LaMarcus Adna Thompson is best known for…

LaMarcus Adna Thompson is best known for his early work developing roller coasters, and is sometimes called the "Father of the Gravity Ride".

He did not invent the roller coaster; that credit goes to John G. Taylor, who patented it under the name "Inclined Railway".

However, over his lifetime, Thompson will accumulate nearly thirty patents related to roller coaster technologies.

An example is the patent granted December 22, 1885, for the Gravity Switch-back Railway.

Thompson's Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway had opened at Coney Island in 1884.

A (six miles per hour) ride cost five cents.

Passengers climb to the top of a platform and ride a bench-like car down the six hundred foot (one hundred and eighty meter) track up to the top of another tower where the vehicle is switched to a return track and the passengers take the return trip.

This track design had soon been replaced with an oval complete circuit.

In 1885, Phillip Hinkle had introduced the first full-circuit coaster with a lift hill, the Gravity Pleasure Road, which is soon the most popular attraction at Coney Island.

Not to be outdone, in 1886 LaMarcus Adna Thompson had patented his design of roller coaster that includes dark tunnels with painted scenery.

Eventually he builds many more, both in the U.S. and in Europe.

In 1887, along with designer James A. Griffiths, he opens the Scenic Railway on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J.

Thompson was born in Jersey, Licking County, Ohio on March 8, 1848, and in his adolescence he became a skilled carpenter.

In 1873, he had begun operating a grocery store in Elkhart, Indiana, where he began designing a device to manufacture seamless hosiery.

He had made a fortune in that business, but failing health had forced him to quit it.