March 23, 1857: Mr. Otis Gives You a Lift

1857: Attention shoppers: The first commercial elevator goes safely up and down in a New York City department store. Like air conditioning and public transportation, elevators are supposed to make the working life a little easier. Maybe they do. But there’s no doubt they introduce the necessary condition to fill cities with skyscrapers. You may, […]

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__1857: __Attention shoppers: The first commercial elevator goes safely up and down in a New York City department store. Like air conditioning and public transportation, elevators are supposed to make the working life a little easier. Maybe they do. But there's no doubt they introduce the necessary condition to fill cities with skyscrapers.

You may, after all this time, still not know what to do with yourself during the inexplicably long seconds you share in vertical captivity with strangers and other people you'd rather not acknowledge. But this dilemma almost certainly did not concern Elisha Graves Otis in 1853 when he founded Otis Elevator, the company that would dominate the elevator business for more than a century and a half -- and counting.

The secret of Otis' success wasn't so much that he could make a platform go up and down, which (patent trolls note) isn't really much of an engineering achievement. There were already steam and hydraulic elevators in use here and there for a couple of years before Otis stepped up. No: Otis' achievement was that he convinced people he could make an elevator that would go not only up, but also down without going into a free fall.

Otis set up business in Yonkers, New York, an emerging industry town about 15 miles north of Times Square. He sold only three elevators in 1853 -- for $300 each -- and none in the first few months of the following year. So the entrepreneur decided to make a dramatic demonstration at the New York Crystal Palace, a grand exhibition hall built for the 1853 Worlds Fair.

The company recounts this milestone in its history.

Perched on a hoisting platform high above the crowd at New York's Crystal Palace, a pragmatic mechanic shocked the crowd when he dramatically cut the only rope suspending the platform on which he was standing. The platform dropped a few inches, but then came to a stop. His revolutionary new safety brake had worked, stopping the platform from crashing to the ground. "All safe, gentlemen!" the man proclaimed.

Otis' demonstration had the desired effect. He sold seven elevators that year, and 15 the next. When Otis died only seven years later his company, now run by his sons, was well on its way. By 1873 there were 2,000 Otis elevators in use. They expanded to Europe and Russia. In rapid succession his company got the commissions for the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building and the original Woolworth Building -- in its day, the world's tallest. In 1967, Otis Elevator installed all 255 elevators and 71 escalators in the World Trade Center.

But the very first commercial installation was on March 23, 1857, at a five-story department store at Broadway and Broome Street in what is now New York City's SoHo district.

The elevator's wide adoption had a dramatic effect on how we work and live. Before, most buildings were built only a few stories high, since climbing stairs is a tiring, high-impact activity. With elevators, the sky became the limit. Offices, and later homes, on higher floors commanded the highest prices, for the view and the respite from street noise. The world-famous New York City skyline? Impossible without the elevator.

Elevators also created new jobs and helped empower the United States' most oppressed citizens. You may not see them much anymore, but there were once tens of thousands of elevator operators, most of whom were black. Indeed, the first elevator operator's union was formed in 1917 by none other than legendary labor organizer and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph -- an elevator operator who went on to create the game-changing Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

In their earliest days, the job of elevator operator required the skill and touch of a barista: An operator ran the lift with a sliding lever that raised, lowered and stopped the lift. Later on, elevators became fully automated vehicles with buttons anyone could push and electronics that knew where each floor was. Now there are few manual elevators still in operation -- but their age and safe records are testaments to Otis' early work.

One thing hasn't changed: Riding in elevators may be the most boring few seconds of daily life, next to waiting for the microwave to "ding." And for the tiny fraction of our lives we spend in them, being there presents an inordinate number of etiquette challenges. And, for the most part, we don't even have elevator music to distract us anymore.

One thing you almost certainly don't have to worry about, though, is the risk of serious injury or death. Out of millions of elevators in the world, only 20 to 30 elevator-related deaths are reported every year. Those fatalities tend to happen when someone steps into an elevator shaft when the elevator should be there, or from the extreme(ly stupid) sport of elevator surfing -- not because an elevator hurtles out of control.

So it does seem that they are as safe as Otis knew they were when he cut the cord on himself in 1854.

Source: Various

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