Who invented Elevator?

Elisha Otis, 1853

Big cities today are dominated by tall buildings. About 125 years ago, the typical cityscape was very different; few buildings reached more than three or four stories, limited by building techniques, access and the provision of services.

Invention story:

Even then, numerous innovations were encouraging the upward urge Metal-frame construction, made possible by the new Bessemer steel and enhanced by Joseph Monier’s reinforced concrete meant that outer walls no longer carried the weight of a building. Water could be sent to the upper floors with powerful pumps driven by electric motors. Communication from the lowest floors to the highest was made easier by the telephone. Most significantly, the endless climbing of stairs was banished by Elisha Otis’s elevator.

Platforms pulled up and down on ropes had been carrying goods from floor to floor in warehouses for decades, but putting passengers in such lifts raised safety concerns. What if the rope broke? Otis, employed as a youth in a bed manufacturer’s warehouse, realized that a fail-safe lift needed some automatic, perhaps spring loaded, device that could snap into place if needed and lock the platform in the shaft.

In 1853 at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition, standing several stories up on an open platform, he ordered his assistant to cut the rope supporting it. The watching crowd gasped, but Otis did not fall to his death. He stood on the unmoving platform, waving his top hat. It was a marketing triumph.

His safety elevator had lived up to its name. By 1873 more than 2000 Otis elevators were in place in office buildings, hotels, apartment blocks and department stores. In 1904 the Otis organization, run by his sons (Otis himself had died in relative obscurity in 1861), pioneered the high speed elevator that real skyscrapers needed.

The term ‘skyscraper’ had entered the language in the 1880s, when the tallest buildings were merely 20 stories; striking for the day, trivial now. The purpose in going up was of course, to make more efficient use of precious land space in cities, and to increase its value. The look of our cities changed forever.