The circus is a little over 250 years old, and almost everything about it was invented by someone who can be named: the ring, the tent, the three rings, the traveling carnival, the machine that spins sugar into floss. These stories follow the people who built it, the acts that made it worth watching, and the canvas and rail that carried it to town.
Every tile in a Circus and Carnival game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Showmen
nine stories
1The sergeant major and his white horse
On the tile: Philip Astley1768
Philip Astley left the army in 1766 with a captured enemy standard to his credit, the rank of sergeant major, and a parting gift from his general: a white charger named Gibraltar. Two years later he took a piece of ground in Lambeth, taught riding in the mornings and performed in the afternoons. Astley presented his feats of horsemanship on Gibraltar, and shared the bill with a small horse trained to add, subtract, feign death and fire a pistol.
Astley called his building an amphitheater and his show feats of horsemanship. The word we use came from a competitor. In 1782 Charles Hughes, a former rider in Astley's own company, opened the Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy on Blackfriars Road, a short walk from Astley's, in partnership with the pantomime writer Charles Dibdin. The grand title did not last, but its first word was taken up as the name for the whole new kind of entertainment.
3America's first circus, with the president watching
On the tile: J. B. Ricketts1793
On April 3, 1793, a British rider named John Bill Ricketts opened a roofless wooden arena at Twelfth and Market in Philadelphia, then the capital of the new United States. There was room for about eight hundred spectators around a ring of soil and sawdust. On April 22 George Washington took a seat. Ricketts spent seven years carrying the circus from Charleston to Quebec, lost his Philadelphia building to a fire in 1799, and was lost at sea sailing home.
The most famous name in circus history came to it late. For decades Barnum's business was a building, his American Museum in New York, packed with curiosities and performers. He was past sixty when two Midwestern circus managers, W.C. Coup and Dan Castello, brought him a proposal for a traveling show. It opened in Brooklyn on April 10, 1871, under a name nobody would fit on a poster today: P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus.
Before his name joined Barnum's, James Anthony Bailey put a circus on a ship. From 1876 to 1878 his Cooper and Bailey show played Honolulu, Fiji, Tasmania, the Dutch East Indies, Australia, New Zealand and South America. Back home he came straight at Barnum's market, and Barnum wrote that he had at last met showmen worthy of his steel. They became partners instead of enemies, and Bailey ran the combined show for years after Barnum died.
In 1872 William Cameron Coup worked out how to move an entire circus by rail every day, and that one idea remade the business. Before it, a show crawled between towns behind horses and played whatever was close by. After it, a circus could wake up in a new city each morning. The same year, Coup added a second ring to the tent. He was Barnum's partner in both, and Barnum's is the name on the posters.
The Greatest Show on Earth started very small. When the five Ringling brothers gave the first performance of their Great Double Shows, Circus and Caravan at Baraboo, Wisconsin, on May 19, 1884, the main tent measured 45 by 90 feet, and there was no band wagon and no menagerie. The menagerie arrived in 1886 in the form of a single hyena, advertised as the Hideous Hyena Striata Gigantium. Six seasons later the show moved onto the railroad.
The story goes that Uncle Sam was modeled on a circus clown. Dan Rice was among the best known entertainers in America before the Civil War, working in stars and stripes with a goatee and a top hat, and he was taken seriously enough to win a Democratic nomination for the Pennsylvania Senate in 1864 and to make a brief run at the presidency in 1867. Whether cartoonists borrowed his face is unsettled. James Montgomery Flagg said he used his own.
Cirque du Soleil grew out of a band of street performers in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, who juggled, danced, breathed fire and walked on stilts for summer visitors. Gilles Ste-Croix formed the troupe, and Guy Laliberte was in it. In 1984 the province put up money to mark the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier's arrival, and the new company played Gaspe and ten other Quebec towns under a tent seating 800. It works without animals, which sets it apart from the traditional circus.
Jules Leotard worked out the flying trapeze over water. His father's house in Toulouse had a swimming pool, so he hung a bar above it and let the water be his safety net. On November 12, 1859, at the Cirque Napoleon in Paris, he performed the first flying trapeze act on record. There was no net under him that night, only mattresses laid on a raised runway. The close-fitting garment he wore still carries his name.
The triple somersault on the flying trapeze belongs in memory to Alfredo Codona, who first presented it in 1920 and made it look easy. The British flyer Ernest Clarke got there a decade before him, securing the trick in 1910 with his brother Charles catching, while they worked for the Ringling Bros. Circus. The Clarkes flew as a pair, with nobody on the return platform to help, and the strain eventually persuaded Clarke to drop it.
On July 10, 1982, during a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey performance in Tucson, Arizona, Miguel Vazquez turned four back somersaults from the flying trapeze and was caught. He was seventeen. The hands that caught him belonged to his brother Juan, who was thirty-one. The quadruple had defeated every flyer who had reached for it, and once the brothers had it they kept performing it into the middle of the 1990s.
Lillian Leitzel stood four feet nine and ruled the Ringling show. Her finale was a hundred or more rotations of her body hanging by one arm from a loop of rope, and audiences counted along. Off the bill she won her own dressing tent beside the performers' entrance and her own suite on the circus train, a comfort until then reserved for the show's managers. She died in 1931, two days after falling from her rigging.
May Wirth was born in Queensland in 1894 and adopted in 1901 by a sister of the Wirth brothers, who ran one of Australia's largest circuses. In Melbourne in 1906, aged twelve, she was billed as May Ringling, the American fearless hurricane hurdle rider. Six years later a real Ringling scout signed her, and she opened at Madison Square Garden turning a back somersault from one horse to another. She stood about five feet tall.
Mabel Stark was born Mary Ann Haynie in 1888 or 1889, and the year has never been settled. She was working as a nurse when a California vacation put her in conversation with Al Sands, a manager of the Al G. Barnes Circus, about her interest in training animals. He hired her on the spot. Audiences came to watch the Tiger Girl direct a dozen tigers at once and wrestle her favorite, Rajah, the motherless cub she had raised herself.
Emmett Kelly wanted to draw. His mother enrolled him in a correspondence course in cartooning, and when he finished it he gave chalk talks at schools, sketching comic figures while he spoke. He took a portfolio to Kansas City hoping a newspaper would hire him, was turned down, and unloaded milk cans and painted signs instead. The sad tramp he called Weary Willie first appeared on his drawing board in the early 1920s. Kelly said later that he saw himself as a trapeze artist or a cartoon artist, not a clown at all.
Tiny Kline's act with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey was the slide for life, in which she came down from the rigging hanging by her teeth. In 1932 she crossed Times Square the same way, from a hotel roof to a theater. At seventy she was hired for the same line of work again: gliding down a wire as Tinker Bell in Disneyland's Fantasy in the Sky fireworks show. She began writing her memoir that year too.
Isaac Van Amburgh started with a traveling menagerie in 1827, cleaning cages. His employers noticed how he handled the animals and built a show around him: dressed as a gladiator, he went inside the cages and put his head in the mouths of lions and tigers. He is credited with the first trained wild animal act, the turn that carried the menagerie into the circus. Queen Victoria had Edwin Landseer paint him among his animals.
The circus ring has a standard size, 42 feet across, and the reason is a horse. Trick riders worked in a circle because the centrifugal force of a turning gallop helps a standing rider keep his balance, and because a circle is easier to watch than a straight run. The measurement settled early and then stopped moving. When John Bill Ricketts opened America's first circus in Philadelphia in 1793, his ring was already 42 feet.
Astley is often credited with inventing the circus ring. He did not: riding in a ring was already the stock in trade of other trick riders when he began. What Astley did, in 1770, was build a business around it, hiring acrobats, rope dancers and jugglers, and a clown to fill the pauses between his own equestrian turns. His first ring was much bigger than today's, roughly 62 to 65 feet across, against the 42 feet the circus eventually settled on.
For its first half century the circus played in buildings, or in wooden enclosures knocked together for a season. In 1825 an American showman named J. Purdy Brown replaced the wooden walls with a full canvas tent, and by the mid-1830s that was simply how the business was done. Canvas is the reason the American circus became a traveling show that could play a different town every day instead of a house waiting for its audience.
The three-ring circus was a solution to geometry. William Cameron Coup, Barnum's partner, wanted to seat more people, and the only practical way to enlarge a tent was to make it longer, which left whole sections of the audience squinting at a single distant ring. So he added a second ring in 1872, a third followed in 1881, and at times American shows ran up to seven rings and stages. Multiple rings stayed an American habit; European circuses kept to one.
The Cirque d'Hiver opened in Paris in 1852 as the Cirque Napoleon and is still working, the oldest circus building standing anywhere. The city's chief architect gave it twenty sides and a dome carried on reinforced walls, with no interior columns to block the view, and benches for 3,900 people. It was built with a ring and no stage because the neighboring playhouses, wary of another circus turning into a rival theater, made that a condition of the permit. A small stage came only in the 1930s.
In 1874 Barnum leased the site of a vacant railroad depot at Madison Square and turned it into an arena he called the Great Roman Hippodrome, seating about ten thousand people and costing $150,000. Within a few years the building had passed to other managers, and in 1879 it was renamed Madison Square Garden. Later buildings inherited the name, so the arena where New York now watches basketball and hockey is called after a circus lot.
On July 6, 1944, fire reached the big top of the Ringling show in Hartford, Connecticut, during an afternoon performance, and nearly 170 people died. The canvas had been waterproofed the way canvas was then, with paraffin wax thinned in gasoline, and it carried the flame across the tent. Connecticut answered with strict new fire rules for public performances. A memorial was dedicated on the site, behind a school, in 2005.
A traveling circus needs somewhere to sleep. From 1884 to 1918 the Ringling show wintered at Baraboo, Wisconsin, in a compound of barns built for animals and wagons, and many of those buildings still stand. The site is now Circus World, run by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Chappie Fox, who became director in 1960, went after the old circus wagons then sitting in disrepair across America and Europe and had them bought back and restored.
When the Russian circuses were nationalized in 1919, most of their performers were Western Europeans, and they left the country. Faced with empty rings, the Soviet government opened a school in 1927, the State College for Circus and Variety Arts, to train performers from scratch. It borrowed its methods from sport gymnastics, brought in directors and choreographers, and ended up inventing apparatus and whole categories of act that had not existed before.
Every carnival has a midway, and the word comes from a strip of Chicago parkland. Olmsted and Vaux drew a mile-long pleasure drive between two South Side parks in 1871 and called it the Midway Plaisance. Two decades later the 1893 world's fair filled that strip with the Ferris wheel, games and sideshows. The strip had carried the name for twenty years before the fair arrived, so the carnival took its name from the park rather than the park from the carnival.
Daniel Burnham wanted something at the 1893 fair that could stand up against the Eiffel Tower. George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., an engineer who was inspecting steel for the fair, proposed a wheel, then spent his own money on safety studies to convince Burnham it would hold. It rose 264 feet, with 36 cars that each carried up to 60 people, and more than 1.4 million riders paid 50 cents. A demolition crew blew it up in 1906.
William Sullivan rode the Ferris wheel at the 1893 fair and wanted one that could travel. A machinist and bridge builder from Illinois, he worked with James Clements on a 45-foot wheel that could be taken apart and put back up in a matter of hours, which suited a county fair or a small-town celebration. Big Eli made its debut in Jacksonville, Illinois, on May 23, 1900. The company he founded still builds wheels in that town.
The machine that spins sugar into floss was the work of a Nashville dentist, William Morrison, with a confectioner named John Wharton. They applied for the patent in December 1897 and carried the machine to the 1904 world's fair in St. Louis, where they sold boxes of fairy floss for 25 cents, half the price of admission to the fair, and moved more than 65,000 of them. The name cotton candy came later, from a second dentist.
Charles Cretors built a steam-powered peanut roaster in Chicago in the 1880s and gave it a mechanical clown, the Tosty Rosty Man, who stirred the nuts in a glass tumbler where people on the sidewalk could watch him work. Then Cretors added a kettle that stirred and seasoned popcorn by itself, and took the machine to the Midway of the 1893 world's fair. Mounted on wheels, machines like his grew into the early mobile concession stands.
Herbert Sellner of Faribault, Minnesota, was already selling water slides when he started sketching a ride for dry land in January 1926. He called it the Tilt-ulator. He filed the patent that April, and a month later, his notes say, the ride had nine cars and a better name, the Tilt-A-Whirl. He built the first one in a neighbor's garden. It was running at the Minnesota State Fair by September 3 that year at fifteen cents a ride, and carried 4,233 riders over the fair's seven days.
LaMarcus Thompson saw a Pennsylvania coal railway carrying sightseers down a mountain and decided the idea could be shrunk to fit a beach. His Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway opened at Coney Island on June 16, 1884. Riders climbed a stair, sat on benches that faced outward for the view, and coasted down at six miles an hour for five cents. It cleared about $600 a day, and rivals opened within months.
State fairs began at Syracuse, New York, on September 29 and 30, 1841, when the state agricultural society gathered farmers for two days of speeches, animal exhibits, samples of manufactured goods for the farm and the home, and a plowing contest. Somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand people came to watch. The shape of the thing has hardly changed: judge the livestock, show off the machinery, and let the crowd wander.
When the Chicago fair closed in October 1893, the men who had worked its midway went looking for somewhere else to put the act. Otto Schmidt, a showman at the fair, founded the Chicago Midway Amusement Company and toured the Northeast with thirteen attractions, some of them straight from the exposition. Others did the same. In 1902 there were seventeen traveling carnivals in the United States; by 1936 there were more than three hundred.