August 3, 1811 — In America they are elevators. In the UK they are lifts. Whatever they are called, without them multi-storey buildings could not successfully exist. The man who enabled us all to rise effortlessly to great heights was born on this day – Elisha Graves Otis.
Otis did not actually invent the elevator: variations had been around for centuries as a means of moving goods. The first known lift was invented by Archimedes in 236BC, and the Colosseum in ancient Rome had 24 lifts operated manually by slaves.
But Otis invented a safety device that prevented an elevator from falling if the cable holding it failed. His device made passenger lifts possible and thus the birth of the skyscraper building.
He was born in Halifax, Vermont, left home at the age of 19, and eventually settled in New York, where he worked for five years as a wagon driver.
By his early thirties he was a skilled craftsman with inventions to his credit as diverse as a machine that could turn out bedsteads four times faster than manual production, a safety brake that could stop trains instantly; and an automatic bread-baking oven.
At the age of 40 he was put in charge of work to convert an abandoned saw mill into a bedstead factory, and he wondered how he could get old machinery there up to the upper levels.
Working with his two sons, he designed a “safety elevator” which solved the problem. Job done, he thought no more about it until business at the bedstead factory dried up. That triggered the birth of a company to market the elevator called Union Elevator Works. The name was later changed to Otis Brothers & Co.
Business took off after he demonstrated his invention at the New York World’s Fair which opened in 1853. Otis stood on a platform with a barrel and other heavy objects way above the heads of the crowd. The platform was held only by a single rope, which he ordered an axeman to cut.
There were gasps of horror from onlookers as the rope was severed, but after a slight fall the platform quickly came to a halt. The safety mechanism was a proven success.
Orders began pouring in and over the years skyscraper buildings began dotting city landscapes across the world. Many of them are equipped with an Otis lift.
* Those who are afraid to use an elevator should take comfort from statisticians who have worked out that people are 40 times more likely to be killed by a horse and 300 times more likely to be killed by a falling coconut than by a lift!
Published: February 13, 2023
Updated: February 15, 2023
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