The elevators

We often pay little heed to the everyday objects and mechanisms that make our daily life simpler and easier. We take them for granted and think not of the idea that originated them or the inventor who created them. One of my favorites is the ubiquitous elevator. It is a mechanisms that we use daily and yet never spend any time wondering about its origins. Did you know that the elevator is over two thousand years old and that it was invented by Archimedes?

Actually the first reference to an elevator is in the works of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who reported that Archimedes (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) built his first elevator probably in 236 BC. In some literary sources of later historical periods, elevators were mentioned as cabs on a hemp rope and powered by hand or by animals. In 1000, the Book of Secrets by al-Muradi in Islamic Spain described the use of an elevator-like lifting device, in order to raise a large battering ram to destroy a fortress. In the 17th century the prototypes of elevators were located in the palace buildings of England and France.

While most ancient and medieval elevators used drive systems based on hoists or winders, it was the discovery of a system based on the screw drive which was perhaps the most important step in elevator technology since ancient times. The first screw drive elevator was built by Ivan Kulibin and installed in Winter Palace in 1793. It was this invention that led to the creation of modern passenger elevators. .

The development of elevators was led by the need for movement of raw materials including coal and lumber from hillsides. The technology developed by these industries and the introduction of steel beam construction worked together to provide the passenger and freight elevators in use today. Starting in the coal mines, by the mid-19th century elevators were operated with steam power and were used for moving goods in bulk in mines and factories. These steam driven devices were soon being applied to a diverse set of purposes - in 1823, two architects working in London, Burton and Hormer, built and operated a novel tourist attraction, which they called the "ascending room". It elevated paying customers to a considerable height in the centre of London, allowing them a magnificent panoramic view of the city centre.

For most city-dwellers, the elevator is an unremarkable machine that inspires none of the passion or interest that Americans afford trains, jets, and even bicycles. Without the elevator, there could be no downtown skyscrapers or residential high-rises, and city life as we know it would be impossible. In that sense, the elevator’s role in American history has been no less profound or transformative than that of the automobile. In fact, the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns.

If we tend to ignore the significance of elevators, it might be because riding in them tends to be such a brief, boring, and even awkward experience—one that can involve unplanned encounters between people with whom we have nothing in common, internal turmoil over where to stare, and a vaguely unpleasant awareness of the fact that we’re hanging from a cable in a long, invisible shaft.

In a new book, “Lifted,” German journalist and cultural studies professor Andreas Bernard zeroes in on this experience, tracing mankind’s relationship to the elevator back to its origins and finding that it has never been a totally comfortable one. “After 150 years, we are still not used to it,” Bernard said. “We still have not exactly learned to cope with this...mixture of intimacy and anonymity.” 

Today, as the world’s urban population explodes, and cities become denser, taller, and more crowded, America’s arsenal of elevators—900,000 at last count, according to Elevator World magazine’s 2012 Vertical Transportation Industry Profile—are a force that’s becoming more important than ever. 

Even less appreciated these days than their transformative effects on American cities are the effects that elevators have had on Americans themselves when they stepped inside of them. At first this was a central concern: As late as the 1900s, doctors worried about a nausea-inducing condition known as “elevator sickness,” caused by the sudden movement of one’s organs inside the body when an elevator came to a halting stop. Public health advocates, meanwhile, warned that the shared conveyances would spread disease among neighbors and co-workers. Other worries were psychological: As Bernard points out in his book, the concept of claustrophobia emerged in the psychiatric literature at the same time as the elevator, and the experience of being inside one was listed from the start as a primary instigator of symptoms.

Elevators also raised new questions of etiquette. One big issue was whether a man in an elevator ought to remove his hat in the presence of a woman, as he would in someone’s home or a restaurant, or keep it on, as he would on a train or a streetcar. The question reflected a basic uncertainty about what this space really was—a mode of transportation, or some kind of tiny moving room.

That was only one of the peculiar uncertainties that came with riding elevators. Another was that they felt simultaneously public and private, taking people out of the broader world while locking them into a narrow, self-contained one alongside a random assortment of colleagues, neighbors, and strangers. By bringing together people who often only kind of knew each other, elevators created vague expectations of interaction—a smile, a nod, even a bit of small talk to acknowledge that everyone on board lived or worked in the same building. Put another way, the experience of riding elevators is still marked by awkwardness and serendipity—who will I see? How long do I have to stand like this?—and as Bernard points out in his book, those qualities have made it a staple of romantic comedies, office dramas, and crime stories in which the plot requires two people to be suddenly and unexpectedly thrust together.

Its uniqueness as an environment also has allowed social scientists to use it as a fruitful laboratory for experiments on behavior. One study tested the effect of smiling on people’s willingness to stand near strangers, for instance, while another looked at how men and women choose to situate themselves in relation to each other upon boarding.

The distinctiveness of elevators as social spaces is also the reason we speak of an “elevator pitch”—so named after the one place the company CEO might spend 60 seconds as captive audience to an ambitious intern. It is this mixing of worlds that makes elevators so important. And the more opportunities modern life gives us to separate ourselves from others—by getting into our cars and escaping into our suburban homes, by hiding in our cubicles and burying our heads in our social networks—the more the elevator matters as a place that squeezes us together for a moment and forces us to grapple with one another’s existence.

Sadly, there is cause to worry about the future of these moments. The next big leap in elevator technology, already active in large new office towers, is something called “destination dispatch,” which groups people who are going to similar floors together in order to get them where they’re going more quickly. Such a system is more efficient in terms of both time and energy, but it also makes it so that people who work on far-flung floors are less likely ever to run into each other. More specifically, it may reduce the chance that someone high up in a company’s hierarchy would share an elevator ride with someone who works down below. Serendipity, in this scenario, begins to recede.

Of course, the elevator has been through changes before. Trained operators armed with cranks and levers have been replaced with buttons; motion sensors have made holding the door less of a heroic act. Through it all, it has never quite lost the strangeness that makes it so different from anything else we experience in our daily lives. 

For all the association with modernity and all the large-scale changes it has enabled, the elevator ride itself—this small, enduring moment of sharing a box with semi-strangers—has been reminding us, for 150 years, of a crucial fact about what it means to be part of a society: that even when they’re standing still, everyone around us is on their way to somewhere.