Am I the last ‘professional’ elevator operator standing? I earned money for my college expenses operating the elevator for J. C. Penney. The bank of elevators eventually was replaced by an escalator and then the store was closed.
I prefer the stairs. Been stuck before on one—I have no respect for them.
My brother, who used to build elevators, says they are the safest mode of mass transportation.
elevators are engineering marvels.
perfected every decade, we now take their reliability for granted but think of the number of trips and the low percentage of minor failures and infinitesimal small percentage of major failures.
Interesting article. But I’d suggest that it wasn’t the elevator that ushered in the skyscraper age in America: it was the use of steel frames for construction in place of the wood frame and concrete block construction that was typical of buildings at the time. If you go into older neighborhoods of a city like New York you’ll find tons of 2-3 story buildings that couldn’t be built any taller with concrete blocks.
I am thankful for the cities because they keep most leftists from invading the rural areas. Now if they would just build large fences around them and on our borders.
I can’t get into one without thinking about that scene from “The Omen.”
Back in my Kollege Daze, there was an old building built in the 20s that had an original elevator still in operation. It had a wood floor, a hand-operated gate, and smelled of ancient grease and oil. You needed a key to call it, but if you were on the floor where it was, you could ride it. It was like stepping back into another time. Loved it!
They say that like it would be a bad thing.
“Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all
I think elevators would have a better reputation if they played better music.
“Otis! My man!”
Stories like this always give me a lift.
and without power, elevators are worthless.
Reminds of a Henny Youngman joke:
A severely inebriated man lurches into an open elevator shaft,falls two floors, and is momentarily knocked out after hitting the ground. When he comes to, he brushes himself off and yells, “I said, up!”
I hate elevators. They made for congested cities built high. I hate the time wasted in them.