by From secret royal rendezvous’ to forgotten public amusements and on to enabling the modern world: here is the history of the elevator.
Elevators: if you work in a modern city, there’s a good chance you use them every day.
The building I work in has twenty stories, and ten lifts. Fully automated, they run via complex computer programs, designed to move people as efficiently as possible.
Our building, like every other in the city, could not operate without them.
Before electric elevators, buildings had a height threshold: they were not built above 10 stories. Partly this was due to construction techniques: reinforced steel was not used until the late 19th century.
But even after this arrived, it was not practical for people to walk up more than a few flights of stairs. Shorter buildings put a cap on density, even in the largest cities.
Consider the Sears Tower in Chicago, still one of the world’s largest buildings: 440 metres tall, it has 110 stories and 400 000 feet of floor space.
Imagine this skyscraper sliced into 50 or 60 low rise buildings, then surrounding each with a carpark, and connecting all the carparks with roads. You’d have an office park the size of a small town.
Tim Harford, ‘50 Things That Made the Modern Economy’
And this is just for one building. Cities, and so the modern economy, would not have been possible without the elevator.
Even sophisticated modern elevators are run by pulleys, which can be traced to classical civilisation. Simple pulleys were first utilised by the ancient Egyptians, who used them in their large scale monument building.
In the third century BCE, they were greatly enhanced by Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and engineer.
Archimedes invented the ‘compound pulley’, which deployed multiple pulleys in combination, greatly enhancing their power. The story goes that he demonstrated his system for King Hieron II of Syracuse, by moving a fully laden ship.
Plutarch, the Greek writer from whom much of our knowledge of Archimedes comes, quotes him as saying, ‘Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.’
From classical times, pulleys became a standard piece of equipment, used in heavy lifting and construction. But they were not used to move people, due to safety concerns.
This would not change until the 17th century.
Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer was a French nobleman who served in the Royal Administration during the 17th century. Born in Nantes in 1607, he entered the King’s service in 1632, and worked initially as a regional legal advisor.
He rose steadily through the ranks, and by 1650 was serving as a councillor in Paris.
In 1653, de Villayer was put in charge of the French postal service. At this time, the post only transported mail between towns and cities; there was no service within townships, people had to deliver these letters themselves.
de Villayer would address this with a new system inside Paris. Post boxes were placed on street corners, and the mail collected three times a day; letters could be sent to anywhere across France.
To pay for this service, de Villayer introduced another new idea: the postage stamp.
It was the world’s first modern postal system. As some of the distances mail was carried were now short, people called it the ‘Petite’ Postal Service.
As well as modernising the mail, de Villayer left another mark on history. An amateur inventor, he was also responsible for creating something known as, ‘the flying chair’.
This was a kind of prototype elevator.
The device consisted of a chair placed in a chamber in the wall of a room, and attached to a pulley and a counterweight. A rider sat in the chair and at a signal, a concealed attendant would pull on a rope, and move the chair between floors.
The idea proved popular among de Villayer’s contemporaries.
The Prince made extensive use of them in Paris and at Chantilly. The Duchess, his daughter-in-law and the King’s daughter, wanted one of the same for her mezzanine at Versailles.
Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon
Flying chairs would be installed in many houses among the French nobility.
In 1743, King Louis XV of France had a flying chair installed in his private apartment at Versailles. The device connected him to the room above, which was occupied by his mistress: Madame de Châteauroux.
de Châteauroux was from a noble family, and had caught the eye of Louis after the death of her husband. For two years the pair had an extra-marital affair, with de Châteauroux appointed a Duchess and wielding significant influence at court.
The flying chair was used to keep their visitations discrete.
Built on the outside of the building, it had been constructed by the royal machinist, Blaise-Henri Arnoult. The King entered via a door on his private balcony.
Elevators to move multiple passengers arrived in the 19th century. The first was built in London in 1829, part of a remarkable building known as, ‘The Colosseum’.
Located in Regent’s Park, and modelled after the Parthenon, ‘The Colosseum’ was part of the 19th century craze for panoramas.
In the era before motion or still photography, giant scale panoramic paintings were produced as entertainment. Exhibited in their own dedicated buildings, and often augmented with props, these were designed to transport an audience to places around the world, or recreate famous events in history (read more about this, here).
The Colosseum was built to house a 360 degree depiction of London, created by artist Thomas Hornor.
Hornor had spent several months in a hut on top of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, sketching the city below. He then spent a year upscaling his drawings into a gigantic painting, that eventually measured 130 metres long by 12 metres high, and contained 4 300 square metres of canvas.
At the time, it was the largest painting ever created.
Hornor’s work was hung in a circular room with a diameter of 40 metres. Visitors passed through a series of galleries, before climbing to a central platform to view it in the round.
The Colosseum building was designed by architect Decimus Burton, who included a unique feature: a public elevator.
Customers who could not manage the stairs, could ride in a mechanical device to the viewing platform instead. Known as, the ‘Ascending Room’, this opened in January 1829.
The Ascending Room is capable of containing 10 or 12 persons, and is raised by secret machinery to the viewing platform.
‘Colosseum’ Visitors Guide, 1848
The secret machinery was hydraulics: Burton’s elevator was powered by pressurised water, pumped from the nearby Thames.
The device made quite an impression, and was much discussed in the press. But some visitors did have reservations about using it, worried that it was unsafe.
These potential safety issues would be addressed by Elisha Otis, a US based entrepreneur and inventor.
Originally from Vermont, Otis moved to New York in 1830, and worked a variety of jobs while he taught himself mechanical engineering. Going into business for himself, he manufactured a number of products, including wagons, carriages, and industrial equipment.
Many of these were based on Otis’ own designs. Among his inventions was an automated safety break for railway cars, although this product was not initially successful.
In 1852, Otis was employed to install a large scale hoist in a bed making factory in Yonkers. As the hoist would be moving heavy items, in his plans he included a safety brake, similar to his railcar design.
When this worked successfully, Otis considered other uses for his invention.
In 1853 he founded the ‘Otis Elevator Company’, and began making elevators designed to move people. To alleviate fears about safety, these would also feature an automatic brake.
Like earlier elevators, Otis’ were operated by a cable, attached to a pulley and counterweight. His innovation was to also have them running on vertical metal rails.
Attached to the elevator box were spring loaded metal wedges, that were connected to a mechanism monitoring the cable’s tension. If the cable broke, the tension would be released, and the spring wedges, sprung.
They would then jam into the tracks the lift ran on, stopping it instantly.
Otis first demonstrated his new elevator at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, a World’s Fair style event, at the Crystal Palace building in Manhattan. Opening in July 1853, the exhibition featured stalls from around the world, and would have more than 1 million visitors.
Calling his invention the ‘safety elevator’, Otis came up with a dramatic method to sell its key feature. Standing atop the platform of a working model, to the shock of onlookers he cut its pulley cable; and then stood beaming, unharmed, when the safety brake prevented his fall.
While this incident became legendary, and gave Otis much free publicity, it would be several years before he would find a paying customer.
In March 1857, Otis installed his first safety elevator at the E.V. Haughwout building, at 488 Broadway.
The building housed the ‘Haughwout Emporium’, an upmarket department store specialising in fine porcelain, glassware and other luxury items. The Emporium was world famous at this time, with the White House and the Czar of Russia among its customers.
At five stories, the building was too short to really need an elevator; the owners had it installed as a novelty, hoping people would attend to ride it.
Other businesses would follow suit, and by the next decade elevators became common in New York, and then other major cities. These early models were powered by hydraulics, or steam engines; electric elevators would arrive in the 1880s.
Also appearing in the 1880s was the skyscraper, the first of which were built in New York and Chicago.
After his success with the elevator, Otis continued inventing other devices. Among these were a bread-baking oven, a new type of steam plow, and an oscillating steam engine.
Having helped enable the modern world, he died of diphtheria in 1861, aged only 49.
The Haughwout Building still stands on Broadway, although the Otis elevator has been removed. In present day, the ground floor is a Staples outlet.
