14th February: Ferris Wheel Day - The London Eye

To celebrate Ferris Wheel Day, here are 10 facts about the biggest one in Europe, The London Eye.

1. It is 443 feet (135 m) tall and the wheel has a diameter of 394 feet (120 m). When first erected it was the tallest Ferris wheel in the world although it has since been surpassed by similar structures in China, Singapore and Las Vegas. It is still the tallest in Europe, and the tallest in the world with a cantilever support on just one side. It doesn't come anywhere in the list of tallest buildings in London, but with a circumference of 1,392 feet, if it were stretched out straight, it would be taller than The Shard.
2. It isn't the first structure of its kind to be built in London. There was another which operated from 1895 to 1907, the Great Wheel, built for the Empire of India Exhibition at Earls Court. It was 94 metres (308 ft) tall and 82.3 metres (270 ft) in diameter,and had 40 cars.
3. The London Eye has 32 cars, one for each London borough. The numbering goes from 1 to 33, however, since there is no car 13. Each car weighs 10 tonnes, or the equivalent of 1,052,631 pound coins. Each one can hold 25 people. The London Eye can carry 800 people each rotation, the equivalent of 11 London double decker buses.
4. Visibility from the top is 25 miles/40km, meaning on a clear day, you can see Windsor Castle.
5. It is the most popular paid tourist attraction in the United Kingdom with over 3.75 million visitors a year. That's more visitors than the Great Pyramids of Giza or the Taj Mahal in India.
6. The wheel rotates at 26 cm (10 in) per second (about 0.9 kph or 0.6 mph) so that one revolution takes about 30 minutes. This is slow enough to allow people to get on and off at ground level without the wheel stopping, although they can stop it to allow disabled or elderly people to get on and off.
7. The London Eye was formally opened by then Prime Minister Tony Blair on 31 December 1999. It opened to the public the following March.
8. The wheel can become a quite different attraction by night when it can be floodlit in different colours. It was lit up in red, white and blue to celebrate the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton, in Pink to celebrate the first civil partnership ceremony to be performed on it, and in red to celebrate Coca Cola taking over sponsorship in 2014.
9. Since it opened, the Eye has seen 500 weddings and over 5,000 engagements. It's also seen Kate Moss 25 times and Jessica Alba 31 times.
10. It was a multi-national project. Steel and electrical components came from the UK, The steel was fabricated in the Netherlands, the cables and glass came from Italy, the bearings from Germany, the spindle and hub were cast in the Czech Republic, and the capsules were made in France by Poma (whose specialty is ski lifts).