Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe–far safer than cars, to
say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary.
Statistics are elusive…but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals,
that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from
fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty
times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more
elevator accidents. An average of twenty-six people die in (or on)
elevators in the United States every year, but most of these are people
being paid to work on them. That may still seem like a lot, until you
consider that that many die in automobiles every five hours. In New
York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven
billion elevator trips a year–thirty million every day–and yet hardly
more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical
attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest
elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of
the world’s population every five days.
And I like this passage:
Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety
elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what
paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. 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.
Here is the article, interesting throughout.
best book *ever* about elevators: The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead!
And to prove your point, from today’s NYT:
A 36-year-old man who was leaving a Mets game with his relatives at Shea Stadium in Queens on Tuesday night was killed after he fell over the side of an escalator and plunged more than 30 feet, the police and Mets officials said.
I remember explaining the concept of “safety elevator” to my kids when they were small so they could understand why it’s physically impossible for an elevator to free fall. I figured they would spend a lot of time in elevators over their lives, and they ought to have that piece of mind. I think a lot of phobias would be ameliorated if everyone understood this concept.
“Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and…”
“Not really – most high-rises these days are built using a concrete central core ”
Maybe change the “k” in “make” to a “d” as in “made.”
There are surely reasons that steel which was newer than concrete was used in the first skyscrapers, before concrete.
And, then people learned that the skyscraper was valuable for the “ferment” within cities. Now, they are a no-brainer.
However, had the WTC been one of the first skyscrapers and been knocked down just as telecommuting was gaining popularity, we might have completely skipped over them, and the elevator would be completely useless. Or, had the counterweight safety elevator concept not been derived to coincide with the advent of the skyscraper we might be praising the escalator. Technology history is fascinating. It doesn’t seem to progress along an infallible path as it seems in hindsight.
It’s also interesting that the skyscraper is an under-appreciated support for the effectiveness of cities, and the elevator is an underappreciated facilitator of the skyscraper. I don’t want to go into an unappreciated business!
I think Tyler exaggerates the case.
There are some very dense Georgian cities built in the late 18th century or early 19th. The houses are made from brick and have 4 or 5 floors. They have a basement, a ground floor and two or three upper floors. These buildings have no steel and no elevators but they still permit large cities to be built.
If we did not have the elevator and reinforcement then there would still be large, dense cities, just not perhaps ones as dense as there are now.
How about a link for my vague memory: I recall a phrasing decades past attributed to NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman something like, “Elevators are among the most cost-effective innovations of the 20th century.” Can anyone point me in the right direction? I am writing a paper, “Propinquity Matters,” tying together health improvements via germ theory of disease, urbanization, and productivity growth.” All ideas welcome at wpm26@georgetown.edu.
I would just like to remind people, that in a typical year, more people in America die from elevator accidents than die from terrorist attacks! Clearly, anyone who doesn’t support a multi-billion dollar War-On-Elevators hates America and Freedom!
It is hard to predict alternative technologies. Imagine a system of pneumatic tubes though high-rise building that could push people up with air. Low-tech versions of these air elevators are offered as inexpensive alternative systems for homes now. Probably they could have been developed for taller buildings if for some reason current elevator technology stumbled over key inventions, or were repressed by regulations.
And the advantage of having invested millions or billions in pneumatic tube systems for people could have been that these systems could be deployed for people and goods through cities as an alternative to current transit systems.
Another alternative technology is the one deployed at Six Flags in New Jersey (see Kingda Ka segment from Modern Marvels on YouTube). It sends people 465 feet up with vigorous hydraulic push. No cables needed.
I agree elevators are great. But wouldn’t injuries/distance traveled be a more meaningful comparison with cars?
This is a great quote:
Loading up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, pressing the button for the top floor, then throwing in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt†) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit: this practice, apparently popular in New York City housing projects, is inadvisable.
Me:
“There are some very dense Georgian cities built in the late 18th century or early 19th. The houses are made from brick and have 4 or 5 floors. They have a basement, a ground floor and two or three upper floors. These buildings have no steel and no elevators but they still permit large cities to be built.”
Rex Rhino:
“But what is the historical context of these buildings? Where they pleasant places to live, or where they tenements? Certainly elevators and reenforced concrete have made high-density living a more pleasant experience, even if it is possible to do it without those things to 18th and 19th century standards of comfort.”
Well it depends on the building and its state of repair, some are awful and always have been. Some are opulent and always have been, many of the fancier parts of Bath and Chelsea in England, and Cork in Ireland are Georgian for example.
What the elevator and concrete reinforcement bring us is the ability to build _very_ densely. Walking up more than 2 flights of stairs is tedious, so people generally don’t build many building with more than 4 or 5 floors. However reasonably high density can be achieved, with modern levels of comfort without elevators.
Also, in many cases concrete reinforcement is used simply because it is easier than other methods. Not because building a particular building is impossible without it. The Grand Hotel in Scarborough in England was built shortly before concrete reinforcement was invented in the 1860s. It has no reinforcement, but it is 12 floors high and has 365 rooms. This was done mainly with brickwork, there are similar buildings in the US I believe. Concrete reinforcement made this sort of stuff much easier and made building even larger building possible.
David: I was taught that the revolving door was pretty important to the development of tall buildings.
That’s true.
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