Bigfork Eagle column

Be thankful

Here are some things you may be thankful for on Thursday: family, friends, hope and money.

I say this because 108 years ago this week there was a man who died with none of these, yet what he gave this world is something you and I are familiar with and most children love.

George Washington was born in a well-to-do Illinois family. He went to college and became a civil engineer. He designed railroad bridges and by the age of 34 had a wife, kids and a company in Pittsburgh so successful he had to open offices in Chicago and New York.

One night, while having dinner at a posh Chicago restaurant with his equally well-to-do friends, he sketched his idea for a new structure.

His friends laughed at him. From an engineering perspective they said it would fall apart under its own weight.

That didn't deter this inventor. He looked for investors but found none. So he put up $400,000 of his own money to build what his friends called a ridiculous contraption.

It took 150 train cars to deliver the steel he ordered to downtown Chicago and on a sub-zero January day construction began. It took months to build and when finished weighed 3,000 tons and stood 26 stories tall.

It was the biggest steel structure on earth, besting the Eiffel Tower, which was part of the plan the inventor had in mind when he built what many called an "engineering marvel" on the grounds of the 1893 World's Fair.

He made a million dollars after his structure opened in the waning months of the fair, but alas, the exposition soon ended, people stopped coming and he could no longer afford to maintain his structure. Worse, the bills he incurred along the way were too much and now he was horribly bankrupt.

He lost his successful company as well as his family and friends. He tried to make a new start but was so far in debt he must have realized he could never crawl out of the hole he had dug by pursuing his dream of building that ridiculous contraption.

On Nov. 22, 1896, at the age of 37, they found his body in an unheated Pittsburgh hotel room he owed rent on.

Suicide, according to some, but at the time no one much cared. It was 15 months before anyone claimed his body.

As for his contraption, it was dynamited and sold as scrap metal.

Alone, cold and penniless, that's how George Washing-ton Gale Ferris, inventor of the Ferris wheel, died shortly before Thanksgiving.