,
the boards coming up and disintegrating.
- [Andrew] When you're there as a spectator,
you'll have to keep your head on a swivel
of whether or not you're gonna
catch a stake in the throat
shooting off this racetrack.
[spectators screaming]
- [Rutledge] These races are pure pandemonium.
And in fact, as the speed and danger increased,
[dramatic music] [metal clattering]
fans started referring to the board tracks as murderdromes.
[dramatic music]
- [Henry] These risks make board track racing a huge draw,
even more popular than races like the Indianapolis 500.
- Because of how dangerous the sport was,
[tires screeching]
board track racing
was a phenomenon.
[dramatic music]
Famously, one year in Chicago, 80,000 people show up
to see a board track race,
when only 60,000 had showed up
to the Indianapolis 500 the same year.
- [Rutledge] You would assume that safety concerns
is really what ultimately ended board track racing.
[tires screeching]
But that's not it.
Nobody cared about that.
The Great Depression sunk in
and then suddenly it just wasn't feasible
to take these tracks apart and move them around
and try to have whole races with them.
[mellow music]
- I am glad that I was not alive in that era
because I would not step foot on a board track race track.
It's insanity, honestly.
[engines revving]
- Board track racing was just one of the sports
that adventurous Americans invented
in the early 20th century.
Polo may have been called a sport of kings in England,
but the game didn't take off in the states
until thrill jockeys developed a version
with a lot more horsepower.
[dramatic music]
- [Bryant] Almost every sport has its origins
in some real danger.
Polo seems pretty dangerous with horses flying around
and jockeys with mallets swinging them
as hard as they can at balls.
But just like imagine this in a car.
[dramatic music]
- [Announcer] If you're anxious to risk life and limb,
here's an ideal game, auto polo.
- [Rutlede] We're gonna take this sport from the UK,
which is so prestigious and we're just gonna
redneck it down.
We're gonna play polo out of our cars.
Great idea.
- Auto polo is invented by
Ralph "Pappy" Hankinson in 1911.
He is a Ford dealer in Topeka, Kansas,
looking for a way to sell more Fords.
- Hankinson comes up with a promotional idea,
modeled along the lines of horse polo,
but instead of riding a horse,
people will be driving one of these new Model T Fords.
[audience cheering]
[dramatic music]
- [Rutledge] This idea really came to Pappy
because other people were doing it.
They were just playing around in their farms.
And Pappy is really the one that comes up with the idea
to make formalized rules around it and call it auto polo.
- [Edward] In auto polo, you have the driver
and then in the passenger seat
you have the mallet man
and that person's job is to whack
a large ball about the size of a basketball
into a goal while traveling very fast,
leading to accidents, crashes, all kinds of mayhem.
- [Bryant] Just think about this, right?
The car's trying to go as fast as it can to get to the ball,
just like a horse would in polo,
but what if the driver slams on the brakes?
The mallet man is going flying,
but they're flying right into a field
with a bunch of other cars.
[dramatic music]
- [Rutledge] People refer to baseball
as the national pastime, boxing is the sweet science,
but do you know what auto polo is known as?
The undertaker's delight.
[dramatic music]
- [Brian] If they were doing it today,
I would go and watch it.
A couple of drunk good old boys
in a couple of pickup trucks
with some mallet whacking a ball around
causing all sorts of mayhem and destruction.
[dramatic music]
- [Henry] Almost overnight,
auto polo goes from country fields to the big city.
- [Edward] By 1912, just one year
after Hankinson starts the thing,
they're doing auto polo in
Madison Square Garden in New York City.
- [Rutledge] They started drawing crowds of 5,000 people
because they would show up for the competition,
but they would stay for the carnage.
[dramatic music]
- [Edward] In the course of a typical match,
cars roll over, they crash into the stands,
players get ejected from the cars,
they're suffering tremendous head injuries.
Some cases losing limbs.
- [Rutledge] It got so bad that they started having
doctors and nurses as a part of the teams.
[dramatic music]
It doesn't take long
for the cars to start getting modified
to be better competitors.
So they might chop the top
or put like a ramming bar on the front.
I mean it became like a demolition derby,
but some dude's hanging out the side.
- [Henry] And it's not just the players in harm's way.
- [Bryant] You get a point for each goal,
but if you run over the referee, you only lose half a point.
- [Rutledge] Can you imagine a sport
that doesn't punish you for hitting the ref
with a car?
- And that's why fans absolutely love it.
[dramatic music]
- [Brian] Here's a deadly sport in which
the cars are getting destroyed
because they're hitting each other,
they're running over refs,
people are are losing body parts
because they're getting clipped.
And as fun as that is to watch,
it's a nightmare financially.
- [Rutledge] Obviously the danger in this sport
is what led to it going away, right?
No.
It was that people were like, yeah,
I really don't want to smash up my car.
It's really expensive.
There's the irony.
[mellow music]
- Auto polo's popularity ran out of gas
during the Great Depression
due to the high cost of car repairs.
Well, it turns out that most insurance companies
won't cover auto polo damage.
- Remember the golden age of televised stunts
back in the 70s?
Daredevils like Evel Knievel risked life and limb
as millions of Americans watched on TV.
And one stunt man soared above the rest, a mysterious figure
who was willing to go to
any length and height to entertain.
[light suspenseful music]
- [Jason] In the age of TikTok,
there's all sorts of challenges
and stunts people do to get attention and likes,
but in the 60s and 70s,
if you wanted to get noticed,
you had to do something big
and it had to be extreme.
[engine revving]
- [Henry] And the biggest daredevil of the day
was Evel Knievel.
- [Nicole] Evel Knievel was a master
of clearing extreme distances,
jumping over buses, cars, lions,
things I would never do.
- [Henry] But there is someone
who's out to top Evel Knievel.
- [Natalia] There's this Canadian guy
in a full body suit and a mask who shows up on the scene.
He calls himself the Human Fly.
- [Jason] He literally looks like right out of a comic book.
He even says Evel Knievel
is his archenemy.
Great marketing.
- Right out of the gate he decides to out-evil Evel
with his own stunt.
He's going to ride an airplane about 300 miles an hour
on top of the plane.
[mellow music]
In order to pull this off, they're going to strap him
to this metal pole on top of the plane
and they have to run this by the FAA.
- The FAA hears this harebrained scheme
and their one bit is wear a helmet.
300 miles per hour up in the air?
What's a helmet gonna do if anything goes wrong?
- [Henry] On June 19th, 1976, he boards his flight.
[dramatic music]
A passenger of one
on top of a Douglas DC8 four-engine jetiner
for a 300-mile-an-hour flight
over California's Mojave Desert.
- This is a major media event.
Brett Musburger is there from CBS.
Everybody's watching.
- [Nicole] After 15 minutes in the air, the plane lands
and the Human Fly waves to the crowd.
[mellow music]
- [Jason] I thought this was the greatest stunt
I'd ever seen before.
I couldn't believe he survived.
- [Nicole] It seems to be a success,
but the television crew records him going to the ambulance
for burns suffered on his legs.
- [Henry] Despite his injuries,
the successful stunt earned him superhero status
and a Marvel comic book.
But the Human Fly has something even bigger in store
to upstage his nemesis.
- So the Human Fly's plan was fantastic.
He said Evel Knievel's gonna jump 13 buses.
Anybody could just be like,
I'll jump 14 buses, maybe 15 buses.
[engine revving]
- The Human Fly says that he's gonna go for 27 buses.
- You'd think that somebody in his crew would be like,
hey, Human Fly, like maybe you know,
you don't have to really do that.
- So his motorcycle engineer comes up with the idea
to build him a rocket- powered motorcycle.
He replaces the motorcycle's engine
with two 1500-pound-thrust hydrogen peroxide rockets.
There's no laps, no getting up to speed.
They just place the Harley at the bottom of the ramp,
the Fly gets on, presses the button,
holds on tight and prays.
[dramatic music]
- [Henry] He lands short of the ramp, crashing near bus 19.
[dramatic music]
- [Nicole] He breaks Evel's record,
but he also pays the price.
He's carried off on a stretcher with serious injuries.
Here's the crazy part.
He's never heard from ever again.
- [Jason] As a kid,
I didn't think much of it when he disappeared,
I guess I just didn't realize it
until it was too late
and I was like, hey, what happened to the Human Fly?
- No one has ever seen the Human Fly since that day.
That was it.
I mean, talk about going out with a blaze of glory.
- In the end, the Human Fly's time in the limelight
was brief like a rocket- fueled flash in the pan.
30 years later, another short-lived fad
had an amateur daredevil flying high
before crashing back down to earth.
[upbeat music]
- [Hakeem] Recreational boating hit its peak in 2005,
and at that time there was something like 80 million
Americans spending their weekends
and summers out on the water.
- [Nicole] And what do people love to do when boating?
Tubing.
[dramatic music]
- [Hakeem] The most fun part is
when you get a little airborne,
[screaming]
but it's like for a fraction of a second.
[upbeat music]
So somebody got the bright idea,
what if we can make that airborne time last even longer?
- What I love about Americans, you got a boat,
let's go out on the water and have a good day.
Not good enough.
Let's get a rope and let's put a tube on it.
Not enough.
What if like there's a device on the tube
that lifts the tube into the air
and flies it around?
- [Henry] In the fall of 2005,
the introduction of kite tubes takes tubing to new heights.
[boat motor revving]
- Kite tubes,
they don't just bounce on a couple of waves,
they're made to take flight.
When you hit the wave, you lift on the handles
and now the tube goes airborne.
- [Nicole] Going up in the air 20 feet
is nothing for a kite tube.
And depending on weather conditions,
you could even go higher than that.
- It's tube, kite, air, boat.
[dramatic music]
People loved it.
- [Hakeem] In the first nine months or so,
they're selling 2,000 kite tubes a month.
- [Henry] The kite tube attracts so much attention,
it's named Product of the Year
by the Sporting Goods Manufacturer's Association.
It's an honor that's given a little too soon.
[dramatic music]
- When you're in the kite tube,
you're not even strapped in.
There's no safety precautions.
You got two little handles,
then you got your feet in this little holster but that's it.
- [Brian] There is no steering mechanism,
there's no braking mechanism.
If something goes awry,
you have no control.
You're crashing back down to earth.
[dramatic music] [man whooping]
- [Steve] When you hit 25 miles per hour,
you get about 10 feet of air.
But you go a little faster, you're 20, 30, 40 feet.
You're like four stories high right now, that's a high fall.
[dramatic music]
- [Nicole] If you fall from that height,
the water is not going to be cushiony and soft.
It is going to be like smacking a brick wall
at 50 miles an hour.
- Ohhh!
- So of course there are dozens and dozens of injuries.
People would break bones, would knock out teeth,
would just skip like a stone across the water
and two people actually died.
- [Henry] The kite tube's popularity
is quickly overshadowed
by its reputation for injury and death.
- [Don] Kite tubes are only around for about a year
when they're taken off the market.
- [Brian] The kite tube is a little bit like Icarus.
It flew too close to the sun and it maimed
and killed too many people and it was gone.
[water splashing]
But what an idea.
What an idea.
- It was reckless, it was short-lived
and for those who tried it and survived, unforgettable.
- Remember the expression, get off your high horse?
Well, for certain thrill seekers, decades ago,
the drop was steep and the landing was wet.
[mellow music]
- [Adam] So it's the turn of the century,
Coney Island is still America's playground.
One thing that has captured America's consciousness
in their leisure activities are diving horses.
[water splashing]
- Coney Island is like the Disneyland of the day
and the diving horses are an immediate hit.
Even Thomas Edison was at one of these shows
filming the horse plunging as part of his early experiment
with moving pictures.
- [Henry] Then a man named Doc Carver enters the picture.
He's got an idea to up the ante.
- In 1906,
Carver introduces Lorena Lawrence,
known as the Girl in Red, diving on horses.
She gets on the horse
and then they dive together 40 feet down.
[dramatic music] [water splashing]
- [Rutledge] Even when you hear it, it sounds preposterous.
A horse that can high dive?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but there's also a person on it.
Neither of those make sense.
- [Henry] By the 1920s,
Carver's ready to introduce horse diving's next big star.
- [Negin] This 19-year-old woman in small town Georgia,
Sonora Webster, sees an ad in the newspaper
and it's like, do you like horses,
do you like to dive, do you like to travel?
And she's like, yeah, that's me.
So she responds to this ad.
- Sonora and Company set up shop
on the steel pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
and the audience response is massive.
- The tanks that these horses are jumping into
are only about 10 to 14 feet deep.
Compare that to Olympic divers,
their tanks have a depth of 16 feet at minimum.
[splashing]
- Very many people have asked me
if I'm not afraid to ride the horses,
and all I can say is that I would never ride them if I was.
- [Henry] Sonora is horse diving's most renowned rider.
But in 1931, tragedy strikes.
- [Bryant] Usually she closes her eyes
when she hits the water.
One day the horse gets off in the wrong direction.
Webster's not sure of her landing,
and she has her eyes open.
When she hit the water,
the force detached
both of her retinas.
She would be blind from that day forward.
- [Henry] Sonora spends a year recuperating,
and then she starts horse diving again, blind.
- Imagine taking that leap on a horse
into a pool of water
and not being able to see your landing
or know when it's gonna happen.
- [Hakeem] Sonora continues her horse dives
in Atlantic City for another 11 years,
and that cements her in history
as the last great horse diving star.
- [Adam] It finally stops in 1978
and it's not out of concern for the rider's welfare,
it's actually because of the potential
of profound injury to the horse.
- As horse diving faded, [mellow music]
Americans hit the water on surfboards
and then someone had the bright idea
to put wheels on a board and hit the streets.
Today, skateboarding is an Olympic sport
where riders are judged on their style,
but back in the 70s, what really mattered
was how fast you could go.
[upbeat music]
- [Jason] Skateboarding, it starts as just a local fad,
dominating the Southern California culture.
By the 1970s, it grew to become a national trend.
- [Henry] Skateboard competitions begin
to pop up everywhere,
but those early competitions usually involve simple tricks
or maneuvering around orange street cones.
- The boards in those days were primitive,
nothing like today.
There were basically wood planks
with roller skate wheels attached.
- [Jason] How fast can we go
before we burn the wheels into molten plastic?
And the answer was Signal Hill.
- [Henry] In 1975, in the hilltop town of Signal Hill
near Long Beach, a promoter decides to launch a contest
that will have competitors racing downhill
in what he calls speed runs.
- [Nicole] Signal Hill is about 365 feet
above Long Beach in California.
It has this huge 30-degree incline on Hill Street,
which is perfect for these insane
downhill speed competitions.
- [Hakeem] When a skater goes down the incline,
their speed increases with the time squared.
After one second, you have a speed.
After two seconds, you have four times that speed,
so your speed increases rapidly.
The higher the hill, the bigger the speed you gain.
- [Jason] The skateboarders could possibly
reach speeds of up to 50 miles an hour.
Now, put this into perspective.
The US government has just put a national speed limit
on automobiles at 55 miles an hour.
What could go wrong?
- [Henry] The answer?
Plenty.
Only six competitors dare to show up
but after getting a sneak peek of the steep downhill,
four drop out, leaving just Guy Grundy
and Garrison Hitchcock.
- [Jason] Grundy, he comes prepared
in a leather suit and a helmet.
Other people,
not so much.
One guy shows up in shorts and t-shirt.
He looks at the hill and he's like, no, I'm not doing that.
You guys are nuts.
- [Michele] Grundy ends up winning the competition.
[dramatic music]
He sets a downhill speed record, 50.2 miles per hour.
- Garrison Hitchcock, he doesn't walk away so happy.
He falls, dislocates his shoulder
and he's whisked away in an ambulance.
- [Henry] But that doesn't put a damper on these speed runs.
Quite the opposite.
It makes them even more popular.
- So the next event occurs
and there's thousands of spectators.
They are rowdy, they want to see somebody wipe out.
[dramatic music]
- In 1977,
one of Signal Hill's first female competitors
is a 21-year-old named Tina Trefethen.
She tops the speed record at over 57 miles an hour.
57!
Here's the bad news.
She hits a pole, she breaks both wrists,
cracks some ribs, and she even loses a lung.
- [Henry] The chaos of these speed runs
eventually gets the attention of lawmakers.
- In 1980,
LA County passed a law that said
the top speed for a skateboard was 10 miles an hour.
So it effectively just ended
all of those speed runs overnight,
which also means that none of those speed records
that have been set would ever be broken again.
[mellow music] - Shattered bones heal,
but holding a speed record in a defunct skateboard race?
That is something that can never be broken.
- Back in the 1800s,
riding the rails was the best way to see the country.
Train tracks crisscrossed America,
connecting cities from sea to shining sea,
but only the most adventurous passengers
would dare to ride the unique railways
found at Coney Island.
[upbeat music]
- [Adam] Coney Island in the 1880s
is where the entire world comes to play
and be mystified and astounded.
And the marquee attraction of the day
was the Switchback Railway
and it was raking in the modern equivalent
of $22,000 a day.
[dramatic music]
- [Natalia] The Switchback topped out at
six miles per hour.
This is really slow compared to a modern rollercoaster,
but think that back then,
not only were roller coasters the new thing,
but very few people were driving around in cars,
so it was actually pretty exciting.
- [Bryant] The people who own the amusement piers
begin to think, well,
how can they up the ante?
How can they make it go faster?
How can they increase the thrill?
- [Henry] What they come up with is
the first American coaster to go upside down.
It's called the Flip Flap Railway.
And at the time, it was the fastest freestanding
rollercoaster in the world because it has to be.
- [Hakeem] The key to making
this rollercoaster work is speed,
so that once you start going around the loop,
you don't stall at
the top and fall down.
- [Nicole] Because there's nothing but your own body weight
and G-force holding you down,
you have no seat belt, you have no harness,
you have nothing but yourself,
God and the wind.
[dramatic music] [people screaming]
- [Adam] The Flip Flap Railway is a circle
that's about 25 feet in diameter,
and in order to generate enough speed,
there's an almost pure vertical drop
where the cars reach
45 miles an hour.
[screaming]
- [Don] To put it in perspective,
the first auto race in the US
is held the same year the Flip Flap opens.
And the cars in that race average seven miles per hour.
Seven.
- [Nicole] So the Flip Flap is extremely fast.
And even in today's standards,
45 miles per hour on a roller coaster is getting it.
- [Henry] The speed is ahead of its time.
But as far as safety measures,
they're making that up as they go along.
- In the late 1800s,
there was no real regulation.
I mean, amusement parks were new,
and so this was all experimental.
- Modern roller coasters are made with this teardrop shape.
That way you pull less G-forces at the bottom
than you otherwise would in a circular design.
- Just for perspective,
a space launch generates three Gs.
[rocket roaring]
Six Gs is the maximum a human being
without protective equipment can really stand.
- [Hakeem] So the riders of the Flip Flap,
they will pull 12 Gs.
This is not safe.
- [Adam] So what 12 Gs means is you'll feel a pressure
12 times your own body
weight pressing down on you.
So that means a 50-pound child would feel 600 pounds
of invisible weight pressing down on them.
- [Brian] The scariest rollercoaster
that any of us have been on today
tops out at about five Gs.
These people were putting these poor suckers
on a wooden trolley cart
that whipped around like that.
Astronauts couldn't put up with it.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Like astronauts training to go to space
don't deal with that many Gs.
- [Nicole] By today's standards,
we get on these roller coasters and we feel at home.
We have seat belts, we have harnesses.
Everything is holding us in.
Not then.
- [Adam] People are without a harness,
just with enough money to ride the rollercoaster
and a little bit of a death wish.
- [Brian] People were passing out,
they were getting bloody noses.
Like they were seeing God.
Their brains were rattling around their skulls.
They were getting flattened like pancakes,
and then they'd have to pay a nickel
or something like that for the pleasure of it.
- Coney Island's Flip Flap Railway closed for good in 1902
because ultimately it was a money loser.
- Today, in-flight entertainment
for your next plane trip might include watching a movie
or bingeing your favorite TV show.
But a century ago, in-flight entertainment
meant something else entirely.
[engines revving]
- [Natalia] In the 1920s,
there's a lot of enthusiasm about aviation.
People are really excited about
exploring the skies in the world.
- [Hakeem] World War I had a huge impact
on aircraft technology.
They were made more maneuverable,
they were made faster,
but when World War I ended,
there was a surplus of airplanes.
So what did the government do?
They began to sell them to civilians.
- [Jason] In the true American spirit,
these new airplane owners,
they look for a way to monetize their new hobby.
- [Henry] What they come up with is barnstorming.
[dramatic music]
- What they would do is land these planes
in the middle of these huge farms
and they would invite people to go for rides with them.
And of course, they're charging a fee for this.
- Some pilots were just raking in cash.
It was all about trying to make your ride
better than the next person.
So it very quickly became a game of showmanship.
[engine roaring]
Because they were trying to up the ante,
they got the idea of maybe
we could take someone else up there with us
and do some stunts on the plane,
but fly low enough that people could see it.
And that's really where
the term aerialist came from.
- [Rutlidge] We had wing walkers
and people that would stand on top of the plane.
When it got really crazy is when the wing walkers decided
maybe I could run from the wing of this plane
and jump onto the wings of another plane.
No parachute, no tethers, just running and going for it.
I mean, talk about dangerous.
Sheesh.
- [Henry] The stunts are hair raising, potentially deadly,
and with no government oversight, anything goes.
- One early barnstorming celebrity was named Eddie Angel,
who wouldd perform a stunt called the Dive of Death,
which he would do at night.
He would actually free fall from about 5,000 feet,
holding two flashlights so you could keep track of him
and he wouldn't open his parachute
until he could see the ground.
- [Romi] You want to play
a tennis match a mile up in the air?
They actually set one up.
Were they watching the tennis match
or were they hoping for
something bad to happen?
Don't know, but it was entertaining.
[dramatic music]
- A 10-year-old girl by
the name of Mildred Unger,
she does the Charleston on the wings of a biplane.
Now, that's crazy enough just to say,
hey, she danced on the wings of a biplane,
but she did it without a harness
and she did it without a tether
and presumably without a loving parent.
- [Henry] Barnstorming accidents are frequent.
In 1923 alone, there are 179 documented incidents.
85 people are killed and 126 injured.
Aviation safety becomes a top priority.
[dramatic music]
- President Coolidge passed the Air Commerce Act in 1926,
which basically said all the planes
had to be certified and inspected.
- [Henry] And for the first time
pilots now need to be licensed.
- Today there's an FAA and restrictive
life insurance policies that ensure
that this kind of thing will never happen again.
[engine revving]
- I do always admire the stuntmen
and the people who are willing
to put their lives, sometimes stupidly,
in danger for our entertainment.
They may lose life, they may lose limb,
[explosion]
but I posit that these people
are just as heroic as astronauts
because they're putting their bodies on the line
for our entertainment.
[dramatic music]
- Looking back on all the things
that we did to get our adrenaline pumping,
whether it was racing cars at a murderdrome
or high diving on horses
or cutting our teeth on an extreme water slide,
we didn't always stick the landing,
but the thrills were usually worth the spills
and that's why our Hazardous History was so exhilarating.
[dramatic music]