Trip to the Moon, A
Entry updated 7 September 2026. Tagged: Community.
Amusement ride (1901-?1908). Conceived by Frederick Thompson and funded by Elmer S Dundy, with "electrical effects ... produced under the direction of Mr Hugh Thomas, ably assisted by Messrs. J.H. Welch, W.A. Pulliam and W.H. Woolley".
The Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York (May-November 1901) featured an amusement ride which purported to take its passengers to the Moon "via the Airship Luna" (see Airships; Space Flight). The set "was of magnificent proportions, covering a ground area of 40,000 square feet, the extreme height of the main building being eighty feet". Despite the expense – 50¢, twice that of the other main rides – over 400,000 made the "trip". The ride was moved to Coney Island in 1902, eventually settling in 1903 at the site of Sea Lion Park, which was expanded and renamed Luna Park.
The Airship Luna, ship-like with long flapping wings and rudders – resembling something that might have been drawn by Albert Robida – would seemingly depart the Exposition. Below passengers saw a model of Buffalo (later, Coney Island and Manhattan); a series of illustrated canvas screens showed the shrinking Earth and the flight to the Moon, including an encounter with a storm. Landing in a crater, the passengers were escorted by moon people, many of them short with thorns on their backs (see Aliens; Life on Other Worlds), across the lunar landscape and through a strangely decorated street in The City of the Moon, which included souvenir shops. There followed a visit to the Palace of the Man in the Moon, whose court included several dancers and Lunette, Maid of the Moon. After dancing and a pageant the passengers were given green cheese and departed through the mouth of the Moon Calf, embedded in the wall.
Though there had previously been plays about visits to the Moon – in March 1877 New York's Booth Theater had staged the play A Trip to the Moon, based on Jules Verne's Around the Moon sequence – this may well have been the first sf carnival-type ride involving a visit off-planet. Its special effects drew great praise and the overall experience seems to have been impressive: during its five-year run at Luna Park there were an estimated 4.25 million passengers.
The ride pre-dates Georges Méliès's Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902; vt A Trip to the Moon), though a likely influence was H G Wells's recently published The First Men in the Moon (November 1900-April 1901 Cosmopolitan; 1901). Some modern descriptions refer to the ride's Moon's people as "Selenites", but a contemporary source using Wells's term has yet to be traced; the souvenir booklet for the Pan-American Exposition [see under links below] refers to the shorter inhabitants as "Lilliputians" (see Jonathan Swift). In 1910 Thompson created another sf ride for Luna Park, the self-explanatory "A Trip to Mars by Aeroplane" (see Mars). He is perhaps best known for his infamous 1903 publicity stunt of electrocuting one of Luna Park's elephants, the unruly Topsy (filmed by the Edison film company for their coin-operated kinetoscopes as Electrocuting an Elephant). [SP]
links
previous versions of this entry