Many believe that the attraction that we are used to calling American slides in English by analogy is called Russian slides. We checked if it was true.

On the Internet, you can often find user allegations that in the USA, the American slides familiar to us, on the contrary, are called Russian hills (""Answers Mail.ru","Yandex Kew"). Articles on this subject are also found in cognitive publications, articles About the history and study of English Ih b. On the website of the palace and park ensemble "Oranienbaum" there is a page dedicated to the pavilion of the cattle hill, where Writtenthat these are "the very American mountains that are called Russians in America."

In 1872, American inventor John Taylor received a patent US128674A On their idea of "improving the inclined railway." Like modern attractions, his car was conceived only for entertainment purposes, and not, for example, for the transportation of coal. It was a relatively primitive design with two curved rail tracks between two platforms. Despite the simplicity, the design still had elements of modern American slides: the trolley descended under the influence of gravity and rose to some height by inertia. At the end of the trip, the passengers went out on the lower platform, and the trolley manually pushed up a small slope and then again transferred to the starting tracks. IN book You can find a photograph of such an attraction about the Savin-Rock Entertainment Park in the United States, which, apparently, functioned in the park a year after Patent Taylor.

Illustration in the application for patent John Taylor

At the end of the 19th century, several patents on attractions appeared in the United States that resembled modern American slides (Richard Knudsen in 1878 year, Thomas Aleksander in 1882 year, Alanson Wood in 1884 year and Phil Stevens in 1884 year). Nevertheless, the father of American hills is called an American inventor La Marcus Thompson. His first slide Thompson Built In 1884, in the largest US entertaining resort on the island of Koni Island in New York at that time. The attraction consisted of wave -like rails with a length of 130 m, lying on a wooden frame. The trolley started from the highest point and rushed down at a speed of about 10 km/h along the descents and lifts until a complete stop. Then the service staff pushed the trolley up to the platform on neighboring rails. The attraction was so popular that Thompson began to receive orders from other entertainment parks. And over the first decade of the 20th century, he built more than 20 American slides of different designs throughout America.

Soon after the opening of the first Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney Turned To the company - the developer of the American slides Arrow Dynamics with a proposal to build an attraction for the entertainment park using the most modern technology at that time. So in 1959, the Matterhorn attraction was put into operation - the world's first American slides with tubular steel and polyurethane coating of wheels. The new design and materials made it possible to carry out more steep turns, loops and steep descents.

Attraction Takabisha In Japan with the largest angle of descent in the world (121 °)

What was the name of this attraction, invented by American inventors a century and a half ago? In the earliest application for a patent in 1872, the design was simply called Inclined Railway (“The inclined railway” - English). Inventor Fil Stevens in his application of 1884 He called it Her Roller Coasting Device, which can be translated as "a device riding in rollers." And today in English (including in the USA), American slides are called Roller Coaster, not Russian Mountains (“Russian slides”).

But in several other European languages, American slides are called precisely Russian slides, for example, in French (Montagnes Russes) and Spanish (Montañas Rusas). In Scandinavian languages, American slides are called railway with mountains and valleys (Berg -og-Dal-Bane). In German, they are called a railway in the form of an eight (Achterbahn or Figur-8-Bahn). In the Russian language they are called American, because in the form close to the modern one, this attraction was first designed in the United States and was most widely used there.

The name “Russian slides”, used in several languages, arose in the 19th century, when in 1804 in Paris the attraction of Les Montagnes Russes was built like Russian ice slides for sledding. In 1817, the attraction "Air Walks" (Promenades Aériennes) in Paris was already an advanced summer version of the Russian hills: it was a cabin on wheels that rolled down a fixed rut and then returned to the top of the hill using a cable. It is not known whether American researchers of the 19th century were familiar with Russian hills in Europe or developed their designs of an “inclined railway” regardless of Russian winter fun and French attractions.

Thus, Russian ice slides can really be considered the predecessors of the attraction, which in several European countries is called Russian hills. Nevertheless, in English, American slides are called Roller Coaster. The phrase “Russian mountains” in English does not make much sense and means primarily only natural mountain massifs located in Russia.

Image on the cover: Wikimedia