History
Walter Bolliger and Claude Mabillard starting working for Giovanola, a manufacturing company who supplied rides to Intamin, in the 1970s. During their time at Giovanola, they helped design the company's first stand-up roller coaster, Shockwave at Six Flags Magic Mountain. They also worked on other projects, such as Z-Force at Six Flags Great America. Bolliger & Mabillard left Giovanola, but the company continued to use their track design, so the company's roller coasters, Titan at Six Flags Over Texas, and Goliath at Six Flags Magic Mountain, use the B&M style track.
In 1987, Giovanola underwent a change of management; Bolliger & Mabillard decided to leave, and founded their own company. At the time, B&M employed four people; two draftsmen, Bolliger and Mabillard. When B&M was created, the pair had agreed not to make any more amusement attractions. However, Six Flags contacted the new company and asked it to build a roller coaster. B&M accepted the offer and hired two more draftsmen. But B&M had a problem regarding how and where to manufacture the track pieces for the roller coaster. With the impression of the work done by Clermont Steel Fabricators on Vortex at Kings Island and Shockwave Six Flags Great America, Walter Bolliger went to the steel plant and asked if they would be interested in manufacturing the track. Clermont Steel Fabricators accepted and currently manufactures all Bolliger and Mabillard roller coaster track pieces for all of North America. Now with a company to manufacture the track, B&M built its first roller coaster, a stand-up roller coaster, Iron Wolf, which opened in 1990 at Six Flags Great America. Two years later, Bolliger & Mabillard built another project for Six Flags Great America, Batman: The Ride, the world's first Inverted Coaster, which brought them to prominence in the industry.
Bolliger & Mabillard also invented the floorless coaster, and the dive coaster. The company also built its first launched roller coaster, the The Incredible Hulk, which is at Universal's Islands of Adventure. Although The Incredible Hulk uses a launch system, B&M classifies it as a "Sitting Coaster". In 2010, B&M unveiled its new wing coaster and premiered the prototype model, named Raptor, at Gardaland in 2011. It has two seats on each side on the car that hang riders over the sides of the track. There are currently only four in operation. In 2012, Bolliger & Mabillard built Leviathan at Canada's Wonderland, which at 306 feet (93 m) high is the company's tallest coaster to date.
By 2010, B&M employed twelve engineers, twelve draftsman, and two draftswomen. The company has made other contributions to the roller coaster industry. The company built the trains for the Psyclone, a now-demolished wooden roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain. The trains are currently used on the park's Colossus wooden roller coaster, but these are only used during October each year. The trains face backwards and are generally raced against trains on the second track, which runs forwards. As of 2012, Bolliger & Mabillard has 85 operating roller coasters worldwide, twenty-two of which are listed among the Amusement Today Golden Ticket Awards Top 50 Steel Coasters List for 2012, and five are in the top 10. The company has built more roller coasters than any other manufacturer on the list.
Read more about this topic: Bolliger & Mabillard
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)