49 Fun Facts About Elevators

According to the Roman architect Vitruvius, who built the first known elevator, probably in 236 BC?

Vitruvius wrote that Archimedes built the first known elevator, probably in 236 BC; his account is the earliest surviving reference to any elevator.

The Colosseum had roughly how many elevators for hoisting animals up to the arena floor?

The Colosseum had roughly 25 hand-powered lifts, each worked by teams of slaves turning winches, that raised animals and scenery from the hypogeum to the arena floor.

Which French king had a 'flying chair' built for one of his mistresses at Versailles in 1743?

A century later a Neapolitan architect installed another 'flying chair' at the Royal Palace of Caserta.

What did architects Burton and Homer call their 1823 London attraction that hoisted customers up for a view?

The 'ascending room' of 1823 lifted paying customers to a panoramic view of London; twelve years later Frost and Stutt built the belt-driven, counterweighted 'Teagle' lift in England.

In which year did Elisha Otis introduce the safety elevator?

Elisha Otis devised the safety elevator in 1852 while fitting out a factory in Yonkers; he demonstrated it in 1854 by having the hoisting rope cut while he stood on the platform.

Where did Otis stage his dramatic, death-defying demonstration of the safety elevator in 1854?

At the 1854 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York's Crystal Palace, Otis rode a platform high above the crowd and had the rope cut; the safety brake held and orders began to climb.

The first passenger safety elevator was installed on 23 March 1857 in which New York building?

The E. V. Haughwout Building, a cast-iron department store at 488 Broadway, received the first passenger safety elevator on 23 March 1857; steam-driven, it climbed five floors at about 40 feet per minute.

In which US state was Elisha Otis born in 1811?

Elisha Otis was born on a farm in Halifax, Vermont, on 3 August 1811; he was working in Yonkers, New York, when he devised the safety hoist in 1852.

Elisha Otis was installing machinery in what kind of works when he invented his safety elevator?

Otis was fitting out a bedstead factory in Yonkers, New York, in 1852 when he devised the safety hoist; he had earlier invented a lathe that turned bed posts about four times faster than by hand.

Elisha Otis died in 1861, aged 49, of which disease?

Elisha Otis died of diphtheria on 8 April 1861 in Yonkers, aged 49; his sons Charles and Norton carried on the business, later Otis Brothers & Co.

In what year did the US Patent Office rule that 'escalator' had become a generic term?

In 1950, in Haughton Elevator Co. v. Seeberger, the US Patent Office ruled that 'escalator' had become a generic word for a moving staircase, stripping Otis of the trademark Charles Seeberger had sold it in 1910.

Who built the first electric elevator, in Germany in 1880?

Werner von Siemens built the first electric elevator in 1880 in Germany; the Austrian engineer Anton Freissler developed the idea into a successful elevator business in Austria-Hungary.

Which American inventor's electric elevator company, with 584 units sold, did Otis buy in 1895?

Frank Sprague's Sprague Electric Elevator Company sold 584 electric elevators before Otis bought it in 1895; Sprague also developed the idea of running multiple elevators in a single shaft.

Alexander Miles of Duluth, Minnesota, patented what elevator feature in 1887?

Before that, riders had to shut shaft doors themselves, and open shafts caused many falls.

Where was India's first elevator installed by Otis in 1892?

Otis installed India's first elevator in 1892 at Government House in Calcutta, the viceroy's residence now known as Raj Bhavan.

What event in New York in 1945 helped speed the adoption of automatic elevators without operators?

The September 1945 elevator operators' strike paralysed New York's office towers and pushed owners toward operatorless automatic cars; emergency stop buttons, telephones and a soothing recorded voice were added to reassure nervous riders.

When a B-25 hit the Empire State Building in 1945, operator Betty Lou Oliver survived an elevator fall of how many storeys?

75 storeys, ending in the basement: first aid workers had put her on a second car after she was thrown from her own on the 80th floor, but its cables had been damaged in the crash.

The paternoster lift is named after the Lord's Prayer because its chain of cars resembles what?

Paternoster ('Our Father') comes from the loop of cars resembling a string of rosary beads, on which the Lord's Prayer is recited; Germany still had about 231 of the lifts in 2015 and the Czech Republic 68.

In which building did Peter Ellis install the first paternoster-like lifts in 1868?

Peter Ellis fitted his 1864 Oriel Chambers in Liverpool with the first paternoster-like lifts in 1868; the tallest paternoster ever was in Stuttgart's 16-floor Tagblatt tower of 1927.

In which year did West Germany ban new paternoster installations?

West Germany banned new paternoster installations in 1974; an attempt to shut down existing ones in 1994 was dropped after public protest, and Germany still had over 200 running in 2015.

What was the name of the world's first machine-room-less elevator, introduced by Kone in 1996?

Kone's MonoSpace, launched in 1996, was the first machine-room-less elevator: its compact permanent-magnet hoisting motor sat inside the hoistway, and Kone said it used 70–80% less energy than a hydraulic unit.

Which family has controlled the Finnish elevator maker Kone since 1924?

Harald Herlin bought the company in 1924; his great-grandson Antti Herlin took the chair in 2003. The company name Kone is Finnish for 'machine'.

Schindler, one of the world's biggest lift makers, was founded in 1874 in which Swiss city?

Robert Schindler and Eduard Villiger founded the firm in Lucerne in 1874, starting with a mechanical workshop on an island in the river Reuss.

Which elevator technology did Schindler's Miconic 10 pioneer in 1992?

Destination control, pioneered by Schindler's Miconic 10 in 1992, has riders key in their floor at a lobby panel and assigns them a car; grouping passengers by destination can raise handling capacity by up to 25%.

Which conglomerate owned Otis from 1976 until spinning it off as an independent company in April 2020?

United Technologies bought Otis in 1976 and spun it off as Otis Worldwide in April 2020, 44 years later; the same break-up made Carrier a standalone company and merged the rest with Raytheon.

Which company supplied Shanghai Tower's record-setting high-speed elevators?

Mitsubishi Electric supplied Shanghai Tower's elevators, which climb the 632-metre tower at up to 20.5 metres per second, about 74 km/h, a speed Guinness recognised as a world record in 2017.

Which tower's elevators, at 45 km/h, were the world's fastest when it opened in 1993?

Yokohama Landmark Tower's Mitsubishi elevators ran at 12.5 metres per second, about 45 km/h, the fastest in the world from the tower's 1993 opening until Taipei 101 surpassed them in 2004.

In a traction elevator, what is the industry name for the deeply grooved pulley the steel ropes run over?

The grooved pulley is the sheave; friction between the steel ropes and the sheave's grooves supplies the 'traction' that names the whole system.

A traction elevator's counterweight is typically the weight of the empty cab plus what share of its rated capacity?

40–50% of capacity on top of the cab's weight is typical; that balance means the motor only has to move the difference, saving power.

Above roughly how many floors do hydraulic elevators become impractical, forcing traction machines?

Hydraulic elevators rarely serve more than about seven floors, because a single-stage plunger must be as long as the travel; they are cheaper and simpler but slower, and buried cylinders raise worries about leaks.

Which German firm developed cable-free electromagnetic elevators that move horizontally as well as vertically?

ThyssenKrupp's MULTI system, unveiled in 2014 and tested in its Rottweil tower, uses linear motors to move cable-free cabins sideways as well as up, letting several cars share one shaft in very tall buildings.

What is a 'Sabbath elevator' programmed to do?

A Sabbath elevator stops automatically at every floor so observant Jews can ride without pressing buttons, which would count as operating electrical equipment on Shabbat.

Which early-1950s Otis system was the first to predict traffic patterns and dispatch cars accordingly?

Otis's Autotronic system, introduced in 1950, used traffic-pattern prediction to dispatch cars without operators and helped make attendant-free elevators standard in 1950s office towers.

Where was the first vacuum elevator offered commercially, in 2000?

The first vacuum elevator was offered commercially in Argentina in 2000; such pneumatic tube lifts suit homes because they need no machine room, pit or cables, the cab being lifted by an air-pressure difference.

The Eiffel Tower's leg elevators, built by Otis, are of what type?

The Otis lifts that climb the tower's legs are double-deck, with two stacked cabins carrying riders from the ground to the first and second levels; Taipei 101 also uses two-level cars to its transfer floors.

What are the transfer floors called where express elevators drop passengers to switch to local elevators?

Such transfer floors are sky lobbies, pioneered at the original World Trade Center, whose express cars served sky lobbies on the 44th and 78th floors before riders switched to local elevators.

Which organisation publishes the A17.1 Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators?

ASME, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, publishes A17.1, the Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators, first issued in 1921 and harmonised with Canada's CSA B44.

Which two physicists first noted the 'elevator paradox', that the first car to arrive seems to head the wrong way?

Gamow's office was near the bottom, so cars mostly arrived going down; Stern's was near the top, so they arrived going up.

Whose 1895 book Dreams of Earth and Sky envisioned a giant tower reaching to the stars?

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, inspired by the Eiffel Tower, imagined in 1895 a tower rising to geostationary height, a structure in compression; the modern space-elevator concept is a cable hanging in tension from beyond geostationary orbit.

Which 1979 novel by Arthur C. Clarke features a space elevator?

The Fountains of Paradise (1979) builds a space elevator on a fictionalised Sri Lanka; Clarke consulted engineer Jerome Pearson, whose 1975 studies had revived the concept.

Yuri Artsutanov published his 1960 space-elevator proposal in which Soviet newspaper?

Artsutanov's article 'To Space by Electric Train' appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda on 31 July 1960, proposing a cable lowered from a geostationary satellite to the equator; it went unnoticed in the West for years.

Elevator music is also widely known by the name of which company that piped it into buildings?

Muzak became a byword for the genre; radios and later piped music were installed to fill the awkward silence once elevator operators disappeared.

Conventional hydraulic elevators, common in two- to five-floor buildings, top out at what speed?

Gearless traction machines, by contrast, can reach 20 metres per second.

Which company supplied the Burj Khalifa's elevators, with the world's longest travel distance at opening?

Otis supplied the Burj Khalifa's 57 elevators; its main service elevator travels 504 metres, the longest elevator travel distance in the world when the tower opened in 2010.

What is a freight lift that rises through a hatch in the pavement outside a building called?

A sidewalk elevator is a freight lift whose platform rises through steel doors set in the sidewalk, letting goods reach a basement directly from the street, a common sight in older New York commercial blocks.

What happens to a traction elevator's brake if power fails?

The drum brake is held open electrically and clamped by spring force, an example of inherent safety.

What does a 'code-blue' key switch do in a hospital elevator system?

Medical staff then use a matching switch inside the car, choose a floor and hold the door-close button.

Otis's biggest contract as of 2013 supplied 670 elevators and escalators to which city's metro?

Otis's contract to supply 670 elevators and escalators to the Hyderabad Metro, announced in 2013, was the largest in the company's history at the time.

The inclined elevators of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas climb the side of its pyramid at what angle?

The Luxor's 'inclinators' run up the pyramid's edges at 39 degrees; other inclined elevators serve sites such as Dallas's Cityplace Station.