Image of The London Eye

-- Designed by architects David Marks, Julia Barfield, Malcolm Cook, Mark Sparrowhawk, Steven Chilton, and Nic Bailey, the wheel carries 32 sealed and air conditioned passenger capsules attached to its external circumference. It rotates at a rate of 0.26 metres per second about 0.9 km/h or 0.6 mph so that one revolution takes about 30 minutes to complete. The wheel does not usually stop to take on passengers the rotation rate is so slow that passengers can easily walk on and off the moving capsules at ground level. It is, however, stopped on occasion to allow disabled or elderly passengers time to disembark safely. Structurally, the Eye resembles a huge spoked bicycle wheel, and was depicted as such in a poster advertising a charity cycle race. The wheel is not the first in London a much smaller ferris wheel used to stand opposite Earls Court station during the later part of the 19th century.