 I celebrate today the greatest engineer born on Valentine's Day. He made his mark in 1893 at the World's Fair in Chicago. As the fair prepared to open, its organizers searched for an engineering achievement to surpass the Eiffel Tower. Today we think of it as a slice of turn of the century Paris, but at the time the tower was the latest in modern engineering. It stated boldly that the French were prepared to construct the bridges and buildings of the 20th century. So the Chicago Fair's organizing committee wanted something distinctive, mere bigness they said would not be enough. Instead they searched for, in their words, something novel, original, daring and unique to show the prestige and standing of American engineers. They already had a chocolate Venus de Milo and a 22,000-pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion, but they wanted more. A 31-year-old engineer approached them with an idea. He'd been hired to inspect the steel in all of the fair's buildings, and he wanted to build on that expertise to create a monument in steel. At first the committee turned down his idea as outlandish and too fragile. Undeterred he wrote them a letter spelling on his plan. I have on hand, he said, a great project for the world's fair in Chicago. I'm going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250 feet in diameter. His name, of course, was George Washington Gale Ferris. His proposal became what we now call a ferris wheel. What a spectacular monument he built. Using 100,000 separate parts, he created a wheel as high as the tallest skyscraper in Chicago, even higher than the crown of the Statue of Liberty. The wheel's axle alone weighed 140,000 pounds, and its 36 cars, each the size of a railway car, carried 60 people. Yet it was the wheel's lightness that startled people. Its rim seemed to float in the air, held up only by gossamer steel spokes, much like a bicycle wheel. Ferris created not only a monument to America's engineering prowess, but also a new aesthetic experience. As the wheel descended, it took about 20 minutes for a complete revolution, the whole fairground near Lake Michigan slowly opened into view. This ride succeeded in bringing notice and, more importantly, paying patrons to the world's fair. Even today, ferris wheels are used to celebrate big events. For example, when the British needed to welcome the new century, they created a 450-foot-tall ferris wheel renamed, though, the Millennium Wheel. And engineers in Singapore are creating a $100 million wheel that will take passengers 560 feet off the ground and give them a spectacular view of neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia. This meeting the standard for spectacle set by George Ferris with his ferris wheel in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.