It rotates at 26 cm per second so that one revolution takes about 30 minutes. The wheel does not usually stop to take on passengers: the rotation rate is so slow that they can walk on and off the moving capsules at ground level. However, it is stopped to allow disabled or elderly passengers time to embark and disembark safely. The project was European with major components coming from six countries: the steel was supplied from the UK and fabricated in The Netherlands by the Dutch company Hollandia, the cables came from Italy, the bearings came from Germany, the spindle and hub were cast in the Czech Republic, the capsules were made by Poma in France, and the electrical components came from the UK. The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair opened it formally on 31 December 1999. However to the public it wasn´t opened until March 2000 because of technical problems. Since its opening, the Eye has become a major landmark and tourist attraction. It is operated by Merlin
strip cipher and M-209s and similar slow systems with typewriter- keyboard cipher machines, often with an on-line capacity. Only such mechanization enabled Army cryptographers to keep up with the ever- rising flood of traffic: the 23,000 codegroups a day that the 5th Army headquarters processed during its Sicily campaign strained even the machines to their limit—and by the time that army was marching on Rome, its headquarters was handling 40,000 groups a day. Traffic volume passed belief: in Hollandia, a million groups a day in November, 1944; at the Army's European Theater of Operations headquarters even before OVERLORD, 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 groups a day, or the equivalent of a shelf of 20 average books. The biggest message center of all, the War Department's in Washington, handled its peak load on August 8, 1945: nearly 9,500,000 words, the equivalent of almost one-tenth the total of French intercepts in all of World War I.
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