Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Elevator

Episode Date: February 20, 2021

Some of the things we use every day were invented in the distant past. Other things were invented quite recently. However, there is a category of inventions that have been known forever, but no one ever had any practical use for it until recently. Learn more about the elevator, and how it helped create the modern world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of the things we use every day were invented in the distant past. Other things were invented quite recently. However, there's a category of inventions that have been known forever, but no one ever really had any practical use for it until recently. Learn more about the elevator. Now it helped create the modern world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story

that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by you. 2002 was a terrible year for everyone, and I was no exception. The industry I was involved in, the travel industry, basically vanished. So in July 1st, I launched a podcast that I had floating around as an idea

in the back of my mind for years. Since then, the little podcast that could has been growing, and it's all due to listeners like you. I'd especially like to thank everyone who has supported the show over on Patreon, especially at the producer level. It really, really, and I can't stress this enough,

really helps me make this show possible. You can get merchandise, like stickers, t-shirts, and hoodies for your support as well. Visit patreon.com slash everything everywhere to show your support for the show or just click on the link in the show notes. If you think about it, the elevator is a pretty simple device. Ever since we had ropes and

pulleys, we had everything we need to make elevators. It isn't surprising that the first recorded example of something like an elevator was created by Archimedes, who built a crude lifting device out of hemp rope. We know that throughout the ancient world in the medieval periods, there were many rope and pulley lifting devices. It wasn't something that was uncommon. However, they were almost always used as cranes for construction. They were mostly used to lift large stones and not people. There are several reasons why elevators never took off for lifting people. First, there was little need to lift people very high.

Most buildings prior to the 19th century weren't that tall. While there were some tall buildings like cathedrals, it was mostly a large and closed space, and few people needed to go anywhere other than the ground floor. In ancient Rome, they had apartment buildings called insulas. The very tallest might get five or six stories, and the rents were based on how high up they were. Unlike modern buildings where the penthouse might be the most expensive unit, back then the higher up you were the cheaper the rent,

because you had to walk up and down all the time. Even mines weren't designed for elevators, because they weren't dug with a vertical shaft. They just dug tunnels by hand, and then you walked into the tunnel. The second problem was that of energy. If someone is going to be lifted up or down, something is going to have to provide the energy to do it. On a construction site, you might have a team of animals

or people to provide that power. But it wasn't something that was on demand that you could use in a building. The final problem was safety. If you list someone up by a rope, what happens if the rope breaks? You fall and you die or you get seriously injured. They didn't have cables back then. They only had fiber ropes that had a limited lifespan. Over the centuries, there were other attempts at lifting people up and down with ropes.

In Morris, Spain, the Muslims had built an elevator-like device to raise weapons. The International Da Vinci had created a system, at least on paper. In the 18th century, King Louis 15th of France created a flying chair to bring his mistress up to his room at the Palace of Versailles. However, these were mostly one-off experimental projects, which weren't really intended for widespread use. The 19th century saw a confluence of technologies and needs which led to vertically moving things. The development of steam engines in the 18th century led to a demand for coal, which required deeper mines, which necessitated lifting things up and down. steam engines were a way to provide power to provide mechanical lift. In 1835 in England, a huge innovation in elevators was created with the development of the permanent counterweight.

The counterweight lessened the amount of energy needed to lift things up and down. However, the big advance and the thing which made elevators plausible as a means of transporting humans was developed in 1852 by Elijah Otis. He developed the safety elevator. This was a system that would prevent. an elevator car from falling if the rope was cut. He dubbed it, quote, an improvement in hoisting apparatus elevator brake. He famously gave a demonstration at the exhibition of industry of all nations in New York in 1854. He was raised up on a platform that was suspended by a single rope.

At his signal, the rope was cut by a man holding an axe. As the crowd gasped, the elevator fell a few inches and then was stopped by a safety mechanism. He then said, quote, all safe ladies and gentlemen, all safe. If the name Otis rings a bell, that's because he started the Otis Elevator Company, which is the largest elevator company in the world today. Believe it or not, the first building with an elevator shaft preceded the first elevator. The Cooper Union Foundation building in New York was built with an elevator shaft because the building's owner, Peter Cooper, assumed that a safe elevator would be developed in the future.

The elevator shaft was round, however, because that's what he assumed the shape of. would be. Elijah Otis actually created a specially designed elevator just for the building and its special shaft. The building and its elevator shaft are still there today. Otis's demonstration was a success as far as selling elevators went. Before a safety demonstration, he had only sold three elevators. After the demonstration, he sold seven within the first year. Most of these were two or three-story elevators for residential homes. The first commercial elevator, which was open to the public, was in 1857. It was installed in the EV Hot Warp Building in New York. It was a steam-powered hydraulic elevator that went five stories. It was installed for a department store that installed it as an attraction to draw

customers. The elevator car was more of a room with couches where people could sit, and it was really, really slow. Many people were terrified to ride in it. The passenger elevator radically changed architecture. Prior to the elevator, there was a natural limit to how tall buildings could be. Even if you could build a 20-story building, for example? You couldn't reasonably expect people to walk up and down 20 stories every day. The next big innovation in elevators was the electric motor. Steam worked, but steam engines were big, noisy, and not really efficient. Buildings grew taller as elevators became more popular and accepted. Doors that automatically opened and closed were invented in 1887, and in 1900, the first automated elevator was installed. People, however, didn't like to use automated elevators. People,

For most of the first half of the 20th century, public and commercial buildings had elevator operators. An elevator operator strike in New York in 1945, plus the addition of safety features such as an emergency stop button and an emergency phone, made automated elevators more accepted to the public. I'm just old enough to remember the very last elevator operator in my hometown when I was younger. Elevator technology hasn't stopped. As buildings grew taller, there has been a need to rethink how elevators. elevators worked. For an ultra-tall skyscraper, simply having a single elevator shaft that stopped at all 100 floors, for example, would be extremely inefficient. If you had to get to the 100 floor, it would take forever. Moreover, the more floors, the more elevators you need, and each elevator shaft takes up valuable floor space. One common technique in really tall buildings is to have express elevators, just like you

would have an express lane on a highway. Then you would transfer to a different elevator, just as you might transfer airplanes at a hub airport. These new techniques have allowed buildings like the Birch Khalifa in Dubai to reach 2,717 feet high. The current record for the fastest elevator in the world is located at the CTF tower in Guangzhou, China. It can go from the ground floor to the 95th floor in 45 seconds. That's 20 meters per second or 65 feet per second. The longest elevator in a single shaft is located in South Africa. The Anglo-Gold Ashanti-Umpameg gold mine has a shaft which is 2,283 meters or 7,490 feet deep.

That's four and a half times deeper than the Birch Kalifa is tall. The Umeda-Hanku building in Osaka, Japan, has an elevator car that can hold 80 people and is a capacity of 11,574 pounds. There are all sorts of unusual elevators which have been custom installed in buildings. The Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas has a pyramid that has elevators inclined at a 39-degree angle. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis has a curved elevator that goes up the inside of the arch at the top over 600 feet. The lobby of the Louvre has an elevator that has no car. It's just a hydraulic lift where people stand at the top of a piston. Today, elevators are one of the safest modes of transportation in the world.

They're safer than stairs because falling down a flight of stairs causes far more injuries than elevators. In fact, you almost never hear about an elevator disaster. At worst, it just stops and someone might get stuck. So the next time you press a button in an elevator, say a quick thanks to Elijah Otis, the man who made a 2,000-year-old invention, practical for the modern world. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackala.

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