Imagine the skyline of a modern city if the elevator did not exist. Buildings would be limited to five or six stories. Most of the architecture of the 20th and 21st century would be impossible. Office towers, hotels and high-rise apartments would hardly stand in their present form.
The need for vertical transport is as old as civilization. Over the centuries, mankind has employed ingenious forms of lifting. The earliest lifts used man, animal and water power to raise the load. Lifting devices relied on these basic forms of power from the early agricultural societies until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
From ancient times through the Middle Ages, and into the 13th century, man or animal power was the driving force behind hoisting devices. In ancient Greece, Archimedes developed an improved lifting device operated by ropes and pulleys, in which the hoisting ropes were coiled around a winding drum by a capstan and levers. By A.D. 80, gladiators and wild animals rode crude elevators up to the arena level of the Roman Coliseum.
Medieval records contain numerous drawings of hoists lifting men and supplies to isolated locations. Among the most famous is the hoist at the monastery of St. Barlaam in Greece. The monastery stood on a pinnacle approximately (200 ft) above the ground. Its hoist, which employed a basket or cargo net, was the only means up or down.
The first elevator designed for a passenger was built in 1743 for King Louis XV at his palace in France. The one-person contraption went up only one floor, from the first to the second. Known as the ‘Flying Chair/ it was on the outside of the building, and was entered by the king via his balcony. The mechanism consisted of a carefully balanced arrangement of weights and pulleys hanging inside a chimney. Men stationed inside the chimney then raised or lowered the Flying Chair at the king’s command.
By 1850 steam and hydraulic elevators had been introduced, but it was in 1852 that the landmark event in elevator history occurred—the invention of the world’s first safety elevator by Elisha Graves Otis. The first passenger elevator was installed by Otis in New York in 1857. After Otis’ death in 1861, his sons, Charles and Norton, built on his heritage, creating Otis Brothers & Co. in 1867. By 1873 over 2,000 Otis elevators were in use in office buildings, hotels and department stores across America, and five years later the first Otis hydraulic passenger elevator was installed. The Era of the Skyscraper followed…. and in 1889 Otis revealed the first successful direct-connected geared electric elevator machines.
In 1898 overseas business had added to the company’s growth, and Otis Brothers merged with 14 other elevator entities to form the Otis Elevator Company. In 1903 Otis introduced the design that would become the ‘backbone’ of the elevator industry. The gearless traction electric elevator, engineered and proven to outlast the building itself. This ushered in the age of high-rise structures, ultimately including New York’s Empire State Building, Chicago’s John Hancock Center, and Toronto’s CN Tower.
Otis is part of United Technologies Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and world leader in the building systems and aerospace industries. With 1.7 million Otis elevators and 110,000 escalators in operation, Otis touches the lives of people in more than 200 countries around the world.
