The mountain would not be just a structure; it would contain two ride systems and also allow passage of the skyway buckets as they journeyed between Tomorrowland and Fantasyland. Walt Disney had seen a Wild Mouse roller coaster in Europe and thought that might be the way to go. A Wild Mouse travels on steel rails, usually angle iron, along a curving route. Unlike today’s train configurations, a wild mouse ran individual cars separately along the track. But could it simulate a bobsled? Despite the Disney organizations best efforts, it could not. Something radically different had to be created for such a ride. That
is where Ed and Karl came in, and it would change the face of roller coaster design forever. Karl: About 1957 we had a visit by Admiral Joe Fowler about if we could build the Matterhorn. I’ll say that in 1958 we actually started the Matterhorn. They designed the mountain first. We put two tracks in and had to stay in the mountain. We couldn’t go outside. Ed: You bet we couldn’t! Essentially they built a steel building, and the steel building was designed, of course, to go in the Matterhorn shape. We had to bridge the distances between the supports they gave us. They gave us a preliminary draft on the building. However, we started to
build the ride before they were very far along with the building. They gave us ten months to design the two rides in the mountain. Karl: So we worked on the layout for the ride. In working on the layout, the goal was to establish the friction slope for the ride, taking into account the various radii, inclines and drops. This was a first for us, and it was a lot of work. We had to miss the other track with proper crossover points. There was not a lot of room for two tracks. Disney wanted to use angle iron, but with the round pipe you could bend it in any direction. Ed: What happened, I think, was that WED Enterprises really wanted to be the guys who designed things. They decided that they should design the track and elected to use angle iron. They built a prototype track out of angle iron, and in typical Disney fashion they put it in a beautiful setting. They made a kind of Japanese garden around it. They brought in sand, and raked patterns in it with little walkways. In the meantime, we had a short little prototype in Mountain View, and we, on the other hand, were just tacking stuff together. If the supports lap each other, so be it, because we’re going to wreck it tomorrow anyway, or cut it off and do it some other way. It had maybe sixty feet of track, so we could see the down-travel and an up-section at the far end. We had a squeeze brake to stop the prototype vehicle. And that’s all we built. Anyway, they invited us to come down and look at their prototype. It was an absolute disaster. Joe Fowler was there, and he just looked at us and shook his head. When he got the opportunity, he said, “Don’t worry boys the job is yours.”
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Eventually we would make a choice between polyurethane and nylon wheels, because we sure weren’t going to run steel wheels on a steel rail, the noise being the biggest single factor. We had our necks out a long, long way, because no one had done it before, and DuPont said, “We just don’t know.” DuPont was the primary supplier of polyurethane at the time. Polyurethane came from Germany as spoils of war after World War II, and DuPont bought the rights from the federal government. Polyurethane rolls with a lot less effort than rubber does. A rubber tire deforms differently and loses more energy to heat than polyurethane. There’s a physical and chemical difference that makes it better in that respect. We were conducting tests on small six- or eight-foot long pipe sections. We were loading them and running them twenty-four hours a day. We were doing the same with nylon and other things. For early tests on the Disneyland site, we were running nylon wheels, but we eventually made the decision for polyurethane, because we had DuPont’s assurance, off the record, that they would help us if we got into a real bind. They had a stake in it too. So we went with polyurethane, and eventually, that was the material of choice. Disney was going to design the sled, but nothing happened. They were just up to their necks on the design of the ride at that time. I decided to go ahead and mock it up so we would have something to work with at least. They said it had to be something like a bobsled, and that’s all we got.
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