Elevator History - Invention of the Elevator Invention: elevator, safety brake in 1852 Function: noun / elï¿½eï¿½vaï¿½tor Definition: A platform or an enclosure raised and lowered in a vertical shaft to transport people or freight. The shaft contains the operating equipment, motor, cables, and accessories. Patent: 31,128 (US) issued January 15, 1861 Inventor: Elisha Graves Otis Criteria; First to invent. First to patent. First practical. Entrepreneur. Birth: August 3, 1811 in Halifax, Vermont Death: April 8, 1861 in Yonkers, New York Nationality: American Milestones: 1852 invents a safety latch for hoisting equipment 1853 starts a company to manufacture safe elevators.

Sells elevator to hoist freight 1854 Otis demonstrates the elevator at the World's Fair, Crystal Palace exposition in New York City 1857 Installs the first passenger safe elevator in a New York department store 1861 receives patent for improvements to hoisting apparatus, safety brake 1861 after his death his sons form Otis Brothers & Company 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores 1898 Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company 1903 introduced the gearless traction electric elevator 1931 first Otis double-deck elevator was installed elevator, safety elevator, safety brake for elevators, elisha graves otis, otis elevatorm UTC, patent 31128, invention, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts. The Story: Imagine the skyline of a modern city if the elevator did not exist. Buildings would be limited to five or six stories. Most of the architecture of the 20th and 21st century would be impossible.

Office towers, hotels and high-rise apartments would hardly stand in their present form. The need for vertical transport is as old as civilization. Over the centuries, mankind has employed ingenious forms of lifting. The earliest lifts used man, animal and water power to raise the load. Lifting devices relied on these basic forms of power from the early agricultural societies until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. From ancient times through the Middle Ages, and into the 13th century, man or animal power was the driving force behind hoisting devices. In ancient Greece, Archimedes developed an improved lifting device operated by ropes and pulleys, in which the hoisting ropes were coiled around a winding drum by a capstan and levers. By A.D. 80, gladiators and wild animals rode crude elevators up to the arena level of the Roman Coliseum. Medieval records contain numerous drawings of hoists lifting men and supplies to isolated locations. Among the most famous is the hoist at the monastery of St. Barlaam in Greece. The monastery stood on a pinnacle approximately (200 ft) above the ground. Its hoist, which employed a basket or cargo net, was the only means up or down.

The first elevator designed for a passemger was built in 1743 for King Louis XV at his palace in France. The one-person contraption went up only one floor, from the first to the second. Known as the "Flying Chair," it was on the outside of the building, and was entered by the king via his balcony. The mechanism consisted of a carefully balanced arrangement of weights and pulleys hanging inside a chimney. Men stationed inside the chimney then raised or lowered the Flying Chair at the king's command. By 1850 steam and hydraulic elevators had been introduced, but it was in 1852 that the landmark event in elevator history occurred: the invention of the world's first safety elevator by Elisha Graves Otis. The first passenger elevator was installed by Otis in New York in 1857. After Otis' death in 1861, his sons, Charles and Norton, built on his heritage, creating Otis Brothers & Co. in 1867.

By 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores across America, and five years later the first Otis hydraulic passenger elevator was installed. The Era of the Skyscraper followed.... and in 1889 Otis revealed the first successful direct-connected geared electric elevator machines. In 1898 overseas business had added to the company's growth, and Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company. In 1903 Otis introduced the design that would become the "backbone" of the elevator industry. The gearless traction electric elevator, engineered and proven to outlast the building itself. This ushered in the age of high-rise structures, ultimately including New York's Empire State Building, Chicago's John Hancock Center, and Toronto's CN Tower. Otis is part of United Technologies Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and world leader in the building systems and aerospace industries. With 1.7 million Otis elevators and 110,000 escalators in operation, Otis touches the lives of people in more than 200 countries around the world.

TO LEARN MORE Read This History of Elevators from Top to Bottom Brand New Images/ Stone/ Getty Images Updated October 18, 2015. An elevator by definition is a platform or an enclosure raised and lowered in a vertical shaft to transport people and freight. The shaft contains the operating equipment, motor, cables, and accessories. Primitive elevators were in use as early as the 3rd century BC, operated by human, animal, or water wheel power. In 1743, a counter-weighted, man-powered, personal elevator was built for King Luis XV connecting his apartment in Versailles with that of his mistress, Madame de Chateauroux, whose quarters were one floor above King Luis. 19th Century Elevators From about the middle of the 19th century , elevators were powered, often steam-operated, and were used for conveying materials in factories, mines, and warehouses. In 1823, two architects Burton and Hormer built an "ascending room" as they called it, this crude elevator was used to lift paying tourists to a platform for a panorama view of London. continue reading below our video Should I Roll Over my 401K to an IRA?

In 1835, architects Frost and Stutt built the "Teagle", a belt-driven, counter-weighted, and steam-driven lift was developed in England. Hydraulic Crane In 1846, Sir William Armstrong introduced the hydraulic crane, and in the early 1870s, hydraulic machines began to replace the steam-powered elevator. The hydraulic elevator is supported by a heavy piston, moving in a cylinder, and operated by the water (or oil) pressure produced by pumps. Elisha Otis In 1853, American inventor Elisha Otis demonstrated a freight elevator equipped with a safety device to prevent falling in case a supporting cable should break. This increased public confidence in such devices. In 1853, Elisha Otis established a company for manufacturing elevators and patented (1861) a steam elevator. While, Elisha Graves Otis did not actually invent the first elevator, he did invent the brake used in modern elevators, and his brakes made skyscrapers a practical reality. In 1857, Elisha Otis and the Otis Elevator Company began manufacturing passenger elevators.

A steam-powered passenger elevator was installed by the Otis Brothers in a five-story department store owned by E.W Haughtwhat & Company of Manhattan. It was the first public elevator. Biography of Elisha Otis Electric Elevators Electric elevators came into to use toward the end of the 19th century. The first one was built by the German inventor Werner von Siemens in 1880. Black inventor, Alexander Miles patented an electric elevator (U.S. pat#371,207) on October 11, 1887. Elevators & Escalators - MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC Mitsubishi Electric Green Technologies It all began with the hoist. The origin of the hoist is very old, and pulley and winch systems have been in use since ancient times to draw water or raise building materials. Indeed, thousands of years ago hoists must have played a fundamental role in the construction of the great pyramids of Egypt.

The first documented proof of their use, however, comes from Greece, in 236 B.C., when Greek mathematician, physicist and inventor Archimedes invented a hoist device with rope and pulley, whereby a hoist rope was wrapped around a capstan and manpower used to pull a lever to turn the drum. It is believed three such devices were first used in the Roman Emperor Nero’s palace. Hoists using human workers as counterweights to draw water from a well or using simple manpower to raise loads were both believed to be in use in ancient Rome. It is also said that the Emperor Napoleon built a caged chair so that the Empress could ascend staircases without effort. Elevators in some form or another have been in use through the eras of human, water and steam power. The mid 19th century marked the dawning of the age of electricity, and developments in elevator technology was being driven by the appearance of the first high-rise buildings in the United States, which necessitated the development of elevators in order to make them practical. As such, the United States emerged as the center of elevator technology development for decades.

A big breakthrough came in 1853, when Elisha Graves Otis solved the problem of rope failure that plagued contemporary elevators. He installed a rope-break safety device called the safety brake (the equivalent of the modern safety gear) into the elevator. With the Otis safety brake, in the case of rope failure, a spring would force a ratchet to engage sawtooth iron bars and safely secure the car. In 1854, Otis demonstrated the safety brake by boarding his elevator at the Crystal Palace in New York and cutting the traditional hemp rope himself. The safety brake worked flawlessly, making a dramatic presentation, and establishing a legend that lives in the industry, and the popular imagination, to this day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, in England, Frost and Stutt successfully developed a counterbalance-type, traction-method elevator called the “Teagle”, in 1853. Frost and Stutt’s Teagle and Otis’ safety brake became fundamental elevator safety features, thus ushering in the age of the safe elevator. Architects were able to let their imaginations soar skyward, and city skylines would never be the same.

The world’s first passenger service elevator was installed in a five-story hotel on Broadway in New York, in 1857. Manufactured by the Otis Elevator Company, it was steam-powered, carried a maximum load of 450 kilograms (992 lbs.), and boasted a top speed of 12 meters per minute (39.4 ft./min.). Until then, rooms on the upper floors of hotels were considered undesirable due to the necessity of climbing numerous stairs with baggage in tow. From that day forward, however, the upper floor rooms, especially the penthouse, could be let at a premium, due to easy access to their superior views. In 1867, the practicality of the hydraulic-power elevator was recognized when Leon Edoux exhibited one at the Paris Exposition. With a top speed of 150 meters per minute (492 ft./min.), hydraulic-power elevators began appearing in 1878, and became widely used in Europe and the United States. At the Mannheim Exposition of 1880, as the industrialized world was adopting electrical power, the German company Siemens exhibited an electric power elevator.

Worm gears were applied to reduce the rotation speed of a direct-current motor, and pinions and vertical racks were used to control speed by altering series resistance in the armature. The first person to use a DC motor for an elevator is believed to be Wegster in 1884 in the United States. A few years later, in 1889, Norton Otis, son of the pioneering Elisha, developed an electric elevator, the first direct-connected geared elevator in the world, and installed it in the Demarest Carriage Building on Fifth Avenue in New York. The elevator carried a load of 675 kilograms (1,488 lbs.) for passengers, 1,125 kilograms for freight (2,480 lbs.), and topped out at a speed of 30 meters per minute (98.4 ft./min.) along a vertical travel distance of 21 meters (68.9 ft.). Oil-power hydraulic elevators were installed in the Eiffel Tower, the symbol of the Paris Exposition in 1889, forming a dramatic demonstration of the practicality of this type of elevator.

A little over a decade later, in 1900, the alternating current induction motor was introduced, which further accelerated the move towards electric power. Then, in 1903, the traction type current elevator models appeared in the United States. With this method, the car is connected to a counterweight by a rope and a pulley using traction power. Since only a small electric motor is required to pull the car over a greatly increased vertical distance, it became feasible to lift cars up high-rise buildings with dozens of floors. Soon thereafter, the adoption of the Ward-Leonard method became an epoch-making advance in the evolution of elevator technology. The Otis Elevator Company introduced it to the market as a multi-voltage system, while Westinghouse marketed it as a variable voltage system. With it, a precision DC system using an automatic car-leveling device improved the quality of the ride and landing at each floor.

In 1922, Westinghouse installed a gearless elevator in the Physical Education Building in Chicago, and in that same year also installed the then-fastest elevators with automatic landing device, in the Rockefeller Building in New York, which boasted a speed of 420 meters per minute (1,378 ft./min.). A few years later the Otis Elevator Company would install the 58 elevators in the Empire State Building in Manhattan designed to service the colossal structure’s 15,000 daily users. In the 1930s, against a backdrop of some 75 years of elevator technology development, which served to drive the construction and practical application of skyscrapers soaring as high as 102 stories, Mitsubishi Electric Corp. entered the elevator business. Over the next 75 years the company would build on this body of knowledge, introduce some of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of elevator technology, and open the way for today’s elevators which can reach speeds as fast as 1,000 meters per minute (3,281 ft./min.) and more. Today, Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

has achieved a firm position as a leader in the industry, and has become a standard-bearer of elevator quality and innovation. Elisha Otis, Safety Brake, Otis History, Otis Elevator Company, USA Otis Elevator Company The world’s leading manufacturer and service provider of elevators, escalators and moving walkways. Otis in the Community OTIS HISTORY Otis has changed the shape of the world. From humble beginnings in Yonkers, New York, to the worldwide industry leader it is today, Otis’ long history is a testament to safety, service and performance. 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. The man riding the hoist was Elisha Graves Otis, the founder and namesake of our company. With his safety brake, Otis literally started the elevator industry.

His invention enabled buildings – and architects’ imaginations – to climb ever skyward, giving a new and bolder shape to the modern urban skyline. Mr. Otis sold his first safe elevators in 1853. Today, more than a century and a half later, Otis still stands as the world’s leading elevator company, with more than 60,000 employees serving customers in nearly every country on earth. Thanks to their dedication, you can ride Otis equipment with confidence, knowing that it represents more than 150 years of experience in both safety and quality. Who Invented the Elevator? Who Invented the Elevator? Go to permalink The history of the elevator, if you define it as a platform that can move people and objects up and down, is actually a rather long one. Rudimentary elevators are known to have been in use in ancient Rome as far back as 336 B.C., with the first reference of one built by the talented Archimedes. Advertisement These early elevators were open cars rather than enclosed ones, and consisted of a platform with hoists that would enable the car to move vertically.

The hoists were typically worked manually, either by people or animals, though sometimes water wheels were used. Romans continued to use these simple elevators for many years, usually to move water, building materials, or other heavy items from one place to another. As for the dedicated passenger elevator, this was created in the 18th century, with one of the first used by King Louis XV in 1743. He had an elevator constructed at Versailles that would carry him from his apartments on the first floor to his mistress' apartments on the second floor. This elevator wasn't much more technologically advanced than those used in Rome. To make it work, men stationed in a chimney pulled on the ropes. They called it a "flying chair." Advertisement It wasn't until the 1800s that elevator technology really started to advance. For starters, elevators no longer needed to be worked manually. In 1823, two British architects—Burton and Hormer—built a steam-powered "ascending room" to take tourists up to a platform for a view of London. Several years later, their invention was expanded upon by architects Frost and Stutt who added a belt and counter-weight to the steam power.

Soon enough, hydraulic systems began to be created as well, using water pressure to raise and lower the elevator car. However, this wasn't practical in some cases—pits had to be dug below the elevator shaft to enable the piston to pull back. The higher the elevator went, the deeper the pit had to be. Thus, this wasn't a viable option for taller buildings in big cities. So despite the hydraulic systems being somewhat safer than steam-powered/cabled elevators, the steam powered ones with cables and counterweights, stuck around. They had just one major drawback: the cables could snap, and sometimes did, which sent the elevator plummeting to the bottom of the shaft, killing passengers and damaging building materials or other items being transported. Needless to say, no one was jumping to get on these dangerous elevators and so passenger elevators up to this point were largely a novelty. Sponsored The man who solved the elevator safety problem, making skyscrapers possible, was Elisha Otis, who is generally known as the inventor of the modern elevator.

In 1852, Otis came up with a design that had a safety "brake." In the event that the cables broke, a wooden frame at the top of the elevator car would snap out and hit the walls of the shaft, stopping the elevator in its tracks. Otis himself demonstrated the device, which he called a "safety hoist," at the New York World's Fair in 1854, when he went up in a make-shift elevator himself and had the ropes cut. Rather than plummeting to his death as the audience thought might happen, his safety hoist snapped out, catching the elevator within seconds. Needless to say, the crowd was impressed. Advertisement Advertisement Otis went on to found his own elevator company, which installed the first public elevator in a New York building in 1874. The Otis Elevator Company is still known today as the world's largest elevator manufacturer. While the cable elevator design has remained, many additional improvements have been made, the most obvious of which is that elevators now run on electricity rather than steam power, a change that came about starting in the 1880s.

The electric elevator was patented by Alexander Miles in 1887, though one had been built by the German inventor Werner von Siemens in 1880. Otis' safety hoist wasn't the end of safety innovation, either. These days, it's virtually impossible for an elevator to plummet and kill passengers. There are now multiple steel cables to hold the elevator's weight, plus a number of different braking systems to stop an elevator from falling if the cables somehow snap. If, despite all these safety measures, the elevator does fall, there are shock absorbers at the bottom of the shaft, making it unlikely death will occur and reducing the possibility of serious injury. Advertisement The Battleship and the Slinky Bonus Facts: Elisha Otis is not considered to be the inventor of the modern elevator by everyone. Another man, Otis Tufts, patented an elevator design that had doors that opened and closed automatically and benches inside. However, Tufts' design did away with the typical cable system because of the safety issues, and instead used an impractical, expensive system of threading the elevator car up a giant screw. Obviously, this would be prohibitively expensive in tall buildings.

Elisha Otis' design was much simpler (and closer to modern designs), easier to use, and less expensive to make, which is why he generally gets the credit and not Tufts. That said, the "Vertical Screw Railway" was installed in a few buildings in New York and Philadelphia. The first elevator shaft was put in a building before Elisha Otis designed his safe, steam powered elevator. This was done in 1853 at the Cooper Union Foundation building in New York. Peter Cooper felt that elevators would be perfected and made safe at some point in the near future, so included it in the design of the building. It took a couple decades, but an elevator was eventually installed in the shaft by Elisha Otis' company. Elisha Otis was born into a farming family in 1811, but he spent a lot of time at the blacksmith's as a child, fascinated by tools and making things. He created a number of inventions to help out around the farm, including a pulley and lift system. At one point, he also worked in a bed-making factory and built a machine that increased production rates significantly.

Otis' daring elevator safety demonstration at the World Fair was hyped up by Phineas Barnum, who is also responsible for making phrases like "jump on the bandwagon" popular . Otis Tufts also invented the steam-powered printing press and steam-powered pile driver. Emily Upton writes for the wildly popular interesting fact website TodayIFoundOut.com . To subscribe to Today I Found Out's "Daily Knowledge" newsletter, click here or like them on Facebook here . You can also check 'em out on YouTube here . Advertisement Who invented the elevator? | Reference.com Who invented the elevator? A: Quick Answer The first records of elevator use trace back to the third century B.C., and the original inventor is unknown. The earliest elevators were primitive and used human, animal or water-wheel power. Full Answer In the 19th century, elevators powered by steam became commonplace. In 1823, an "ascending room" powered by steam was built in London by two architects, Hormer and Burton. This was followed in 1835 by two architects named Frost and Stutt who built a primitive elevator that was powered by a combination of steam, counterweights and a belt system.

In 1853, Elisha Otis invented and patented an elevator brake, which made elevators safer and paved the way for the development of the skyscraper. Who Made America? | Innovators | Elisha Otis 1811, Halifax, VT 1861, Yonkers, NY At P.T. Barnum's Traveling World's Fair in New York, Otis rode up in an elevator and then slashed the retaining ropes with a saber. As the crowds screamed in horror, Otis fell for only a second or two before reassuring them, "All safe, ladies and gentlemen, all safe." Photos: Otis Elevator Company Safe Elevators A ceaseless tinkerer created the first safe elevator, then died before he could see it revolutionize architecture, cities, and the way we live. Mechanically Inclined Although the concept of a powered hoist had been around for some time, Elisha Otis designed the first elevator that could lift and lower people and cargo safely. Born to a Vermont farmer in 1811, young Elisha preferred hanging around the blacksmith's forge to working on the farm.

Otis's interest in tools and in making things led him to innovate everywhere he worked. He helped his brother, Chandler, who was a builder, by designing a hoist system to transport materials two or three stories high. Working for a bed manufacturer, he built a machine that sped production by a factor of four. Safe Elevator Hoist systems had existed since at least the time of the ancient Romans. But none of them had been safe. Otis designed the first safe elevator when he needed to lift heavy building materials, while converting a sawmill into a factory in Yonkers, New York. He made toothed wooden guide rails to fit into opposite sides of the elevator shaft, and fitted a spring to the top of the elevator, running the hoisting cables through it. The cables still guided the elevator up and down, but if they broke, the release of tension would throw the spring mechanism outward into the notches, preventing the cabin from falling. Building a Business With his two sons, Otis founded the Union Elevator and General Machine Works Company. He debuted his invention at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853. The impresario P. T. Barnum was there to hype the stunt and attract a crowd.

Otis's alarming demonstration increased orders for his "hoist machines." Otis, a compulsive tinkerer, made numerous improvements to his elevator and patented other inventions, but he never managed to run a successful business. He died in 1861, leaving his sons to run the company with better business and managerial skills. Otis's safety elevators would be used in tall landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, becoming a brand name and key component in the skyscrapers that defined modern cities. Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator | PopMatters A Cultural History of the Elevator by Andreas Bernard Before skyscrapers forever transformed urban landscapes, the conveyance that made them possible had to be created. Three elevator doors in corridor of office building image from Shutterstock.com . Before skyscrapers forever transformed urban landscapes, the conveyance that made them possible had to be created. The elevator serves as a reflection of life in modern growing cities, a space of simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, constantly in motion. Excerpted from Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator Andreas Bernard (footnotes omitted). Copyright © 2014 New York University Press .

No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Introduction The History of Technology: New York, 1854 The history of the elevator begins with a piece of theater. From May to October 1854, the mechanic Elisha Graves Otis gave repeated performances at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York City, designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of a safety device he had invented. On September 20 of the previous year, Otis founded the E. G. Otis Elevator Company in Yonkers, New York. But having received only one order in his first seven months of business, he was happy to accept an invitation to introduce his apparatus to the public. In the Crystal Palace on Forty-Second Street (an imitation of the Crystal Palace built for the London World’s Fair in 1851), he installed a platform on guide rails on which he had himself hoisted into the air before the onlookers. When the platform had risen to its maximum height, to their horror, he severed its suspension cable.

But instead of plunging fifty feet to the ground, the elevator stopped short after only a few inches of travel. “All safe, gentlemen, all safe,” Otis reassured the shocked fairgoers, and then explained his newly developed safety catch: a flat-leaf cart spring attached to the roof of the platform remained flexed as long as the elevator’s hoisting rope was taut, but flattened out as soon as the rope is severed, engaging notches cut into the guide rails and holding the platform in place. This experiment raised public awareness of the invention and in the following years resulted in numerous orders for freight elevators. Eventually, on March 23, 1857, the first passenger elevator was installed in the retail establishment of the New York porcelain and glass dealer Haughwout and Company. Otis’s 1854 performance is regarded as the primal scene in the history of the elevator. In every encyclopedia article and handbook of the history of technology, as well as in individual monographs and collections of essays on the topic, this event serves as a demarcation line, dividing the predecessors from the canonical figures, the mere curiosities from the fully developed, production-ready apparatuses.

It was only “by executing this stunt, before a gasping crowd, [that] Otis had heralded the birth of the elevator industry,” declared a publication about the development of the firm. At first glance, the consensus that his experiment represents a historical caesura, “one of the authentic great moments in architectural history,” stands in surprising contrast to the relatively modest scale of the innovation that Elisha Otis presented in 1854 and finally patented in January 1861, three months before his death. For the New York mechanic was by no means the inventor of the basic principle of the hoisting apparatus. His only addition to the machines already in existence was the safety device whose reliability he proved by using himself as a guinea pig. Ground floor-elevator, E. V. Haughwout and Company, 488 –492 Broadway, New York City, August 1970. Photograph by Cervin Robinson. From Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress. A glance at the literature on architectural history reveals just how old the practice of vertical transport of goods and people is. In classical antiquity, hoisting devices appeared in the writings of Archimedes and Vitruvius.

Isolated examples of passenger elevators also cropped up between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century and are regularly mentioned in histories of technology. The Jena mathematician Erhard Weigel, for example, had a house built around 1670 in which he installed an arrangement of pulleys to convey him from one of its seven stories to another. In her final years, the ailing Austrian empress Maria Theresa would be lowered into the Crypt of the Capuchins by means of an elevator to pray at the graves of her parents.

In 1804, a freight and passenger elevator was built for a six-story cotton mill in Derbyshire, and in 1830, the English diplomat Charles Greville described in his memoirs an apparatus in the palace of the Sardinian royal couple in Genoa: “For the comfort of their bodies he has a machine made like a car, which is drawn up by a chain from the bottom to the top of the house; it holds about six people, who can be at pleasure elevated to any storey, and at each landing-place there is a contrivance to let them in and out.” Thus one wonders why the history of the elevator should rest on a single, canonical incident despite the multifarious data, a heterogeneity that only increased in the decades preceding Otis’s experiment. From the 1830s on, there was a multiplicity of well-documented elevator installations, both planned and completed, in Europe and the United States. By about 1830, freight elevators had been installed in numerous British textile factories, as one can read in the seventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In Eu-ropean mines, moreover, the transition from hemp ropes and chains to the much greater load-bearing capacity of the iron-wire cable, invented in 1834, led to the rise of so-called rack-transport, a conveyance we can think of as the underground equivalent of a freight elevator. From then on, ore or coal was no longer hoisted to the surface in barrels dangling from a rope, but rather in multistory compartments running on guide rails and capable of carrying a large number of containers. (As we shall see, this development at first had no influence on the vertical transport of the miners themselves.) During the same period, however, there were increasing references to passenger elevators as well. The Bunker Hill Monument in Boston, a 221-foot granite obelisk erected in 1842, contains a steam-powered elevator that can carry six passengers to an observation platform. For the 1853 opening of the Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations (the very fair at which Elisha Otis would demonstrate his invention the following year), the architect James Bogardus planned a 325-foot tower whose top could be reached by a steam-powered elevator.

That same year, the New York steel producer Peter Cooper had a nine-story elevator shaft added to the company’s headquarters, although the mechanism was not installed until eleven years later. And finally, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reported in June 1853 the imminent “introduction of a steam elevator” into private homes in New York, by means of which “an indolent, or fatigued, or aristocratic person” could have himself conveyed to the upper floors. One thing becomes clear from all these projects and installations: the dispersed and untidy beginnings of the elevator’s history cannot be easily consolidated into a unified foundational narrative. Elisha Otis’s “All safe, gentlemen, all safe” is less the “incunabular maxim of the modern passenger elevator” than a single voice in a mighty chorus of mid-nineteenth-century mechanics. So how did his 1854 experiment achieve its unparalleled status?

What was so epoch-making about Elisha Otis’s invention if even a recently published official company history states that his elevator in the New York Crystal Palace followed “already existing models”: “a platform set between vertical guide rails and raised and lowered on a rope wound around an overhead drum, the drum turned by belting that looped across the factory floor to the central, continuously turning steam engine.” Thus by 1854, both the propelling force and the mechanism itself were already well-known elements of the apparatus. The decisive difference, the detail that transformed scattered instances of the use of hoisting devices primarily for freight into the passenger elevator—an all but obligatory installation in every multistory building—consisted solely of Otis’s invention of the automatic safety catch. As one historian of the elevator put it, “Although people had been building hoists for at least two thousand years before that, their hoists had the serious fault of falling to the bottom should the lifting cable break. But Mr. Otis invented something that no one had ever seen before.

He built a hoist equipped with an automatic safety device to prevent the car from falling.” In light of the unanimous opinion that the real history of this means of conveyance begins only with Otis’s emergency brake, it is worthwhile to direct our attention to contemporary reactions to the event. In hindsight, the elevator experiment in the Crystal Palace appears to be the celebrated centerpiece of the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. In a 1911 biographical sketch in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Elisha Otis’s birth, his son Charles Otis remarked that the demonstration had been “one of the most interesting and attractive in the Fair,” a judgment that continued to hold sway in the following decades. Even the most recent publication on the history of the Otis Company states that by the end of the fair, the demonstration had “long since eclipsed the bigger show it was part of.” Apparently, the public was already aware of the historical dimensions of the scene. However, if one sets out to look for evidence of the demonstration in New York newspapers and magazines between May and October 1854, a different picture emerges.

While the New York Times carried almost daily reports on the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations following its ceremonious reopening on May 1 (it was closed during the winter of 1853 –1854), including enthusiastic full-page articles about main attractions such as the hot air balloon ascent from the fairgrounds on June 9, not a single line was devoted to the epoch-making event in the Crystal Palace. One must comb painstakingly through the archives to find any trace whatsoever of the experiment. In its issue of June 10, 1854, in a sidebar entitled “Crystal Palace Notes,” Scientific American presented some novelties to be found in the fair’s “machine arcade.” Between appreciations of a cigar rolling machine and a whaling harpoon, mention is made of a “new and excellent platform elevator, by Mr. Otis, of Yonkers, N.Y…. It is worked by steam power, and operates like some of the elevators in cotton factories. It has a plain platform, which runs up and down on guides… It is self-acting, safe, and convenient.” There was no mention of the safety device or its spectacular demonstration.

In the major American daily newspapers and magazines, the 1854 event showed up only in two marginal locations. In addition to the Scientific American article, a brief report appeared on May 30, 1854, in the New York Daily Tribune, which mentioned the daring of the inventor “who, as he rides up and down the platform occasionally cuts the rope by which it is supported.” No further contemporary traces can be found (just as there were no obituaries of Elisha Otis in 1861). Thus it is no exaggeration to say that the demonstration in the Crystal Palace, that “authentic great moment in architectural history,” went almost completely unnoticed by the public. If one sets out to trace the contemporary perspective on the emergence of the elevator in the United States between 1850 and 1880, one is more likely to discover a different foundational narrative. Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, every account of the elevator’s history credits another mechanic with a similar-sounding name, Otis Tufts, with its invention, although he is almost forgotten today.

In 1859, Tufts patented an apparatus called a “Vertical Railway” or “Vertical Screw Elevator.” It was the first to have a completely enclosed cab, propelled by a twenty-inch-wide steam-driven iron screw running through its center. In the same year, the only examples ever produced of this slow and costly but extremely safe elevator were installed in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City and the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia. While the proprietors of the Haughwout store had Elisha Otis’s first passenger elevator of 1857 removed three years after its installation because the public refused to accept it, the two elevators built by Tufts remained in service into the 1870s and for a while transformed the hotels into overrun tourist attractions. It is instructive to realize how definitively the earliest texts on the history of the elevator ascribed the pioneering role to the Boston inventor, hailed after his death in November 1869 as “one of the most successful inventors of the last thirty years.” In 1880, the American Architect and Building News began its extensive article “Notes on Elevators” by remarking how recently these “now indispensable conveniences” were born.

“Although steam freight-hoists have been known for forty years, it is about twenty since the first passenger-elevator or ‘vertical railway,’ as it was called, was constructed by the late Otis Tufts… This cumbrous and costly apparatus kept the field to itself for some time.” Two years later, Sloane Kennedy, writing for Harper’s Monthly, made the not quite accurate claim to be the first historian of the new means of conveyance: “The story of the invention of the passenger elevator has never up to this time been told, and the present paper is therefore a new chapter in the history of inventions.” He too regarded Tufts’s role as beyond question: “It is to the brilliant genius and energy of the Boston inventor (now deceased) that the credit is due of inventing and constructing the first passenger elevator in the world driven by steam power.” The name Elisha Otis appears in Kennedy’s essay only once, in a sentence about “other early inventors and patentees of portions of elevator machinery.” His emergency brake, the decisive watershed in the canonical history of the elevator, was in 1882 still considered an inessential addition.

Otis Tufts was the definitive historical figure, an opinion still held in the following decades. Thus the New York Times included the “vertical railway” (not the “elevator”) in an 1891 article on epoch-making inventions of the nineteenth century, and one of the largest elevator manufacturers in Chicago, when queried in 1903 about the early history of his product, answered, “The first elevators for use as passenger lifts, of which I have any knowledge, were the screw-elevators built by Otis Tufft [sic], of Boston, in 1859.” Otis Elevator Company plant, main building. Photograph by Wurts Brothers.Courtesy of the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, New York Public Library, and the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. We need to grope our way back to the turning point at which a figure like Otis Tufts slipped into the background and the currently accepted foundational narrative began to take hold. When and why did an experiment that for fifty years was perceived as a subsidiary anecdote at best metamorphose into an epoch-making moment?

How is it that for decades, all research on the history of the elevator referred to an event for which, because of the absence of contemporary interest, there is hardly any evidence? (In fact, it was falsely dated time and time again: according to Jeannot Simmen and Uwe Drepper, Otis’s experiment took place “in the New York Crystal Palace in 1853,” and Jean Gavois also wrote that “Otis demonstrated his safety elevator… in 1853.”) Without doubt, the ex post facto valorization of this primal scene has to do first and foremost with the business interests of the world’s largest producer of elevators. From the 1870s onward, Otis Brothers and Company, the business founded by Elisha Otis’s two enterprising sons, developed into the leading manufacturer of elevators. With the founding of the Otis Elevator Company in 1898, it absorbed its fourteen leading American competitors. In addition to its monopoly of elevator production, the company was also intent on establishing historiographic hegemony over the apparatus.

It is no accident that the historical account that first places the experiment in the Crystal Palace at the center of the elevator’s history was written by Elisha’s son Charles. In 1911, he declared his intention to replace the “kindly intentioned but somewhat inaccurate notices” honoring the hundredth anniversary of the worldwide enterprise’s founder with the true story. His account included a minute depiction of the demonstration that had excited so little notice in 1854 and declared it to be the birth of the passenger elevator. Otis Tufts, on the other hand, put in an appearance as a mere epigone who adopted the promising invention of Elisha Otis and wheedled the hotel owners of New York and Philadelphia into buying his shoddily constructed machines (Charles Otis mentioned a serious accident in the Continental Hotel, an incident for which no other evidence exists). The influence of this text on the historiography of the elevator is obvious from the fact that after 1911, there was hardly a mention of the elevator’s origins that did not begin by repeating the story of the event in the Crystal Palace.

At the same time Otis Tufts, whose contribution to elevator construction was by no means restricted to the exotic “Vertical Screw Elevator,” was downgraded to a transient bit player of the early years. The most important producer of the conveyance was now regarded as its inventor as well, and one can trace how this narrative was cemented in place in the course of the twentieth century—especially, of course, by the Otis Company itself, whose publications in any case constitute a considerable part of the historical literature. On the 125th anniversary of the founding of the E. G. Otis Elevator Company, the firm even printed up a facsimile newspaper with imaginary historical articles, thereby creating out of whole cloth the contemporary interest in Otis’s experiment that in truth did not exist.

Under a masthead reading “New York, 1854” and in a layout reminiscent of the New York Times, one could read about a “young inventor” presenting his safety elevator “in a daring exhibition before thousands of viewers.” “This reporter noted that as the platform went up, without question, everyone in the hall stopped to see what would happen next.” This “anniversary edition” also contained a striking iconographic embellishment of the event: next to the article was an illustration that was often reproduced in subsequent years. It purported to supply an impression of the excitement in the Crystal Palace. Illustration from Otis Elevator Company, The Otis Bulletin: Special 125th Anniversary Edition, September 20, 1978. According to the historian of the Otis Company, this illustration was based on a sketch made during the demonstration by an artist for the New York Recorder. In all the older literature about the experiment, however (including that issued by the Otis Company itself), the event was sketched in a significantly more modest way. We are justified in assuming that the most famous and by now “official” illustration of the experiment was in fact drawn in 1978.

The teeming, astonished onlookers as well as the assistant who has just severed the suspension cable are inventions of the recent past. Illustration from Otis Elevator Company, The First Hundred Years (New York, 1953) It is no surprise that the largest manufacturer of a technical apparatus has an interest in retroactively claiming credit for its invention. In the course of the last hundred years, however, the stage-managed event in the Crystal Palace was so consistently and unanimously depicted as the elevator’s primal scene that there had to have been more at work in this consensus than just a public relations strategy of the company. It had to do, rather, with the question of how to construct a foundational narrative in the history of technology. If it is precisely this event among the dozens of possible candidates between 1840 and 1860 that establishes itself as the elevator’s beginning, if after half a century of neglect it still retains the power to suppress competing dates, then one has to wonder what has made it so persistent. One answer lies perhaps in the way Otis’s invention is presented.

The theatricality of the demonstration (however unimpressed contemporary witnesses may have been) places this contribution to the elevator’s development above the crowd of equally important but less dramatic turning points, such as the first installation of guide rails in a factory or the first construction of a completely enclosed cab. The concentrated format of a public demonstration satisfies the yearning for a clean, unambiguous beginning, a yearning endemic to the historiography of technology. The dramaturgy of the experiment in the Crystal Palace also contributes to this outcome: Otis focused his demonstration of the innovation on a radical moment—the assumed fatal severing of the cable—and thus accommodated the interest of historians in locating the beginning in a single, visible moment. One must pay attention to the widely reproduced illustration of the experiment, drawn long after the event. It attempts to encompass precisely the historical moment: the cable has been severed, the witnesses freeze, yet the platform does not fall. Why then has the demonstration at the New York industrial exhibition established itself as the primal scene? Not because it is in fact clearly identifiable as the beginning, but rather for aesthetic reasons—because it makes the beginning tellable.

Otis provides an appropriate narrative for the birth of the elevator, a classically Aristotelian narrative, in fact: the hero’s rise into the air in the Crystal Palace moves toward a literal peripeteia, a tragic reversal—until the safety catch interrupts his fall. The epochal status of the event, at any rate, illustrates the discursive mechanisms by which the “origin of a technical fact” comes into being, to use the words of the historian of science Ludwik Fleck. In his study of syphilis research around 1900, Fleck spells out how years of collective and anonymous work on serological experiments were retroactively attributed to a single investigator. A process of countless laboratory corrections and adjustments that in the end led to the reliability of the test was transformed into a datable act, an individual invention (the “Wassermann reaction” of 1906) in order to ensure a clear historical narrative.

The “straight path to knowledge,” which Fleck’s discourse analysis exposes as a fiction, is preserved by all histories of the elevator that begin in the Crystal Palace in 1854; out of the “thinking collective” of mechanics in the middle of the nineteenth century, a single name and a single event are distilled. But the closer one examines this seemingly clear distillate, the cloudier it becomes. Inventor Elisha Otis Biography Inventor: Elisha Graves Otis Criteria; First to invent. First to patent. First practical. Entrepreneur. Birth: August 3, 1811 in Halifax, Vermont Death: April 8, 1861 in Yonkers, New York Nationality: American Invention: elevator, safety brake in 1852 Function: noun / elï¿½eï¿½vaï¿½tor Definition: A platform or an enclosure raised and lowered in a vertical shaft to transport people or freight. The shaft contains the operating equipment, motor, cables, and accessories.

Patent: 31,128 (US) issued January 15, 1861 Milestones: 1852 invents a safety latch for hoisting equipment 1853 starts a company to manufacture safe elevators.

Sells elevator to hoist freight 1854 Otis demonstrates the elevator at the World's Fair, Crystal Palace exposition in New York City 1857 Installs the first passenger safe elevator in a New York department store 1861 receives patent for improvements to hoisting apparatus, safety brake 1861 after his death his sons form Otis Brothers & Company 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores 1898 Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company 1903 introduced the gearless traction electric elevator 1931 first Otis double-deck elevator was installed elevator, safety elevator, safety brake for elevators, elisha graves otis, otis elevatorm UTC, patent 31128, invention, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts. The Story: Imagine the skyline of a modern city if the elevator did not exist. Buildings would be limited to five or six stories. Most of the architecture of the 20th and 21st century would be impossible.

Office towers, hotels and high-rise apartments would hardly stand in their present form. The need for vertical transport is as old as civilization. Over the centuries, mankind has employed ingenious forms of lifting. The earliest lifts used man, animal and water power to raise the load. Lifting devices relied on these basic forms of power from the early agricultural societies until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. From ancient times through the Middle Ages, and into the 13th century, man or animal power was the driving force behind hoisting devices. In ancient Greece, Archimedes developed an improved lifting device operated by ropes and pulleys, in which the hoisting ropes were coiled around a winding drum by a capstan and levers. By A.D. 80, gladiators and wild animals rode crude elevators up to the arena level of the Roman Coliseum. Medieval records contain numerous drawings of hoists lifting men and supplies to isolated locations. Among the most famous is the hoist at the monastery of St. Barlaam in Greece. The monastery stood on a pinnacle approximately (200 ft) above the ground. Its hoist, which employed a basket or cargo net, was the only means up or down.

The first elevator designed for a passemger was built in 1743 for King Louis XV at his palace in France. The one-person contraption went up only one floor, from the first to the second. Known as the "Flying Chair," it was on the outside of the building, and was entered by the king via his balcony. The mechanism consisted of a carefully balanced arrangement of weights and pulleys hanging inside a chimney. Men stationed inside the chimney then raised or lowered the Flying Chair at the king's command. By 1850 steam and hydraulic elevators had been introduced, but it was in 1852 that the landmark event in elevator history occurred: the invention of the world's first safety elevator by Elisha Graves Otis. The first passenger elevator was installed by Otis in New York in 1857. After Otis' death in 1861, his sons, Charles and Norton, built on his heritage, creating Otis Brothers & Co. in 1867.

By 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores across America, and five years later the first Otis hydraulic passenger elevator was installed. The Era of the Skyscraper followed.... and in 1889 Otis revealed the first successful direct-connected geared electric elevator machines. In 1898 overseas business had added to the company's growth, and Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company. In 1903 Otis introduced the design that would become the "backbone" of the elevator industry. The gearless traction electric elevator, engineered and proven to outlast the building itself. This ushered in the age of high-rise structures, ultimately including New York's Empire State Building, Chicago's John Hancock Center, and Toronto's CN Tower. Otis is part of United Technologies Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and world leader in the building systems and aerospace industries. With 1.7 million Otis elevators and 110,000 escalators in operation, Otis touches the lives of people in more than 200 countries around the world.

TO LEARN MORE Who Invented the Elevator Who Invented the Elevator 05 Oct, 2010 who invented 0 In most multi-story building around the world there exists at least one elevator. Many people everyday use them to travel from one floor to another with ease. The elevator was design to allow buildings to become taller and house more people in smaller areas. This occurred because land was becoming more expensive and limited in city areas. The elevator also allowed for easy and quick transportation of objects over numerous floors. This was particularly useful in the building and mining industries as heavy materials and equipment could be moved with minimal human effort. But is the elevator a reasonably new invention or has it been around for centuries and who invented the elevator? Who Invented the Elevator? Elevators in various forms have been in use for centuries in many different civilizations. It is widely believed that elevator type machinery has been in use since the 3rd century BC. Most of these elevators were used to lift heavy materials in a pulley type system. The source of power was human, animals or water wheels. In the 17th century prototypes of elevators powered by human effort were found in palaces in England and France.

In 1793 the first screw drive elevator was installed in a building by Ivan Kulibin. In 1850 Henry Waterman invented an elevator similar to what we know as an elevator today to transport barrels of flour. By the Mid 19th Century, steam operated elevators were being used extensively in factories, mines and warehouses but were not considered safe for the transportation of people. That all changed when in 1853, an American inventor named Elisha Otis invented a freight elevator with a safety brake installed to prevent it from falling if the cable should snap. This instilled people with a sense of confidence that the elevator could be used for the safe transportation of passengers. Elisha Otis established an elevator company and patented in 1861 a steam elevator. Seeing the potential for elevators to begin carrying people J.W Meaker patented a method of opening and closing elevator doors safety in 1874. In the early 1870’s hydraulics began to be used to power elevators. The Otis family continued to make improvements to the elevator and patented a number of new ideas in 1903.

The Modern Elevator The first electric elevator was used towards the end of the 19th century. It was built by a German inventor named Werner Von Siemens in 1880. Frank Sprague is responsible for increasing the safety and speed of these electric elevators. The use of the safety brake system invented by Elisha Otis is still part of the modern elevator design. Today the Otis Elevator company which is part of the United Technologies Company is the world’s largest manufacturer of vertical transport systems. Other inventions

Question: Who invented the elevator in 1853?
Answer: Elisha Otis