Americans have always been thrill seekers

and we start young at the playground,

especially when the equipment seemed designed

for one purpose only, to try and break us.

[dramatic music]

- [Don] The late 1800s, into the 1900s,

millions of people arrived from Europe primarily

and they are crowding into these neighborhoods

of New York City and Boston and Philadelphia,

piled on top of each other.

Absolutely nowhere for kids to play.

So where do they go?

Out into the streets.

[dramatic music]

- [Steve] They'd be getting into trouble,

getting into fights.

We're talking thousands of kids.

- [Don] They are involved in gambling, drinking, smoking.

What kids do when they hang out on the streets.

They're also getting run over by trolleys.

Mothers, community leaders, politicians,

everyone starts to look for healthy

alternatives for these kids,

and what they come up with are playgrounds.

[mellow music]

- [Henry] The idea behind playgrounds

is to create a local spot

where kids can get all their bottled up energy out.

- They've got everything we think of

that a modern playground would have,

swings and monkey bars and slides.

- Any kid who's gone down any metal slide

knows that steel gets really, really hot,

like 150-degrees hot.

Your skin makes this screeching sound

as you get stuck going down. [screeching]

- [Henry] But there was one legendary piece of equipment

that was on nearly every playground

until it went extinct.

- One of the most popular pieces

of playground equipment is the miracle whirl.

It's a metal disc on an axis.

You run top speed, grab a handle,

and when you feel it's going fast enough,

you sort of throw caution and your life to the wind

and just jump on.

- [Brian] The park where I grew up had two miracle whirls.

It served one purpose,

and that was to see who

could throw up the fastest.

- It's a vomit machine.

There is always some kid spinning so fast

that other kids are puking

and if they're not puking,

they're falling off.

- [Henry] The miracle whirl's design

has numerous potential pitfalls.

- [Adam] The only thing holding you on this ride

is the strength of your grip.

A child's grip.

- [Austin] If for some reason

you are spun from the high end to the low end,

you can have your legs

trapped under the low end.

And should you be catapulted from the high side,

you're not landing on today's recycled rubber modular mats.

- Growing up in the 1970s,

there was no padding on the ground.

You took chances.

- [Austin] You're landing on whatever

was around that the town had.

Could be wood chips, could be asphalt, could be bare earth,

could be bricks.

[mellow music]

- [Henry] The miracle whirl goes through

several safety redesigns through the decades,

but eventually falls out of favor

in the 90s and early 2000s.

- When you're being raised in a world

where your parents are happy

to put you on the miracle whirl, you know you survived it.

But I just think that like if your childhood

starts from a place of torture devices for fun,

that you can handle almost anything life throws you.

I think.

But I don't have kids.

[laughing]

[mellow music]

- Once you survive the playground,

you are ready for the amusement park.

But back in the 80s, there was one notorious destination

that nobody was ready for.

[dramatic music]

- [Hakeem] In the 70s and 80s, water parks are a new concept

and Gene Mulvihill comes up

with an idea for Action Park.

He's gonna be in the center of it all

and he markets it as the park

for the ultimate thrill seeker.

- [Announcer] It's got cliff diving,

air slides, rapids, waterfalls.

- Gene Mulvihill kind of had this grandiose vision

of he was going to be the next Walt Disney,

but Action Park was probably one

of the most ill-advised

parks in the history

of amusement parks on earth.

[screaming]

- [Steve] Every one of my friends that went

came back with a cast and stitches.

- We would pull up to it talking

about which dangerous ride

that we were gonna go on to prove how tough we were

and our parents were like, here's money, get in there.

We'll be at the bar.

[dramatic music]

- [Edward] At the time in New Jersey,

there's an advisory board for amusement park rides,

but not a regulatory agency.

So Mulvihill doesn't need any permit

when he goes about building this thing.

- [Henry] With nothing holding him back,

Mulvihill dreams up one of the park's

most unforgettable rides.

It's the nation's first looping water slide,

the Cannon Ball Loop.

[mellow music]

- So the Cannon Ball is a

60-foot enclosed water slide

that has a 360-degree loop that spits you out at the bottom.

- It defied every engineering principle,

every mechanism for safety or risk.

- When I look at this, I'm like, this clearly was designed

by someone who has no engineering experience

and guess what?

It was.

- [Edward] Gene Mulvihill designed

the Cannonball Loop on the back of a napkin.

He's not an architect,

he's not a designer, he's not an engineer.

He has no business building this thing.

- [Brian] The Cannonball Loop was so dangerous looking

and so ill-conceived

that him and his workers didn't want to

try it out and test it.

- [Nicole] So Gene gets his son to test this water slide.

His son doesn't even have enough faith in Gene.

He decides, hey, I'm gonna go down it, dad,

but I'm gonna go down it in full-blown hockey gear.

And this is a slide designed

for people in bathing suits,

okay, not hockey gear.

- Gene Mulvihill using his son to test out this ride

just says so much about attitudes

around parenting from that era.

- [Henry] Then Mulvihill starts paying park employees,

mostly high school students, to go down.

- Mulvihill offers them $100

to be the guinea pigs, essentially.

So one by one they go down the water slide

and there's a problem.

[dramatic music]

- [Hakeem] When they enter the loop,

the riders have to have enough speed

to make it all the way around the loop.

If you didn't make it, you fall back down the tube

and now you're really stuck.

You can't go back up the 60-foot incline

and you can't go up the loop.

What do you do?

- The only way to get out eventually is they lower ropes

down the tube where the kids can latch onto it

and then they pull them

all the way back out.

- They finally decide that

there's enough people getting stuck

that they have to create this hatch to get people out.

- This was a ride that

had its own escape hatch.

That's how bad it was.

- [Henry] But amazingly, getting stuck

is not the worst possible outcome.

- [Brian] People would come out and be like,

why am I bleeding from here,

why am I bleeding from here?

It's a water ride.

How are people getting cut?

They open a hatch and they see that

people were losing

their teeth on the ride.

The teeth would get embedded into the ride

like shards of glass and then we would

just go on it and shoot around

and get cut up by people's teeth.

People's teeth!

- [Henry] The Cannonball Loop causes so much carnage

that responsible adults are forced to intervene.

- So many people had been injured

that the advisory board said,

hey, we got to put the brakes on this.

- [Henry] The ride is only open for a month,

but the park itself hangs on for another 11 years.

- A lot of these things

that we talk about

sound kind of dangerous and perhaps too risky for children

to be engaging with.

But as someone that like lived through that era,

there was a sense of pride in acknowledging

and surviving the danger.