Inventors Behind Disneyland’s Original (and Most Back Breaking) Roller Coaster Receive Highest Honor

The National Inventors Hall of Fame has announced its class of 2025 inductees, including the two inventors who were behind one of Disneyland's most iconic attractions.

The Matterhorn made history as not only the first roller coaster at Disneyland but also the first tubular steel coaster in the world. The attraction was engineered by inventors Karl Bacon and Ed Morgan, who are now being honored posthumously for this accomplishment with their induction into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2025.

Last year, we reported how Disney Research Fellow and Imagineer Lanny Smoot was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, making him the second person from the Walt Disney Company to receive this honor after Walt Disney himself. Keep reading for more details on Karl Bacon and Ed Morgan's engineering work on the Matterhorn Bobsleds and the impact of their innovation…

Karl Bacon and Ed Morgan Announced As National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees

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The Matterhorn may not be the smoothest ride at Disneyland today, but there is so much history behind it and it remains one of the most iconic attractions of the park decades later. The ride has never been duplicated at another Disney Park. This was the first form of this type of ride system. This combined with the fact that the Disney Imagineer on the project, Bob Gurr, had to have a refresher in trigonometry before working on the ride is part of the reason the ride is so bumpy today.

The Matterhorn was partially brought to life by the contributions of Karl Bacon and Ed Morgan, whose engineering of this first tubular steel coaster “set the standard for roller coaster design technology” as their National Inventors Hall of Fame biographies highlight. 

Morgan and Bacon co-founded Arrow Development together with colleagues Bill Hardiman and Andy Anderson in 1946. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Morgan recalled, “We generated ideas and projects together. I was the guy that made them happen from the mechanical standpoint. Karl was the guy who did the math.”

The company's construction of carousels and other rides for amusement parks led to their work with Walt Disney when he hired Arrow to work with WED Enterprises to create rides for Fantasyland including – the Mad Tea Party, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Snow White’s Scary Adventures and Casey Jr. Circus Train. Following the success of several of the land's original rides, Arrow was contracted to built more, including what would become Disneyland's first coaster.

Because iron tracks could not be bent precisely enough to work for the design of the ride, Morgan and Bacon developed tubular steel tracks for more prescision. They also used polyurethane wheels for the attraction, which created less noise than steel wheels and less friction than rubber wheels. They designed the track so that the rails would surround the wheels for stability so that the vehicles would not derail as they went around the curves at high speeds, and developed a “booster” device that gave ride controllers the ability to make the ride move faster and slower as necessary.

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Morgan and Bacon's groundbreaking design of the Matterhorn set the stage for future roller coaster design and innovations. Arrow continued to be a crucial development partner for Disney as the company went on to work on more rides including “it's a small world,” Pirates of the Caribbean, Adventures Thru Inner Space, and the Haunted Mansion.

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