Stuff You Should Know - Going Up: Elevators

Episode Date: August 19, 2014

Elevators are way more interesting than you might think. In this week's episode, Chuck and Josh board the lift to enlighten everyone as to the ins and outs, and ups and downs, of these handy people movers. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry. Jerry has a personal story in this one that I teased in the NSA podcast. That's right, which we recorded like weeks ago. Jerry has been stuck and rescued from an elevator. Jerry, it turns out, was stuck in an elevator, a crowded elevator, for four hours.

Crowded with NASCAR people, as it turns out. Yeah, NASCAR fans who were in town for a race, I guess, right? Yeah, and she had to get rescued through the top? Yeah, which we learned from this research. You can't get yourself out through that top, because it's bolted on the other side. Yeah. You've got to have someone come, it's for them to get you out, not for you to get yourself out.

Right. Sorry, John McClain. What you did is impossible. Yeah, and there weren't even bolts on his, then he just like kicked it open. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think there was like a screen. Yeah, this ended up being way more interesting than I thought. Well, let's get to the interesting stuff, shall we?

Sure. Okay, so Chuck, we can begin the begin by talking about elevators and who invented them. Yes, and it should come as no surprise, because if I had a dime for every time we sat in the studio and said, it started in ancient Rome, seems like everything started in ancient Rome or China. But in ancient Rome, they did use, you could call it an elevator. It was a lift. Yeah.

It's not like an enclosed elevator, but it was like a platform with pulleys that they would lift things up, essentially doing the work of an elevator. They used people, livestock, water screws, which means Archimedes was involved. That's right. Yeah, I knew a friend in New Jersey, a bartender, who when you would ask what the score of the game was, a football game, he would just breeze by and go, lion's ten, Christian's nothing, no matter who was playing. This one of those bartender jokes, imagine he said it a million times and probably got

it from someone else. Just an aside. Well, but we're talking about, as far back as 336 BC, Archimedes was in ancient Greek. A Syracusean, maybe? Yeah. He was from Syracuse. Go orange. Go orange.

And so elevators and the concept of functioning elevators has been around for a very long time. It wasn't until the 19th century, though, that they really started to take shape in a way that we see them now. Yeah. They were basically just these platforms that lifted you up and you needed an ox. I think we should talk about Louie, which one is he, XV25? XV. XV.

Man, I always get that backwards. XV. He's not a Super Bowl. Yeah. King Louis XV. He had what some people say was the first modern type elevator with his flying chair. It was on the outside of Versailles and his mistress, it was built for Madame de Chateaureau. This sounds like a made-up name.

No, that was her name. And she lived up on the third floor and would go sit in her little box and lower herself down right to the king's balcony and they would do the devil's business. And it was very convenient for him. He also had flying tables at dinner that would lower food right at his chair. Like a dumbwaiter. A really dumbwaiter. And he would clap his hands, I guess, and call for the flying table, bring me another

guinea hen. Yeah, I love guinea hens. Dumbwaiter, by the way, it's a pretty insensitive term for that thing. Sure. Yeah. I agree. And Lazy Susan, what's that all about? I know.

That's very derogatory. Did you know that Lazy Susan was supposedly invented by a Chinese American restaurant tour at Chinese restaurants? It's where they were invented. Lazy Susan? No. Did you know that? That it was invented in a restaurant?

In a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco in the 50s or 40s. It doesn't surprise me, but that's what it's used for. Is that some revelation? Sure. Okay. I would have guessed it was invented around the same time as and by the same people who invented the butter churn. Okay.

Time frame is what you were remarked. I thought... This restaurant kind of threw me off too, the whole thing. So at any rate, elevators have been around for a while. The 15th got clever. He had one that used a system of ropes and pulleys, which conceivably his flying chair was conceivably the first elevator, the first modern elevator ever built. But it wasn't until the 19th century, like I said, that they started to really take

shape and they still had the kind that were used for industrial purposes, like for mining or storehouses or things like that. But then passenger elevators really started to take shape. The problem was they were extraordinarily dangerous. Yeah. People died. A lot of people died. Routinely.

If you had a rope system, a rope system, cable system, or tension system, those are three names for the same thing, which basically uses a pulley and a rope to lower and raise a box that you stand in, in your human being, that's that kind of elevator. Yeah. As opposed to a hydraulic piston system, which is what they used pre-industrial revolution. Which makes a lot of sense. No, I'm sorry. They used it post-industrial revolution, but.

Pre-rope and pulley system, modern elevator, the kind we see now. Yeah. But you couldn't have a very tall building because your piston had to draw down and if you wanted to go up, you had to draw that thing down just as far. Yeah, the piston had to be as tall as the floor of the tallest floor of the building. Yeah. And then, yeah, you had to have that pit that was equally deep, right? That's right.

That's a deep pit if it's a tall building. That's right. So it's not very practical. So yes, that is a little segue that humanity took with the piston or hydraulic elevator. And apparently they were still popular in mansions. Yeah, sure. And have you ever seen the movie Lady in a Cage? No.

It's a black and white movie with Jimmy Khan overacting like a crazy as a hoodlum in like the 50s. And I can't remember the name of the famous star who's the woman in the cage, but the cage is an elevator that's trapped between floors in her mansion and things go really badly for her. Wow. It's a good movie. I'll have to check that out.

But the rope and pulley system, the reason why it didn't become the modern elevator until the 1850s is because there was no safety mechanism. Those ropes would break. And like you said, a lot of people died because the whole thing would just go all the way down to the of the shafts and kill everybody on board. There's nothing to stop it. Which is some people's greatest fear is being on and we'll get to that stuff later like what might happen.

Yes, we will. Teaser. But along came a guy named Elijah Otis whose last name you might recognize. Yeah, in 1852, he and his sons said, you know what? These things need, they need a safety device so people don't die. And so they created and debuted very famously the safety voice at the 1854 New York World's Fair when he dramatically got in and said, cut the rope. And they cut the rope and it fell like a foot and then the safety device break and everyone

went, wow, that's awesome. It worked. That's right. I think it was attached on a spring and as long as the rope was tense, the spring would stay tripped or no untripped. And then when the tension was released because the rope was no longer there, the spring would go and those the breaks, like you said, would come out. And that's basically still in use today on a lot of elevators.

Like this thing that he created in 1852, it's they still build it into brand new elevators today. And they'll have, you know, it's a notches cut into the railing that guides the elevator. So when those little things spring out, it just clicks into the next notch. Some wedges go into them and they can't go any further. Yep. And you're like, oh man, thank God for Elijah Otis and his sons. Right.

So a lot of people say, well, Elijah Otis invented that elevator, the modern elevator. He did not actually. He invented the safety mechanism. He invented the non-killing elevator. It allowed rope and pulley systems to become ubiquitous and used in all sorts of buildings and for people to trust them. And so he probably created the modern elevator industry as a better way to put it. Yeah.

I mean, he formed an elevator company and the Otis brothers and did pretty well with it. Well, there is another. Yeah. He's dead, but his company's doing great. Oh yeah. I think like 80% of elevators are Otis elevators. But he's dead.

Yeah. He's very much dead. Well, over 150 years ago. Right. Yeah. There's another Otis who is contemporaneous to Elijah Otis, but his first name was Otis. Otis Tufts. Yeah.

What are the chances? Apparently pretty high. Yeah. A lot of Otis is back then. Yeah. So this Otis Tufts fella, he actually invented what we would recognize as the first modern elevator a couple of years before Elijah Otis got his patent on the safety mechanism. And it was basically a car.

Yeah. With automatically opening and closing doors. Yeah. He could sit down. There are benches. Yeah. Which all of the early elevators had, which apparently we'll get to later is why we all face forward.

Yeah. Well, sure. That's one reason. Yeah. And just to not be weird. That's another one. But he had a really good idea that was extraordinarily safe, Otis Tufts did. His elevator was basically had a hole going through the middle and that was threaded.

And so his elevator acted like a nut that was going around a very long screw that went from top to bottom. That's what the elevator went up on. So I guess you would turn the screw and the thing would probably be pulled down or pulled up and there's no safety issues whatsoever. But it was very impractical because it was very expensive. And again, this screw would have to be at least as tall as the building. Yeah.

That's a big screw. Yeah. So he was not able to sell a lot of them. He did okay. But it wasn't widely adopted because it was just impractical. Yeah. Everybody kicked him to the curb. Yeah.

And said, hey, these Otis brothers have really got it going on because they're safe, they're efficient and we can scale this out. You know, it's a scalable product. So that's the story of how the elevator came to be. Yeah. That's the end of that one. All right. Yes, it is.

All right. Well, right after this break, we are going to talk a little bit about safety mechanisms and why you don't fall to your death now. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing.

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we talked a little bit about some of the safety, but let's talk a little bit about how an elevator works. Modern elevators use a cable system where the cable is looped over a sheave. It's very simple, actually. And I say cable, but several cables. Right.

And it just has a grooved rim surface, the sheave does, and it's just basically there's a counterweight on the other side. Elevator goes up, counterweight goes down, elevator goes down, counterweight goes up. Each of those cables, by law, is required to be able to hold the elevator fully loaded, plus 20%, and by itself, but there's still like four to seven, four to eight. Four to eight cables, usually per elevator car. So you would have to have all of those eight snap in order to put yourself even in the slightest bit of danger, but that's when other fail safes come into play to help you from

dying. Right. So the elevator cables are not going to snap, pretty much ever. No. Because not only are there all of these extra cables, there are elevator inspectors who examine the cables to make sure there's nothing wrong with them. And he's like, seven of these are shot, but you still got the one. So it's fine.

So the cable snapping is not going to be a problem. But if all of the cables did snap, if somebody got up there and cut through them with an acetylene torch. Yeah. Let's just say that happened. The car, the elevator car, would basically fall about two feet. Because remember we talked about that thing that was invented by Elijah Otis that's still in use today?

Yeah. There are things that are connected to governors, the cables that are bolted to the top of the car and run through the sheave, which is basically a giant pulley. They also go through a governor, speed governor, and when that governor starts spinning really fast, which tells it that the cables are spinning really fast, it automatically trips those wedges, which go into the grooves, into the rail that the elevator car runs on. So it'll fall about two feet. Yeah.

And that's if it has, I mean, there are different kinds of braking systems, but that is certainly one. One is this kind of brake, shoe basically that goes around the rail. Yeah. Like a roller coaster. Right. And then when the governor pulley senses that it's spinning too fast, it trips those and they just grip the rail.

Either way, you're going to fall just a foot or two. Yeah. And I don't think we said that this is, it's an electric motor that spins this sheave that pulls the cables up and down. Right. I thought that was obvious, but we should point that out. We should, and it's a pretty elegant system actually, because the counterweight and the elevator weight fairly close to the same.

Yeah. So the motor that's running the sheave only has to overcome the force of friction to basically tip the balance between the two so that whichever one is lower will pull the other one down. Yeah. That's how an elevator goes up and down. So let's say the cables have been cut and this diabolical villain that wants you dead in a very expensive and time consuming way, a lot easier ways to kill somebody has also somehow removed all of the safeties.

That's what in elevator jargon, the safety mechanism are called safeties. Yeah. That's the fact of the podcast. What happens then? So you're saying let's, you are just plummeting your free, I say free fall, but as this article points out, it's not quite free fall because there's going to be friction because it is on rails and you can't be in, you're not in a vacuum. No.

And what's more, because you're not in a vacuum, there's air beneath you and this elevator car that takes up most of the space in the shaft is compressing the air beneath it. So that's going to help. So it's creating a cushion of air and like you said, the friction from the rails is slowing the whole thing down. So yeah, you're not going to enter free fall, which is where there's no force of gravity exerted on you at all. No, you're going to be slowed down, but you're definitely going to feel like you're falling.

It's, you know, you're going to be moving at a rate of speed, a dangerous rate of speed. But at the very bottom, there are shock absorbers built in and it looks like, I mean, a big springy, spongy thing. And that's basically what it is. It's a cylinder, a piston filled with oil, usually. And so that'll help you out a little bit too, probably keep you from getting killed. Yeah. You know what you fall from, and there's apparently one instance in the history of elevators,

at least in America, that where that's actually happened. Yeah. Where these cars have fallen, modern elevator cars have fallen from a significant height. And that was in 1945 when a B-52 bomber accidentally ran into the war and other world traits under the Empire State Building. And basically cut the cables, the safety brakes, everything on two elevator cars that dropped from the 79th floor. Yeah.

This happened once. All the way down. And the one woman who was aboard survived. That's right. 79 floors. That's 800 feet. That's a long way. Yeah.

And that was in, that was 1945 cushioning. Right. You know, imagine it's a little better now. Well, one of the things that saved her, though, was that she was in the corner of the car because the cable, the elevator cable, started to coil up beneath it as it fell down. It kind of pushed up through the bottom of the car. And she was in the middle of it. And it was 1945, so you know she was drunk.

And you know what they say. She was smoking a cigarette the whole way around. If you're drunk, then think your body, is that a misnomer? Think your body can accept like an accident more readily if you're drunk because it doesn't stiffen up. I've always heard that. That might be a wise tale. Maybe.

All right. So let's talk a little bit about if you are going to die or suffer a devastating injury on an elevator. Chances are, no. You have a.0000015% chance of dying on your average elevator ride. How'd you come up with that number? Well, how you do any average, you multiply, well, we won't get into the math of it, 18 billion passenger trips on an elevator per year, 27 people die on average per year.

And most of those are people that work on elevators repairing them. So your chances are they say greater of getting struck and killed by lightning. Right. And everyone knows that's not, you know, you shouldn't worry about dying in an elevator. And it says that escalators are 10 times safer. That's not necessarily true. That's what the elevator people say. It depends.

They did a study of senior citizens with like a median age of I think 80 years and found that there were a higher number of accidents on escalators, but zero fatalities over this 14-year period, whereas there's fatalities in elevator accidents. And we should say like there's a very, very slow or slim chance of being injured in an elevator. What'd you say? 0.00015%? Yes.

That's a small chance, but it does happen. Yeah. And if you do die in an elevator accident, it's going to be pretty gnarly. Have you, did you see the lady in China? Yeah. Well, there's all kinds of stories that'll put the fear of God into you. This one lady, Suzanne Hart, in 2011, an ad exec in New York stepped onto her elevator. The door closed on her, grabbed her, and took off up the shaft and killed her, and not in

a pleasant way. No. That same week, a woman at Cal State Long Beach had the exact same thing happen to her. As she was stepping on the elevator, the car just suddenly went up and took her with it. They cut her in half? Yeah. Wow. A nurse in China, same thing happened to her.

Apparently, statistically speaking, if you're going to be injured by a malfunctioning or killed by a malfunctioning elevator, it's going to be while you're getting on or off and the thing starts moving up without you realizing that it's about to happen. Because if it does happen, it happens pretty quick. Yeah. I've started, since reading this, I've started getting on and off of elevators for very fast. Well, that's one thing that you should do. You should also pay attention to your surroundings, what's going on.

That's the problem, because getting on and off of an elevator is a pretty mindless thing to do. Yeah. And as Nick Plomgartner points out, who wrote, probably the greatest article anyone's ever written on elevators in the history of humanity, it's in the New Yorker, it's called Up and Then Down. And how many articles did you read to compare it to? Just this one.

Dude, I would put it up against any other article you can come up with. There's someone out there that wrote one that's like, Josh didn't even look at mine. I would read it if they thought it compared. Anyway, he points out that not only is it like a mindless thing getting on and off of an elevator, we don't even think about what's going on during the elevator ride. Like our brains are basically like, I'm on 11, I get in, go through these doors, and now I get out of the doors and I'm on 15. Well, yeah, and people, they've done studies like it that way.

Other, they've thought about, hey, maybe we should make the elevator clear so people can see what's going on and that people roundly said, no, I don't want a clear elevator. I don't want to see those cables. I want to get in my little box and get spit out on whatever floor I pushed the button for. Right. And the whole, you know, Muzak. Yeah.

Muzak came about to, in part, to calm people down on elevators, to drown out the noise of the elevator mechanism working and just to calm people down. Yeah, because if you're elevator phobic, it means almost 100% that you are claustrophobic and you don't like being in that small space with those people. And experts say that if you have a big elevator fear, you've just got basically your fight or flight responses being hijacked in a situation that's truly not dangerous. Because that's when it's supposed to kick in, but the idea of being trapped in Jerry's case with NASCAR fans is enough to make her possibly hyperventilate and have a panic attack

if she is also claustrophobic, which about 5% of people are. Well, I think elevator phobia and claustrophobia overlap, kind of, but they're not one and the same, right? No. Okay. That's what you're saying. Yeah. Okay.

How do you get over that? Well, I mean, it could be genetic. Some people think that phobias like that are genetic. Others think that it comes from being trapped in something when you're a kid and comes out later when you could always go the CBT route and have a doctor lock you in a small box over and over until you get used to it. I think that's basically what they do. I think also, though, probably the more common therapy would be exposure therapy where you

and your doctor go to the elevator down the hall in the doctor's office building and go up and down a couple of times. I read an LA Times article about this psychologist who treated people with a fear of elevators and said that you start out by just looking at the elevator and then maybe getting on for a second and then getting right back off. She said over the course of probably about 10 rides by the 10th one, it's gone. It's treatable. It's very treatable.

I read another article in the New York Times about this woman who said, I have a phobia of elevators that's so bad, I don't even want to confront it. I don't want to get over it. Right. I don't want a hill to climb, to get to the other side, even if it just took 10 elevator rides, that's just too much. People who have elevator phobias' lives are altered because of their fear of elevators. There's lots of places they can't work.

Even if you work down the second floor of a building, if the doors to the stairs lock behind you, then it doesn't matter if you work on the second floor. You could only conceivably work on the first floor. Yeah, we don't have the option of taking the stairs here because I've made that mistake taking a private call on the stairwell and you get locked out. You got to walk all the way down. Yeah, and some people I imagine too have a fear of heights. One of my friends' moms couldn't stay above the third floor of a hotel even.

Oh, really? Yeah. Even when the blinds closed and everything, she knew she was high up and that freaked her out. For that reason, I can't stand glass outdoor elevators. Yeah. I forgot. We shot a scene.

Oh, that was not fun. Was that the peach tree or inside the Marriott here? The Marriott. But the Marriott here has a very cool interior glass elevator that goes up really high. Yeah, I remember. You did a good job, though. Well, yeah. I was fine on that one.

I was proud of you. You did fine. It was that sky car at Stone Mountain that got me. Oh, the sky bucket thing? Yeah. It just takes you from one side of the park to the other? Yeah. That's what we spit off of.

No, it's enclosed. Oh, the one I rode was just like a ski lift, basically. You were on this one with me. Didn't we shoot at Stone Mountain? Oh, no, no, no. Okay, I know what you're talking about. I thought you were talking about six flags. No, no.

The sky bucket. Although I probably wouldn't like that either. Yeah, you're talking about the tram that takes you to the top of Stone Mountain. Yes. It is fully enclosed, yes. And remember, there was like a pole going through the middle that I was holding onto and just staring at the floor. That's one of those things where if they have to stop it, it swings back and forth, and

you're reminded, I'm hanging from a cable on a big heavy car. Oh, man. Okay, so we'll talk about some elevator etiquette tips. We're going to help you be a better human being, apparently, right after these messages. Hey, Chuck. Hey, dude. We love Squarespace, don't we? Yeah, we sure do.

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You'll love it. All right. There's a couple of people that I think are awesome. One of his name was Edward Hall and he's a scientist in the 1960s that invented Proximix, which is basically studies how much personal space people like. And what he found out is Americans have four different categories of personal space, public space, which he found that people like to be 12 feet apart from one another. Personal space, four feet, personal space, a foot and a half, and then what he calls intimate

space, which is right up on somebody. Yeah. The other guy is a dude named John J. Fruin and he wrote something in 1971 called the Pedestrian Planning and Design. Just called Pedestrian Planning and Design. It is the go-to handbook for if you want to build a subway or if you want to build an elevator car or anything where you're squashing people together, that is still the go-to for how many jerks can we fit in this box?

Right. So that was comfortably and safely. Right. That was all taken into consideration and all of those things. What those are not taken into consideration on are elevator cars. They basically go way beyond that foot and a half of personal space. Well, yeah. It goes by weight only, right?

Yeah. If it's a busy time, all of a sudden you can find yourself in intimate space with all these other people around you in a tiny little box. Let's talk etiquette when you do find yourself in a situation like that. One really good way to prevent being in a crowded elevator car and from stopping people in an elevator car unnecessarily is following what's called the two-flight rule. Which we can't do here at our office. No, we're an exception and the reason why we're an exception is because if we tried

to take the stairs, the door's locked behind you and you're trapped in the stairwell and you have to go back down to the ground floor, which is the one door that's unlocked, right? That's right. Why do I feel like we're helping a stalker do schematics of the building? They're like, oh, that's an interesting detail. You will regret sharing that. Do we have stalkers? No.

Oh, well then we're fine. They're all trapped in the stairwell. That's who those people are. The two-flight rule basically says that if you are going one to two flights up, take the stairs instead of the elevator. Okay. It keeps people from having to wait while you get off a distance that you could have considerably walked and should for your own health walk.

Sure. Another rule, always touchy, do you hold the door for someone or not? I always think of curbing your enthusiasm. Did you ever see that one when Larry feigned as if he was going to hold the door open and wouldn't do it? I didn't see that one. I would have assumed that that topic would have covered like six consecutive episodes. Yeah.

Now, he very obviously was like, oh, let me reach for this and then of course he ends up on the same floor in the same waiting room as the girl who didn't hold the door for. And I think she does it to him later, of course, in true TV fashion. But the author of the thing that we read said if you're on the elevator by yourself, you should always hold the door open for someone. Yeah. But if there are a bunch of people on there, you might want to just not do it and say hey, get the next one.

Yeah. Because you don't have time to take a straw poll to see what everybody on the elevator thinks and you're not necessarily in charge of everybody so you don't get to decide if the door stays open. So the decision is you can't decide, doors are closing on their own. Exactly. If it's a full elevator, then yeah, T.S. Yeah.

And it depends on the amount of elevators. We have four elevator banks in our office and I feel like... Another detail. Yeah. I feel like there's going to be another one coming very soon. Yeah. So it's not a big deal. And I don't expect anyone to hold the elevator for me.

In fact, I will say go. Don't reach your hand out and stop the elevator for me. Which apparently is very dangerous, not necessarily reaching your hand out but jumping on an elevator with the doors closing. That's when it's... You don't want to do that. I do that all the time. You do it, but do it at your own peril.

At my point, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,5 risk. Yeah. Here's something I didn't know, Chuck. You're supposed to stand in a single file line, no matter how many elevators there are. But I think that's true. If you work in the Empire State Building, you're going to get huge lines. Most office buildings, I don't think have lines like that. Depending on the size of the office building, they might have this type of elevator call

system where you go up to a little keypad or something. Yeah, the dispatch system. Yeah. You type in what floor you're going to and the computer tells you what elevator to wait for. Yeah. You can only take one elevator, but the elevator is going straight to your floor and it just waits until enough people to fill it up, come along, and then it sends you on your merry

way. If you don't have that and you do find the line, supposedly you're supposed to stand in single line. Did not know that. Well, it may not be true. Again, I think if you have that many people in your building to warrant a line, then yeah. But ours is pretty big and there's never like a big crowd of people. But you bring up an important point here as far as the stops go and there is a term called

elevatering, which I never heard and that is the discipline of designing an elevator to work efficiently, basically. And one of the things that they have to look for is probable stops and they have actually calculated this. A guy, his last name is Fortune, has a probable stop table and says that if there are 10 people in an elevator that serves 10 floors, it is going to, you're going to make six and a half stops on average. That half stop is tricky.

Yeah. 10 people on 30 floors, nine and a half stops. So it's just interesting to think about like you can avoid all of that with either the dispatch system or like the World Trade Center had the Sky Lobby where you could take an express up to like the 30th floor, get off there and then get on the local. Right. And just go to whatever floor you want to. And then the same guy, Mr. Fortune, who's an elevator consultant, one of the foremost

ones I gather from that Nick Plumgarden article, he also told Plumgarden that you have to factor in what's called wait time, which basically in an American office building supposedly, the interval, which is the total length of time it takes for a single car to go all the way up and all the way down, divided by the number of cars, then you have your wait time. That should be no more than 30 seconds with the actual wait time being about 60% of that or 18 seconds. So in an American office building, you should not have to wait for longer than 18 seconds for an elevator.

Yeah. And he's carried it one step further, which is you want your handling capacity of the building that is the amount of passengers, the percentage of passengers of the building's population that you carry in five minutes. And he says 13% is a pretty good target. You want to hit that 13% range. And in general, in England, people are over-elevated and in places like India and China, they are under-elevated.

Not enough elevators. Yep. But in England, they're lousy with them and they're just carrying one person at a time, apparently. People have like two, three elevators in their house. Chuck, I have one for you regarding etiquette. If you are on an elevator and a man and a woman are exiting the elevator at the same time, should the man let the woman go first?

And where are we? You are at a guar concert. And it's just the two of us. I am always one to say ladies first, but I have seen Ms. Manners says in a corporate environment, you should treat everyone equal and not do things like ladies first and hold the door open for a lady. And I think the manor's mentor, Maryleigh McKee, would like us to correct. She's not Ms. Manners.

Oh, is that someone else? Yes. She's the manor's mentor. But she says, if you're in an office environment, people are supposed to be equal. So you don't have to let ladies go first. I say I'm a Southern gentleman, so I do that kind of thing. If it's a crowded elevator, it's every person for themselves. You should just get off if you're at the front, standing in front of the door, it just makes

more sense. It can easily get very clumsy and confusing and just awkward if you're like, oh, what do you do the other way? You go first. No, it's not. And the lady would probably be like, who's this creep that wants to get behind me? Right, exactly. And also, if you're on a crowded elevator and you are in front of the doors, the proper

procedure is to step off and let people out instead of just trying to wedge yourself into somebody's groin, just like step off the same as if you're on a subway. You can get right back on, don't worry. But I see a lot of people not doing that, no wonder why. I guess they're lazy jerks. You think? Yeah, you step off. If you're the closest to the door, you step off and you leave your hand there, your arm

there. To get chopped off? Yeah. I mean, you're, but you're leaving it, you're keeping it from closing on the people exiting, but you're also keeping it closed from closing on you so you can get back on. Sure. So you're not going to lose your place. No.

You know, you're a martyr. Yeah. And then when you step back on as per the rules of social norms, according to these people who study it, everyone just sort of files into the proper place. If it's just two of you, you probably should stand, you know, well apart from each other. There's four of you. You're probably going to migrate to the corners. And then if it gets super full, you're going to be touching some folks.

Yeah. But normally up till five, it follows the face of a die. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And you face forward. And again, that's supposedly because there used to be benches in the backs of elevators. It'd be so weird if someone just got on and just walked straight to the back of the elevator

and stood there. You know, like that would freak me out. I would get off that elevator. What if they just turned around and were facing you? No, no, no. If they just got on and just walked straight and just faced the back wall, I'd be off of that thing so fast because they got something up their sleeve that I don't want to be a part of.

But what if you were toward the back of the elevator facing front and somebody got on and stayed by the doors, but just turned around and was facing you? That's equally as creepy. And then they're between you and the door, so I wouldn't even know how to get out of there safely. Right. I'd probably bowl the dude over and then he'd be like, what's your problem? You just start crying.

What about your phone? Oh, well, I mean, this is a personal thing, I guess, but I think you should never talk on the phone when you're several feet from a stranger. Yeah, barely. Barely anybody gets coverage on an elevator anyway. They just stand there on the phone the whole time like, did we get cut off? Yeah, that's even worse. You said, hello?

Hold on. I'm on an elevator. You say, I'll call you back. I'm on an elevator. Yeah. I wouldn't want to have my conversations in front of people either. Sure. I thought that they're super private, but that's just, that's my biz.

Sure. You got anything else? No, I do. If you've seen internet videos about, did you see the one on the train in Asia where people were just packing themselves on and like pushing people on like sardines? Apparently in Asia there's a much, much higher tolerance for personal space when it comes to subways and elevators and getting around. Yeah.

We have many more hangups. Well, we have a huge nation that we've spread out through and have enormous pockets of unpopulated areas. Yeah. Crop land. We like our land and our fences. Good fences make good neighbors. That's it?

I got nothing else. It's elevators. Pretty much. Seriously, go read Up and Then Down by Nick Plomgardner in The New Yorker. It's awesome. Oh, I did have one more thing actually. What, Chuck? There makes an awesome point in there that if it wasn't for elevators, the world as we

know it would not even be the same because verticality is what has allowed us to grow as people because if it wasn't for verticality, we could only expand outward and there's only so much outward expansion you can do. That's right. Elevators themselves have shaped the way mankind has populated this world. Nice. Pretty interesting. It is interesting.

Never thought about it before that way. It's an interesting article through and through. By far, article ever written on elevators. But we have plenty of articles on elevators on the site at HowStuffWorks. You can type elevators into the search bar there and it'll bring up a bunch of different articles. You can read those. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this, you guys may have legitimately saved our son's life. Wow. Right? Hey guys, I want to say thank you and tell you that it's quite possible that your show on allergies saved our son's life yesterday. And this just came in, so this was very recent. Henry, our three-year-old, was playing outside and was stung by a bee near the wrist on his left arm.

I didn't think anything of it because he's been stung before and not appeared to be allergic with no reaction. So I made sure the stinger was out and handed him over to my husband to calm him down. Thankfully, my husband, Dustin, remember the allergy podcast you did and how you said that sometimes it takes a first exposure for the body to decide if it's a response to a specific allergen. So Dustin kept a close eye on Henry and noticed that the left side of his face started to swell within minutes, I know.

We rushed him to the emergency clinic where he received a shot of epinephrine, a dose of antihistamine and prescriptions for both immunosuppressants and an epi-pin. He is doing fine back to his normal wild self thanks to the information in your podcast and Dustin's quick thinking. The first thing Dustin said to me after leaving the clinic was, you realize stuff you should know saved his life, right? Oh, that's so cool. I know.

Thank you for everything you do, guys. We always love the podcast and now I have even more reason to appreciate it. That is from the Bex, Dustin Lindsay Silas and Henry. Thanks Bex. We appreciate that. He had permission to read it and she asked the husband and he was like, heck yeah, people need to get the word out on this stuff. Yeah.

Watch your kid after they get stung by bees. Yeah. Don't just laugh at them. Yeah. I would say we didn't necessarily save anyone's life. It would be more the parents and the medical emergency people. Yeah, but we're glad that knowledge could ease that inch and a long. So if we've done anything that even remotely smacks of saving a life, we always love hearing

about that. Believe it or not, it's happened more than once. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

We find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about

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