The next time you’re waiting on line to ride the Matterhorn Mountain bobsleds in Disneyland, consider this:
Bob Gurr — the man who designed the Matterhorn, the world’s first tubular steel roller coaster — had a life-long fear of coasters. In fact, he had never worked up enough nerve to actually ride one until Walt Disney asked him to design the ground-breaking attraction.
And, back in the late 1950s when the Matterhorn was being developed, Gurr didn’t have the luxury of computer technology to assist him; all he had was trigonometry, which he had to teach himself a few months before taking on the project. [...]
