People seem to have become braver

I was reading a thing about rollercoaster history and I read that they had to have a nurse stand by in the station because people would pass out.  It just seems weird that if people 80 years ago looked at MF they would probably die.  In a hundred years people will probably be able to withstand 12 g's or something crazy like that.

Hmm... not exactly. The ride with the nurse's station was the Crystal Beach Cyclone. In some cases, it really did need the nurse on duty. Rides built nowadays are made to exact specifications where engineers know precisely how many Gs a rider will experience. In a lot of ways, rides back then were a heck of a lot more intense than current coasters.

-----------------
Joshua Wilcox
"The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing"

People aren't really braver, but insurance companies to seem to have decided for us in advance what rides are available to us.  Traver's coasters nowadays would NEVER get off the drawing boards, for better and for worse.  People also died on the first looping coasters, from excessive G forces and/or falling out of the trains...
-----------------
Son of Drop Zone - PKI CoasterCamp I Champions!!!

the construction of coaster has become more precise and more calculated. Actually, the G forces felt on rides in the 1920's are mostly greater than the g's felt on the newest steel coasters. the first looping coaster in i think 1910 or so, had a completely circular loop which made it produce 8 g's, I believe two people died on it and many suffered injuries. So in reality the g's have decreased due to newer coaster innovations and techniques.

Well Some things of Evolution are true, other wise we would all be dying at 30.  Are bodies are stronger than ever beforem and our Health is better than ever before, Not to mention we have systems like Katiea thats tell us if design wont work.

Largely it is a trust thing. When you go to a park today, you hear how this coaster cost ten million dollars and that coaster cost fifteen million dollars and such. A good bit of the reason that the park tells the GP this is because expensive=quality. No one dies on MF because it is well engineered, but the reason people RIDE it is because they trust that it is well engineered. This would not have been possible during the first golden age, when some rides really were poorly designed.

Also designing coasters is a good bit easier than it was back then, thanks to computers. The structures are not really the problem, as 300ft structures are child's play. Recall that the empire state building went up in the 30s. The problem is the ride and reliability, which CAE packages help immensely. Fatigue failure is very, very difficult to predict without FEA.

It isn't that people are braver, it is that everyone knows that no one dies on roller coasters. This was not the case 80 years ago.

Good points. I guess im pretty stupid for not thinking of those.

---

Intaminrocks said:
"Well Some things of Evolution are true, other wise we would all be dying at 30.  Are bodies are stronger than ever beforem and our Health is better than ever before, "

---

Our health is better because our technology is better, NOT evolution. If you took all our medical knowledge back to the middle ages, they would have similar life spans to ours. The only thing that has "evolved" is our sciences.
jeremy

-------------
"Nobody writes about the planes that land." Steve Salerno Washington Times 7-10-01

Well Said, Jeremy, and John (Comatose).

I'll have to agreee here that people are just less scared to ride because rides are indeed SAFER. There are still people out there that are afraid to ride because of the few "incidents" each year (the Beast comes to mind). Think back to the first golden age, the reason why Traver was so succesful was because back then, if your ride killed someone, it was all the more popular. Some people call him a genius, but I, truthfully think he was kind of an idiot. some of his designs would NEVER be attempted today. Then again, look at what we have today, most of this stuff would have never been attempted. Thanks to better sciences and understanding of things, we can have rides that look more dangerous, but everyone GP included, knows they're safe.

-Josh

-----------------
-*And on the 8th day, God created Cheese-On-A-Stick*-