The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-02-18

moving steel cagss wtth its QuoSA Oi lpassengers, plying upward ana down-
 ward with almost lightning rapsuass has made the sky-screper . possibility
 has made practicable the segregatine of thousands of offices in . small space and has revolutionixed family Ike by making the big apartment house q place of homes that are easily aecessi- ble. r.
 The commercial supremacy of the big American city Is due to its geogrepni- cal location. For example. four-sto- ried buildings. the maximum height desirable where elevators are lacking,
 would have made the office buiidings of New York crowd all others entire ly off Manhattan Island, would have sent the householder further than Brooklyn for a dwelling place, and hsve neoessitated the walking of endless miles by those who constituts New York's business world. As time is money in these days, this would be equivalent to the ioss of millions of dollars every month. The elevator obviates such e loss.
 The elevators In Park Place Building. New York, are examples of the value of the elevator in modern business life. There are ten in this building. They serve 5000 people using the 1000 offi- ces. and have each capacity of six . teen V8T8On8. G<AAl Ssgv1t@sE eeA~As~-s~ the trip to the top of the building 2ex feet, and back in three minutes, and makes 200 trips day. Every twen- four hours the ten travel In the age gregete 220 miles, distance edufvA- lent to that from New York to Wash ington. The latest elevator census shows that New York alone has over lS,O00 elevators. and that over a6,V00 of these are passenger cars. carrying
 ~A Q d flaw or billion or more year.
 An expert estimates that there are ISo.0oo elevators in the United States. Assuming that each one is operated 800 days in the year. and carry an av- craze of 100 persons Q day. the total carried in year would be 4.soo,00o.ooo. The figures seem toe large for crsdulfty. and yet they show sn average of only fifty-six rides every twelve months they illustrate the esssntiaiity of the passenger elevator In latter-day ciy- ilixation.
 The passenger elevator came into being because it had to be. It 10 a product of the centralizatiou in gtv- On spots of large numbers of people with the consequent enhancement or demand for land. 1ts perfection en- abIed the development of the modern
  a thousand mon and women carry on their activities. where without the ele- vator there would be perhaps fifty.
 So fer back as two or three centuries before Christ, freight hoists were in use. Passenger elevators were de- vised eight hundred years later, but were known in only isolated cases another thousand years eiapsing be- fore there was real progress in per- footing them. Cities began to grow to large dimensions and vaster popu. letion. Pressure Of population be- gan to force upward the value Of oity realty Society grew complex. Bus mess took on more complicated phases. ; ThV restless spfTits now developed to an almost frenzy. took hold of nu- manity; and the day for the evolution of the passenger elevator had arrived. Higher In the aig went business build Ings. As they rose difftouities of uti- lixing such high structures increased. mon brought into application their fn- yentive genius and simple devices were created to be operated by man power. Then came the hxdgaulio elevator with . car weighing more than the weight and the motive power supplied by put ting in or taking out water from an
 The first power elevators in use in the United States were the belt driven. spur rearod freight machines of 1850. They were used in factories and btg stores and their efficiency suggested their application to the needs of the people. This suggestion began to take shape about 1870, and inventors de- vised 6 very noisy affair driven by two steam cylinders. In 1880, the Western Union and the Tribune buildings in New York were equipped with. pas sengor elevators. and the new machine was chased as one of the wonders or the world. These two elevators were operated by steam, but later the West srn Union changed it's motive force to a water balance affair.
 These were later superseded by the electric mechaniSms, to which have been added safety devices. these rem der elevators so safe that there is lit- tie risk of injury to the passengers, and experts contend that one Is safer travelling in one of these cages than in the coach or sleeping car of stan- dard railway.
 The value of the new device had been proved by the two New York companies, and forthwith every new building was made higher and the elevator equipment added Old buildings were remodeled to meet the demands of time-savinB, energy saving people. By 1886 therc were L 900 in operation in New York a. lone. Speed and safety are the first two requisItlea. The higher the build. ing the faster must the elevator go-- if it meet the demands of it's patrons, but wise legislatures have tntervened in the interest of human health and sanity. Now the elevator in an eight or ten story building runs about 200 feet e minute. while in a twenty story building it makes 500 or 500 feet in that time.
 With elevators as aids, builders of office structures threatened the sky line, ana when the forty-one and forty five story buildings were planned for New York in 1906 it meant a revolution in the elevator industry. Fortunately, by that time. electricity had come to take the place of steam. and the prob lem of transportation could be met.
 There is . definite and fixed re- iation between the amount of rentablo floor space in Q building and the num- building. The architect now usually allows 25.00O square feet of rentable space to each elevator. He figures on each elevator carrying so many pas. sengers In so many minutes. and knows that in his calculations he must allow TB percent of every trip to be taken up in the egress and ingress of the pas sengers.
 It is claimed there are now no ba. sic patents which make it possible to nouopolize passenger elevator nanu. factyire, as has been done to Q large ex- tent with telephones. The use of el- evators is much more general in the Uni. ted States than in any foreign country: ing up 0 large trade with other lands STg1 av ms1nuJfad avar IT0 elevators for