Underrated Things: Elevators

Most of us use them at least a few times a day, but we hardly ever give a thought to how complex they are. The lowly elevator is the red-headed stepchild of human transport - no respect. It's easy to say 'What's the big deal, the weight goes down and pulls a rope, and you go up.' Au contraire, my silly little friend. Because I'm a nerd and like reading about obscure things, I did a bit of research and was surprised at just how utterly complicated an elevator system is. I just wish that the nippleheads who installed the elevators in my building would read this, as its sometimes literally faster to climb 16 floors. But I digress.

Can you guess when the first elevator was built? 1700s? 1600s? Considering that they barely knew about America in the 1500s, it seems unlikely, but check this out: the first elevator was installed in Rome in 236 BC, by none other than Archimedes himself (the "Eureka!" guy). That's 2,244 years ago! Granted, there weren't many improvements for a few, oh, millennium, but still. The first electric elevator was installed by Ernst Werner von Siemens in 1880, and used a patented safety mechanism invented by Elisha Otis, both of whose names should be familiar to elevator fans worldwide (and don't even get me started on the Schindler elevator company. Schindler's Lifts??)

Otis' original elevator patent sketch. More detailed than Archimdes' version, that amateur.But elevators have come a long way since then. This genuinely fascinating article by Nick Paumgarten combines the technical aspects of building a 'vertical transport system' with the story of Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours over a weekend, and how pathetic a society we'd be without them. From the article:

Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete.

It's a long article, but it covers a lot of ground, and I defy you not to go "Wow, didn't know that before" a few times as you read. It's not as easy as hooking up a rope to some weights - you have to contend with density tables, automated safety features, statistics, crowd movement algorithms, social engineering, security, and many more nuanced fields. Also, check out the funny/scary time-lapse video of White's elevator adventure below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM679Zwpp8E&eurl=http://dailyhype.blogspot.com/2008/04/panichype-stuck-in-elevator-for-41.html[/youtube]

And here's a fun fact: in terms of safety records, the elevator is the safest form of vehicular transport on Earth ever devised. Each year in the US, there are 120,000,000,000 (billion) rides, and out of that, only around 10,000 injuries. In case you're keeping count, that's an accident rate of 0.00000008%. Not too shabby, when you consider that 26 people die every hour in car wrecks.

At any rate, designing an efficient elevator system is a huge task with a near-limitless number of variables. So next time you're in one going down (or going down in one, if you're a danger-junkie), don't forget about what goes into the 'simple' task of moving you a few hundred feet straight up or down. Or take the stairs and appreciate the elevator more with every cursed step.

Cruelest practial joke ever... or best optical illusion.

Comments

[Anasuya]

Greg, have you read the novel the Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead? It's about elevators and is fabulous--highly highly recommend..