[Great American Scream Machine] opened just a few months before Cedar Point's Magnum XL-200, taking for a short while the title of World's Fastest Roller Coaster
Also tallest. Back when the speed on all roller coasters came from gravity, those records often went together. These days they've gotten decoupled because of the rise of launched coasters.
I have always thought of "tallest" as a much more significant record than "fastest." The question I often get asked by people when they find out I'm a coaster geek, is what's the "biggest" thing I've ridden. "Biggest" is ambiguous as it might mean tallest, or longest -- and Marineland (Canada) even exploits the ambiguity so far as to declare their coaster, Dragon Mountain, the "largest," with the justification that it takes up the largest land area (though it is not the longest in either time or track length). But I think when people ask me what the "biggest" is, they mean the tallest.
I remember going to Cedar Point in the summer of '89, when Magnum was new. I had seen the advertisements for it; I remember one that ran in the Sunday comics page that depicted it with the summit obscured by clouds. When I saw it in person, I thought the ads had not exaggerated. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen, a coaster so tall I could see it from all over the park. It hardly seemed real; it looked like something from the cartoons, a caricature of a roller coaster. I didn't spare any thought to whether it might be the fastest roller coaster. I just knew it was the tallest one I had ever seen.
It took me years of gradual progression to overcome my fear of roller coasters. My incremental accomplishments were always marked by riding something taller than I had ridden before -- not by riding something faster. And to this day I still think of "taller" as a bigger deal than "faster." So Kingda Ka's speed record will be broken soon, but I will still feel happy that I have ridden the tallest coaster in the world -- until that record is broken too.
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rosecarmine
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Date: 2010-07-21 06:23 pm (UTC)Also tallest. Back when the speed on all roller coasters came from gravity, those records often went together. These days they've gotten decoupled because of the rise of launched coasters.
I have always thought of "tallest" as a much more significant record than "fastest." The question I often get asked by people when they find out I'm a coaster geek, is what's the "biggest" thing I've ridden. "Biggest" is ambiguous as it might mean tallest, or longest -- and Marineland (Canada) even exploits the ambiguity so far as to declare their coaster, Dragon Mountain, the "largest," with the justification that it takes up the largest land area (though it is not the longest in either time or track length). But I think when people ask me what the "biggest" is, they mean the tallest.
I remember going to Cedar Point in the summer of '89, when Magnum was new. I had seen the advertisements for it; I remember one that ran in the Sunday comics page that depicted it with the summit obscured by clouds. When I saw it in person, I thought the ads had not exaggerated. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen, a coaster so tall I could see it from all over the park. It hardly seemed real; it looked like something from the cartoons, a caricature of a roller coaster. I didn't spare any thought to whether it might be the fastest roller coaster. I just knew it was the tallest one I had ever seen.
It took me years of gradual progression to overcome my fear of roller coasters. My incremental accomplishments were always marked by riding something taller than I had ridden before -- not by riding something faster. And to this day I still think of "taller" as a bigger deal than "faster." So Kingda Ka's speed record will be broken soon, but I will still feel happy that I have ridden the tallest coaster in the world -- until that record is broken too.