Tilt-A-Whirl! The Minnesota invention and State Fair staple turns 100
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Faribault in the 1920s must have been a uniquely amusing place. Inventor Herbert Sellner was running around the southern Minnesota town, using the family home, the yards of friends and neighbors, the fairgrounds and the lakes around Rice County as staging grounds to experiment with his contraptions.
In 1922, he created the water toboggan, a giant slide that looked like an old-timey roller coaster descending into a lake. Sellner set one up at Roberds Lake just northeast of town. It became such a big hit that Sellner got orders from all over the U.S., as well as France, Switzerland and beyond. It was considered the precursor to all the water slides to come.
“He mentions he had a call from Jamaica to be able to get one of their water toboggan slides sent out there,” said Jenna Nelson as her finger followed a handwritten note from Sellner. Nelson, the curator for the Rice County Historical Society, flipped through a copy of Sellner’s journal and rattled off dates and amusement rides.
There was “The Swooper,” which had an elongated oval shape.
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“It almost looks like a squashed version of a Ferris wheel,” Nelson said, laughing. “That one, unfortunately, did not take off.”
Then came another experiment at a local lake.
Herbert “created a water merry-go-round and, basically, one boat was driving, and all the other boats were tied together,” Nelson said. “It got destroyed by a storm in 1925.” Herbert’s brother, Martin Sellner, suggested adapting it for land.
In January 1926, Sellner started sketching drawings for this new ride, calling it the Tilt-ulator. On April 24, he filed a patent in Minneapolis, and a month later, according to Sellner’s notes, he had made a significant change: The new ride — with nine cars, as one advertisement put it, “tilting, sweeping, spinning, swooping, swaying, speeding, sliding, skidding, rounding, rotating, rising, revolving, hesitating, flying, falling, curving and circling” — would be called the Tilt-A-Whirl.
By Sept. 3, Sellner’s Tilt-A-Whirl was up and running at the Minnesota State Fair. Rides cost 15 cents a pop.
“That's pretty impressive, being that he invented it that year as well,” said Keri Huber, the archivist for the State Fair. “I just love that Minnesota innovation, and the State Fair was like, ‘Yes, let's have it!’”
A century later, a Tilt-A-Whirl still operates at the State Fair, as well as Valleyfair, where it was one of the original rides when the amusement park opened in Shakopee in 1976. Since 1926, Huber estimates that over 1,000 Tilt-A-Whirls have been manufactured and bought all across the country for boardwalks, county fairs, carnivals and amusement parks.
The State Fair is celebrating the ride’s centennial with a history walking tour in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society. The fair’s Tilt-A-Whirl, which is now located at the Kidway, will be one of the stops. Some crop artists have also taken note of the milestone, creating seed mosaics of the Tilt-A-Whirl for the fair’s competition exhibition in the Ag-Hort building.
A Faribault icon
In Faribault, where the Rice County Historical Society is also celebrating its centennial, Jenna Nelson says the museum is preparing to overhaul its Tilt-A-Whirl and Sellner Manufacturing Company exhibit, which will reopen in 2027.
Sellner Manufacturing was the amusement ride company Herbert Sellner founded after working in furniture design and toy manufacturing with his father Frederick Sellner, who had immigrated with his mother Charlotte from Germany in the 1880s. Herbert was born in Faribault 1887.
The current exhibit is small, featuring some Sellner family history, a few designs for toys and lamps, a model car for the Tilt-A-Whirl and some discussion of its iterations. The earliest versions of the ride were made mostly of wood and featured nine cars.
Over the years, it was paired down to seven cars and wood gave way to steel and fiberglass, developing the car’s iconic half-egg dome shape. There are variations too, such as “Barrels of Fun” (the cars shaped like old wood barrels) and the “Berry-Go-Round” (shaped like strawberries).
There’s also documentation of the evolution of Sellner Manufacturing. In 1927, Herbert was diagnosed with leukemia and given only a few years to live. He died at the age of 42 in 1930, leaving behind his wife Frieda and two sons. Before his death, Herbert built a factory and convinced his brother Martin to take over operations, which remained in the family until Sellner Manufacturing sold to a Texas company in 2011.
Nelson said the museum is expanding the display because its collections have so much more to show, such as colorful illustrated advertising brochures that Sellner Manufacturing printed in the 1920s.
One guarantees that the Tilt-A-Whirl is “as safe as grandma’s rocker,” and includes reviews like, “Tilt-A-Whirl is creating furor and produces revenue like an oil well,” reported by Billboard magazine in 1928. (Fun fact: In the early 20th century, before becoming a music industry publication, Billboard used to report on circuses, fairs and burlesque shows).
There are the journals, too, which Herbert wrote in almost daily, about his progress with inventions, materials and going back and forth to the patent office in Minneapolis. His patent for the Tilt-A-Whirl wasn’t actually approved until 1930.
“For what I would think of as an inventor, he has pretty meticulous records from day to day, which is kind of surprising to me, even if it's shorthand notes that he's writing down,” Nelson said.
Nelson said she wishes there were more personal stories on record about Herbert.
“Obviously, there's that component of fun that he's interested in. He's developing these toys. He's developing these amusement rides. So there's some component there of just kind of generally being interested in creating things for families to do,” Nelson said. “I’ve got to imagine it was a part of his personality. He seems like he would be a fun guy.”
A crop art ode, or ‘that pure joyous feeling that you get in your stomach when it's spinning’
Herbert’s legacy lives on around Faribault. In the historic downtown, there are two vintage Tilt-A-Whirl cars with plaques on street corners. The exterior wall of the Paradise Center for the Arts features a large mural honoring the ride. Herbert’s legacy also lives on across the U.S., like at the Jersey Shore, where the Minneapolis-based artist Robin Schwartzman first encountered the Tilt-A-Whirl as a kid.
“That's my favorite ride,” she said. “There’s lots of love for the Tilt-A-Whirl in my life.”
Schwartzman, who moved to Minnesota in 2008, designs playgrounds and mini-golf courses. She will be entering a crop art piece that celebrates the 100th anniversary of her favorite ride to the State Fair crop art competition exhibition.
“I found out that it was invented in Minnesota,” she said. “Plus, it's like a fair classic, so I was like, ‘I have to celebrate that.’”
Schwartzman grew up in Pennsylvania and recalled going on family summer vacations to the Jersey Shore and riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Fantasy Island amusement park. In high school and college, she worked as a caricature artist at Dorney Park in Allentown, Penn.
“Our main stand was literally right across the midway from the Tilt-A-Whirl,” Schwartzman said. “We would just watch it all day long, and so we'd hear people screaming, we'd hear people laughing, people would come off the ride and every now and then we'd witness people puking,” she added, laughing.
She pointed to the Tilt-A-Whirl’s unique design that plays with centrifugal and gravitational forces. Each ride is different, too, as the weight of the passengers can increase or decrease the spinning motion.
“It's that feeling when it's starting to spin and the centrifugal force kicks in,” Schwartzman said. “It's just that pure joyous feeling that you get in your stomach when it's spinning and you can't really control it.”
Keri Huber, the State Fair archivist, says the first generations of Tilt-A-Whirl rides at the fair used to be located in the Mighty Midway. Somewhere along the way, as larger rides like the Air Maxx and the Kraken took over the Midway, the fair relocated the Tilt-A-Whirl to the Kidway.
One reason: As long as a child is accompanied by an adult, they only have to be 3 feet tall to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl (most of the rides at the Midway require a height of at least 4-feet).
Huber says the State Fair archives don’t hold a lot of information about the ride, but she posits that may be because it was such an instant classic, history took it for granted.
“It's a wonderful ride that can be celebrated through the generations,” Huber said. “Your grandparents went on that ride, and then your parents and then now you as a child.”
The Minnesota State Fair runs Aug. 27 through Sept. 7.
