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Alpine Sleigh Ride
The Alpine Sleigh Ride was a dark ride located in the Alpine Valley section of AstroWorld in Houston, Texas. It was one of the original attractions of the park and operated from 1968 until the end of the 1983 operating season. Featuring a ride control system and vehicles (ArrowGlide) designed by Arrow Dynamics, the attraction's initial concept and design was by amusement park planner and architect Randall Duell. Duell’s company had been hired by Judge Roy Hofheinz to plan AstroWorld. The attraction took riders through an alpine themed forest before reaching the show building which was designed to resemble a large mountain capped with snow. The ride had elements of both a dark ride and a roller coaster. During the first part of the ride, the sleighs moved through a pine forest, past a towering waterfall, and into the “Der Hofheinzberg” mountain. The second half of the ride took riders through dark tunnels and icy caverns. A waterfall cascaded from atop the mountain and down ...
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Batman The Escape
Batman The Escape was a stand-up roller coaster located at Six Flags AstroWorld in Houston, Texas, United States. Manufactured by Intamin, the ride featured one inversion and originally opened as Shockwave at Six Flags Magic Mountain in 1986. After briefly operating at Six Flags Great Adventure, it was moved a second time to AstroWorld, where it reopened in 1993 as Batman The Escape. The coaster operated there until the park's permanent closure in 2005. The track was eventually moved to Six Flags Darien Lake, placed into storage, and never reassembled. History Six Flags Magic Mountain The ride was originally known as Shockwave at Six Flags Magic Mountain. It was a prototype stand-up coaster that was purchased from the Intamin testing facility in Switzerland. Over fifty trucks delivered the ride to Los Angeles in long containers. Shockwave officially opened to the public on May 16, 1986. The coaster was a very popular attraction at Magic Mountain regardless of its roughn ...
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Dark Ride
A dark ride or ghost train is an indoor amusement ride on which passengers aboard guided vehicles travel through specially lit scenes that typically contain Animatronics, animation, sound, music and Special effect#Live special effects, special effects. Appearing as early as the 19th century, such exhibits include tunnels of love, scary themes and interactive stories. Terminology In its most traditional form, the term ''dark ride'' refers to ride-through attractions with scenes that use black lights, whereby visible light is prevented from entering the space, and only show elements that fluoresce under ultraviolet light, ultraviolet radiation are seen by the riders. The size of each room containing a scene or scenes is thus concealed, and the set designer can use forced perspective, Pepper's ghost and other visual tricks to create the illusion of distance. Typically, these experiences also use a series of opaque doors between scenes to further control riders' views within a spa ...
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Six Flags AstroWorld
Six Flags AstroWorld, also known simply as AstroWorld, was a seasonally operated amusement park in Houston, Texas. Owned and operated by Six Flags, the park was situated between Kirby Drive and Fannin Street, directly south of I-610. The park opened on June 1, 1968, and was developed originally and constructed as part of the Astrodomain, the brainchild of local philanthropist and former Houston mayor Roy Hofheinz, who intended it to complement the Astrodome. The Hofheinz family sold AstroWorld to Six Flags in 1978. Notable rides featured at the park included the Texas Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster built in 1976 that was modeled after the well-known Coney Island Cyclone, and Thunder River, considered the world's first successful river rapids ride when it opened in 1980. WaterWorld, an adjacent water park, was acquired and added to AstroWorld in 2002. Following declining revenue, rising property value, and other issues facing Six Flags, the company closed AstroWorld perm ...
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Houston, Texas
Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in 2020. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the seat and largest city of Harris County and the principal city of the Greater Houston metropolitan area, which is the fifth-most populous metropolitan statistical area in the United States and the second-most populous in Texas after Dallas–Fort Worth. Houston is the southeast anchor of the greater megaregion known as the Texas Triangle. Comprising a land area of , Houston is the ninth-most expansive city in the United States (including consolidated city-counties). It is the largest city in the United States by total area whose government is not consolidated with a county, parish, or borough. Though primarily in Harris County, small portions of the ...
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Arrow Dynamics
Arrow Dynamics was an American manufacturing and engineering company that specialized in designing and building amusement park rides, especially roller coasters. Based in Clearfield, Utah, the company was the successor to Arrow Development (1946–1981) and Arrow Huss (1981–1986), which were responsible for several influential advancements in the amusement and theme park industries. Among the most significant was tubular steel track, which provided a smoother ride than the railroad style rails commonly used prior to the 1960s on wooden roller coasters. The Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland, built in 1959, was Arrow's first roller coaster project. In 1975, Arrow Development introduced the first corkscrew style track Corkscrew, at Knott's Berry Farm that sent riders through a series of corkscrews. Arrow created several other "firsts" over the years, introducing the first suspended roller coaster in almost a century, The Bat, in 1981, and the world's first "hypercoaster", Magnu ...
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Roy Hofheinz
Roy Mark Hofheinz (April 10, 1912 – November 22, 1982), popularly known as Judge Hofheinz or "The Judge", was a Texas state representative from 1934 to 1936, county judge of Harris County, Texas from 1936 to 1944, and mayor of the city of Houston from 1953 to 1955. Early and personal life Hofheinz was born on April 10, 1912, in Beaumont, Texas. The Hofheinz family moved to Houston in 1924. He graduated from San Jacinto High School with highest honors as a champion debater and started work in 1928 at age 16 after his father died. In the summer of 1928, Hofheinz was an aide at the Democratic National Convention held in Houston; he befriended future U.S. senator and president Lyndon B. Johnson at the convention. Hofheinz matriculated at Rice University and Houston Junior College before graduating from the now-defunct Houston Law School (1912–1941) in 1931 at age 19. He married Irene ("Dene", née Cafcalas; 1912–1966) in 1933, a fellow law student; together they ha ...
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Carrier Corporation
Carrier Global Corporation is an American multinational heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), refrigeration, and fire and security equipment corporation based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Carrier was founded in 1915 as an independent company manufacturing and distributing HVAC systems, and has since expanded to include manufacturing commercial refrigeration and food service equipment, and fire and security technologies. As of 2020, it was an $18.6 billion company with over 53,000 employees serving customers in 160 countries on six continents. Carrier was acquired by United Technologies in 1979, but it was spun off as an independent company 41 years later in 2020, as was the Otis Elevator Company. History Willis Carrier is credited with inventing modern air conditioning in July 1902. In 1908, the Carrier Air Conditioner Company of America was created as a subsidiary of the Buffalo Forge Company, with Willis Carrier as its vice president. With the onset of World ...
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History Of Houston
This article documents the wide-ranging history of the city of Houston, the largest city in the state of Texas and the fourth-largest in the United States. The City of Houston was founded in 1837 after Augustus and John Allen had acquired land to establish a new town at the junction of Buffalo and White Oak bayous in 1836. Houston served as the temporary capital of the Republic of Texas. Meanwhile, the town developed as a regional transportation and commercial hub. Houston was part of an independent nation until 1846 when the United States formally annexed Texas. Railroad development began in the late 1850s but ceased during the American Civil War. Houston served the Confederacy as a regional military logistics center. The population increased during the war and blockade runners used the town as a center for their operations. Many free black people came to Houston after the civil war. Not receiving the support of the incumbent white population, they formed their own social and ...
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Amusement Rides Introduced In 1968
Amusement is the state of experiencing humorous and entertaining events or situations while the person or animal actively maintains the experience, and is associated with enjoyment, happiness, laughter and pleasure. It is an emotion with positive valence and high physiological arousal. Amusement is considered an "epistemological" emotion because humor occurs when one experiences a cognitive shift from one knowledge structure about a target to another, such as hearing the punchline of a joke. The pleasant surprise that happens from learning this new information leads to a state of amusement which people often express through smiling, laughter or chuckling. Current studies have not yet reached consensus on the exact purpose of amusement, though theories have been advanced in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology. In addition, the precise mechanism that causes a given element (image, sound, behavior, etc.) to be perceived as more or less 'amusing' than another simil ...
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Amusement Rides That Closed In 1983
Amusement is the state of experiencing humorous and entertaining events or situations while the person or animal actively maintains the experience, and is associated with enjoyment, happiness, laughter and pleasure. It is an emotion with positive valence and high physiological arousal. Amusement is considered an "epistemological" emotion because humor occurs when one experiences a cognitive shift from one knowledge structure about a target to another, such as hearing the punchline of a joke. The pleasant surprise that happens from learning this new information leads to a state of amusement which people often express through smiling, laughter or chuckling. Current studies have not yet reached consensus on the exact purpose of amusement, though theories have been advanced in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology. In addition, the precise mechanism that causes a given element (image, sound, behavior, etc.) to be perceived as more or less 'amusing' than another simil ...
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