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49 free Elevators trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Elevators trivia is more fun than it sounds. This quiz starts with the ancient and odd: Archimedes' hoist, the 25 lifts under the Colosseum floor, Louis XV's flying chair, London's 'ascending room' of 1823. Then Elisha Otis: the bedstead factory in Yonkers, the rope-cutting stunt at the Crystal Palace, the Haughwout store on Broadway, and the Otis employee who coined the word 'escalator'. Siemens's first electric lift, Frank Sprague's controls and Alexander Miles's automatic doors follow. The middle section covers how lifts work and the companies that build them: sheaves, counterweights, hydraulic limits, machine-room-less designs, ThyssenKrupp's cable-free cars, Kone's Finnish name, Schindler's Lucerne workshop, destination dispatch, Sabbath mode and the truth about the door-close button. There are questions on the paternoster and its German ban, the fastest lifts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, the record descent in Yokohama, sky lobbies, the elevator operator strike of 1945 and Betty Lou Oliver's 75-storey fall. It finishes with the elevator paradox of Gamow and Stern, Muzak, and the space elevator from Tsiolkovsky to Arthur C. Clarke. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on elevators, Elisha Otis, Otis Worldwide, paternosters, Kone, Schindler and related pages, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone; the expert tier reaches Artsutanov's Cosmic Railway and Government House, Calcutta.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01According to the Roman architect Vitruvius, who built the first known elevator, probably in 236 BC?
Archimedes
Vitruvius wrote that Archimedes built the first known elevator, probably in 236 BC; his account is the earliest surviving reference to any elevator.
Q 02The Colosseum had roughly how many elevators for hoisting animals up to the arena floor?
25
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.
Q 03Which French king had a 'flying chair' built for one of his mistresses at Versailles in 1743?
Louis XV
A century later a Neapolitan architect installed another 'flying chair' at the Royal Palace of Caserta.
Q 04What did architects Burton and Homer call their 1823 London attraction that hoisted customers up for a view?
The ascending room
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.
Q 05In which year did Elisha Otis introduce the safety elevator?
1852
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.
Q 06Where did Otis stage his dramatic, death-defying demonstration of the safety elevator in 1854?
New York's Crystal Palace
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.
Q 07The first passenger safety elevator was installed on 23 March 1857 in which New York building?
The E. V. Haughwout store, 488 Broadway
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.
Q 08In which US state was Elisha Otis born in 1811?
Vermont
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.
Q 09Elisha Otis was installing machinery in what kind of works when he invented his safety elevator?
A bedstead factory
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.
Q 10Elisha Otis died in 1861, aged 49, of which disease?
Diphtheria
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.
Q 11In what year did the US Patent Office rule that 'escalator' had become a generic term?
1950
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.
Q 12Who built the first electric elevator, in Germany in 1880?
Werner von Siemens
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.
Q 13Which American inventor's electric elevator company, with 584 units sold, did Otis buy in 1895?
Frank Sprague
Q 21What was the name of the world's first machine-room-less elevator, introduced by Kone in 1996?
MonoSpace
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.
Q 22Which family has controlled the Finnish elevator maker Kone since 1924?
Herlin
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'.
Q 23Schindler, one of the world's biggest lift makers, was founded in 1874 in which Swiss city?
Lucerne
Robert Schindler and Eduard Villiger founded the firm in Lucerne in 1874, starting with a mechanical workshop on an island in the river Reuss.
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.
Q 14Alexander Miles of Duluth, Minnesota, patented what elevator feature in 1887?
Automatic doors closing off the shaft
Before that, riders had to shut shaft doors themselves, and open shafts caused many falls.
Q 15Where was India's first elevator installed by Otis in 1892?
Government House, Calcutta
Otis installed India's first elevator in 1892 at Government House in Calcutta, the viceroy's residence now known as Raj Bhavan.
Q 16What event in New York in 1945 helped speed the adoption of automatic elevators without operators?
An elevator operator strike
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.
Q 17When a B-25 hit the Empire State Building in 1945, operator Betty Lou Oliver survived an elevator fall of how many storeys?
75
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.
Q 18The paternoster lift is named after the Lord's Prayer because its chain of cars resembles what?
Rosary beads
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.
Q 19In which building did Peter Ellis install the first paternoster-like lifts in 1868?
Oriel Chambers, Liverpool
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.
Q 20In which year did West Germany ban new paternoster installations?
1974
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.
Q 24Which elevator technology did Schindler's Miconic 10 pioneer in 1992?
Destination control
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%.
Q 25Which conglomerate owned Otis from 1976 until spinning it off as an independent company in April 2020?
United Technologies
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.
Q 26Which company supplied Shanghai Tower's record-setting high-speed elevators?
Mitsubishi Electric
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.
Q 27Which tower's elevators, at 45 km/h, were the world's fastest when it opened in 1993?
Yokohama Landmark Tower
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.
Q 28In a traction elevator, what is the industry name for the deeply grooved pulley the steel ropes run over?
Sheave
The grooved pulley is the sheave; friction between the steel ropes and the sheave's grooves supplies the 'traction' that names the whole system.
Q 29A traction elevator's counterweight is typically the weight of the empty cab plus what share of its rated capacity?
40–50%
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.
Q 30Above roughly how many floors do hydraulic elevators become impractical, forcing traction machines?
Seven
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.