99% Invisible - 98- Six Stories- the memory palace

Episode Date: January 3, 2014

Elevators are old. They would have to be. Because it is in our nature to rise. History is full of things that lift other things. In ancient Greece, and China, and Hungary, there were systems of weights and pulleys and … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I have a couple announcements before we get started. We're currently reconfiguring all the different moving parts of the show so that we can start producing weekly episodes starting on February 4th, 2014. That involves moving the office to downtown Oakland, getting our new producer, Katie Mingle, out here to the West Coast, and attending all the various Kickstarter fulfillment details of which there are many. Thanks again for that Kickstarter. That was

pretty awesome. But even though we're up to our eyeballs and back office stuff, I still want to play some great radio for you. And this week, we have a story from our friend Nate Dimeo of the palace. The subject is right in our wheelhouse, so I thought you'd like it. Enjoy. Elevators are old. They would have to be because it is in our nature, right? To rise. So history, even ancient history, is thick with things that lift other things, ropes and platforms and weights and pulleys, with people to pull them. When the slaves of Rome were served up to the wild beasts at the Colosseum, other slaves pushed the wheels that pulled the ropes that lifted the platforms, that sent them up from the darkness below ground, up into the sun and the roar of the crowd, and of the lions.

and the roar of the crowd and of the lions. In China and Hungary and Mollse Michel, one can find monks in kings and courtesans and construction materials and meals fit for queens and sorted consorts, rising up, while some slave or servant or caged animal somewhere pulled on some rope or pushed some piece of wood around and around and around. One man in France spent the year 1743 inside a chimney, waiting for a belt ring, so he could pull a rope through a pulley, and hoist King Louis XV up in a flying chair from the ground to his bedroom balcony, rather than have him walk up a single flight of stairs. Elijah Otis was too sick for the family business. He was a good looking kid and smart as a whip, but he was kind of weakling. And when he was 19, he moved away from the family farm in Vermont to figure out something to do for a living.

Something where he wouldn't have to exert himself. Sell anything bought or processed. Process anything sold, bought or processed. Or lift heavy things. He wound up in a furniture factory where he and his co-workers spent their days sanding curves and decorative knobs into bedposts. And Otis spent his nights designing a better way to do it.

He invented a machine, a kind of lathe that sped up the process. It increased output, it made the men's jobs a little easier, and it opened up the aesthetic possibilities of the bedpost in new thrilling ways. Nobs upon nobs upon nobs upon nobs. In his boss was so impressed that he took him off the floor and made him head engineer of the Mays and Burns Bed Factory of Yonkers, New York. So Otis got to work trying to solve one of the biggest problems in the place. The factory had a lift, it had an elevator. A lot of factories were starting to have them then. These were simple machines.

Just picture a platform that could be pulled off the ground up to a second story on a chain or set of cables or ropes. Sometimes the ropes would be pulled by a steam power winch, but the one in the maze and burns bedfactory of Yonkers, New York was pulled by a draft horse. In one day, the horse is pulling on the rope, which is pulling the wooden platform loaded with lumber and tools up to the second floor. In the rope snapped. The platform plummeted, dropping 15 feet, slamming down onto the floor and onto one of the men below, sending its cargo careening, smashing into the scattering workers.

Just a few years later, in 1843, Elijah Otis stood on a wooden platform, 30 feet off the ground. The elevator was loaded with lumber and tools and barrels, just like the one had been that day in Yonkers. And down below, on the floor, stood hundreds of gentlemen and ladies, who didn't want to spend their night out in the town being crushed by construction equipment. They had come to the Crystal Palace exhibition to see the gathered wonders of the world. A massive structure of steel and glass had risen in Manhattan, where Bryant Park is today. It was America's first world's fair, and New York was psyched. In the gentleman and, after walking through these sculpture gardens in the art galleries, found themselves in a great hall filled with industrial equipment. And while they stood on the floor of the main hall, moonlight streaming through the

glass roof, craning their necks to see Otis and his elevator floating in air, they may not have known that they were looking at the future. Because they had seen elevators before, and seen one adventure after another come up with some new way to get from one floor to another. So here was one more. Admittedly he was higher than they'd seen before, up three stories instead of two. But there was no way this thing was going to catch on. Because who in their right mind was going to ride a three-story

elevator? Fall from the second floor, break your leg, fall from the third, you break your neck. So they watched Otis, and watched his son nearby, raise a sword, and then bring it down like an executioner, slicing the rope that held up the platform. And not in-screened. And then it cheered. Elijah Otis didn't invent the elevator. He invented the brake. The little metal piece that catches the car and stops it from plummeting if the cable that holds it up stops holding it up. Elijah Otis didn't invent the elevator, but his sons kind of invented the modern world. The Otis brothers convinced the world to aim higher. The tallest buildings back in the

19th century, the tallest buildings that weren't churches or lighthouses, which were all show off the spires anyway. We're just a few stories tall. In part, these buildings were held down by the lack of engineering know-how. But just as much, they were held down by stairs. People could only climb so many. So the brothers Otis came up with a killer sales pitch. Higher was better. They targeted Hotels first, and convinced them to turn the idea of luxury, quite literally, upside down.

Before the elevator, the best rooms were on the bottom floor. You didn't have to walk. Stairs were for suckers. But the Otis brothers convinced Hotels it should be the other way around. The first floors were the one on the street, with the Hoi Palloy and their noise and their sweat and their fruit cart sticking in the sun, in worse the horses and the things horses do. Wasn't a king's throne supposed to be higher than his servants? Wasn't a lord supposed to lord over?

Why shouldn't the wealthy traveler be above it all? In the hotel's bit, when they built high, in the wealthy travelers like the view. And when it came time for them to build their next office building, they built higher still, and they bought from the Otis Elevator Company. Building's grew, three stories to four to six. In the Elevators group better and faster. To the delight of passengers who loved the thrill ride of hurtling 70 feet at speeds of

600 feet per minute, up to the penthouse on the seventh floor. But though the Otis safety elevator relieved them of the fear of falling to their dooms, it created a new concern. One ginned up in the papers and in the esteemed pages of the Scientific American, which warned of the horrors of something called elevator sickness. Acute dizziness and nausea, owed to the spacious fact that when an elevator comes to a stop, not all of your organs stop at the same time. The best way to combat this, it seems, was to brace your head up against the ceiling

of the elevator as it came to a stop. So all of you stopped at the same time. The regional headquarters of the Otis elevator companyator Company in my hometown is a one-story building. I just always thought that was kind of funny. At another world's fair, in Chicago in 1870, the crowd gathered to watch a dramatic demonstration of the latest in Elevator safety technology. Earlier that year, a seven-story building in New York became the tallest in the world. And it had every architect, and every illustrator in the Sunday Circulars drawing up visions of the cities of the future,

with gleaming towers climbing, soaring, 11, and even 14 stories. And though people had grown to trust the Otis break at four and five stories, what would happen if something happened? And you were up there scraping the sky. So the fairgoers went out to a field where another inventor had constructed a temporary elevator shaft. This one a hundred and nine feet tall, and they watched as passengers climbed to the top and stepped inside. And they watched as someone cut the rope to the elevator and it dropped, plummeting for

a few exhilarating seconds before it came to a slow stop, cushioned by a pocket of compressed air. And then the crowd politely applauded. The outcome never having really been in doubt what with the wonders American inventors were coming up with all the time. And really, they had seen this trick into World's Fair before. and doubt what with the wonders American inventors were coming up with all the time. And really, they had seen this trick at a world fair before. They may have been more excited, however.

Had they known that the same technique had been tested in secret in Boston not long before. And when the elevator car holding eight volunteers dropped on command, the air pressure in the shaft that was supposed to cushion its descent blew out the walls of the elevator shaft, leaving nothing to stop the free-fallen car but Massachusetts soil. Many bones were broken. Lives passed before eyes. All eight of them nearly died. Something the eight volunteers who climbed into the elevator in Chicago hadn't been told. The Burj Khalifa Tower rises 2,722 feet above the desert in Dubai. It has history's tallest and fastest elevator, and notice.

It travels 30 feet a second, taking you 124 floors in about a minute. Reviewers have called the experience mildly exhilarating. Six stories first appeared on the Memory Palace podcast by Nate Dimaio. A couple years ago we commissioned another piece from the Memory Palace. I called it a bridge to the sky, Nate called it a stretch. So while we're here talking about how great the Memory Palace is, I thought I'd play that one for you too. Bradford Gilbert had spent his career close to the ground.

At 23 he took a job as the architect for the New York Lake Erie in Western Railroad. It was 1878. The Western was basically just Western New York and just left of Lake Erie. Were Gilbert walked ridges and delts, mapped its contours and calculated its slopes and rises, built bridges and trussles, and new ways to go over the river and through the woods, It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed.

It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed.

It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed. It was a place where the building was constructed. in Oyster Bay and Tom's River in Essex Falls. The places you waited to get places where things actually happened. But buy a ticket there for Manhattan or St. Louis and you can see other architects building more impressive things.

You could disembark and marvel at six and eight and ten story structures. Mammoth buildings of stone and brick in rod iron holding court on whole city blocks like medieval fortresses made for the kings of the modern American insurance industry. The emperors of imports and exports. One of these was looking to expand his empire. John Noble Sterns had made a lot of money importing silk and he was looking to make a lot more in real estate. He bought some land in a prime location at 50 Broadway.

It was the perfect place for a new office building, right downtown near the ports, in the heart of the growing financial industry. But there was a problem. The lot was less than 22 feet wide. There are rules that dictate what you can build in how. Rules of physics and rules of men who sit on various bureaucratic boards and bodies. And those rules dictated that if Sterns wanted to build one of those ten story office towers that were all the rage in 1888, he would need to build walls of stone and brick that were 5 feet thick, with itty bitty

windows. And that left room for an interior that was only 11 feet wide. Slice off a few feet for a hallway, a few for a bathroom, a couple for a coat closet, another for some filing cabinets in an umbrella stand. And he would be asking the quintessential modern titan of American industry to work in a dark cell, better suited for a monk, illuminating a manuscript. Sterns asked all the best architects for a solution. They had built medieval bell towers, come man-hatten bank headquarters. They had made midtown hotels that looked like mountain fortresses. But what Sterns wanted was a flagstaff.

What Sterns wanted was a blade of grass. And they weren't in the blade of grass building business. They told them it couldn't be done. Everyone except Bradford Gilbert. The in-house architect for the New York, Lake Erie, and Western Railroad had an idea. Even the simplest train trip between two of his backwater stations often required stunning feats of engineering. Hundreds of tons of cars and cargo hurtle over thin tressels and bridges every day. What if he turned one of those bridges on its head? What if he was one of the steel frames that so capably carried trains and built it up instead

of out? He told Sterns that if he did this, the walls wouldn't have to be 5 feet thick. They could be 9 inches. And in the 20-foot wide office spaces that that would create, the quintessential modern Titan of American industry would have room to stretch out his legs, while he made out his rent-check to John Noble Sterns. They would call it the tower building. Sterns loved the idea.

For a while, until people started telling him it was completely bananas. First, he heard it from business associates, people looking out for his investment. Then it was the press, which called the project and the men behind it, idiotic. Architects came in from all over the country to watch the tower building rise, to pour over Gilbert's blueprints. And they all pretty much agreed. Gilbert and Stern's were idiots. The walls were just too thin.

The foundation was too narrow. Sure, those quintessentially modern men could stretch out their legs in sunny 20 foot wide offices stacked up like cardboard boxes. But they could also be crushed to death when the first stiff wind came and blew the building down. Stern's ask Gilbert to change the plans, and he refused. He said he was so confident in his design that he would move his offices to the top two floors of the building. If the building blew down, he would have the farthest of fall, in the longest time to consider his mistakes, before he slammed into the pavement. The first stiff winds of a hurricane blew into Manhattan on a Sunday morning in 1889.

The tower building stood nearly complete, and people lined the streets to watch it tumble. By late morning the crowd numbered in the hundreds, the curious, the morbid, the newspaper men who were professionally both, and as the wind roared, a man pushed through the crowd. He walked to the base of the tower, to a construction ladder, and began to climb. When Bradford Gilbert reached the top of his tower, the wind whipped through its skeleton frame in more than 80 miles an hour. It was too strong for him to stand in the girders that crossed in the center of what he hoped would

someday be his penthouse office. It was too strong to look down at the crowd who were probably placing bets on whether he would die by being blown off the building or simply in the crushing force of its collapse. But he crawled out to the center of the building and pulled from a bag rope with a lead way to touch to one end, who tied the other end to a girder and tossed the weight down through the empty floor's blow. When he got to the ground he looked up and saw the lead way hanging in mid-air, stock still, held up by a building that wasn't going anywhere. The next day, the papers called Gilbert immediate, and this time he probably deserved it.

They admitted his idea was genius. In three years after, Gilbert could sit in his pan house office in the tower building and he could look out of his large window, stretch out his legs, and watch a whole city stretching ever higher as it took his idea and built on it. The Memory Palace by Nate Dimaio 99% Invisible is San Greenspan, Avery Truffleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of cool stuff at 99pi.org. Radio Tapio.

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