Sugarloaf Mountain

This guide to Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro traces the century-old cable car dreamed up by engineer Augusto Ferreira Ramos in 1912, mocked by colleagues as fit only for a mental hospital, then built anyway as one of the earliest passenger cableways on Earth. It follows a later day when one of the line's two cables snapped mid-crossing, leaving twenty-two passengers hanging over the bay. A mechanic named Augusto Gonçalves climbed out onto the remaining line by hand.