In 2010 Google combined Valentines Day with the Winter Olympic Games on the homepage and this year Google is doing this again but this time the doodle honours George Ferris. George Ferris created the original Ferris Wheel for the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. He was an American engineer born February 14, 1859 in Galesburg, Illinois.
The Ferris Wheel he created had 36 cars, each fitted with 40 revolving chairs and able to accommodate up to 60 people, giving a total capacity of 2,160. When the fair opened, it carried some 38,000 passengers daily, taking 20 minutes to complete two revolutions, the first involving six stops to allow passengers to exit and enter and the second a nine-minute non-stop rotation, for which the ticket holder paid 50 cents. It carried 2.5 million passengers before it was finally demolished in 1906.
Just like last year Google made an interactive doodle. Because of George Ferris the company made an amusement park with in the middle two Ferris Wheels. By clicking the ‘love’ icon at the bottom both Ferris Wheels can spin and two random animals will appear as a match like a horse and a tiger (Everything is possible with some imagination :-)). After playing Cupid Google shows an image of how the two animals get along. Like other recent The doodle doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 but the Ferris Wheels can be spinned in all the modern browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.
You can see a video of the doodle below. You can see all the other doodles Google used in the previous years since 2000 for Valentines Day on this page. On this page also the doodles that were used in Brazil last year, in 2011 and in 2010 and the separate doodle that was placed in the United States in 2009.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wZC28p6PWkE&version=3&hl=en_US&w=615&h=385]
