1861

Elevator

Elisha Otis (1811–1861), Werner von Siemens (1816–1892)

By the second half of the 1800s, architects and structural engineers were coming up with new ideas for buildings. These ideas would allow them to create taller and taller structures. But they faced the limitation of stairs. People will only climb so many flights of stairs before they give up.

Someone had to engineer something better than stairs to solve this impasse. The solution that eventually evolved is a room that moves vertically—an elevator. American inventor Elisha Otis patented a steam elevator in 1861, later founding the Otis Elevator Company.

For a steam elevator to function in a building, it had to have a boiler to create pressurized steam and a steam engine to turn a large drum for winding the cable. From there the elevator mechanism had the four key elements we are familiar with today: the car, a counterweight, the cables and their associated pulleys, and then the safety mechanism that made elevators from the Otis company famous. If a cable broke, it would release a braking mechanism that would immediately stop the car and keep it from falling back down the shaft. This braking system gave people the confidence to use elevators without fear.

In 1880, German inventor Werner von Siemens produced the first electric elevator. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of electrical engineering for this and other contributions.

By the year 1900, there were over 3,000 elevators in New York City. They carried more than a million people every day. Engineers had created a safe device that was extremely useful to people living in cities, and it made the skyscraper era possible. Without elevators, buildings really would not have gotten much higher than four or five stories.

SEE ALSO High-Pressure Steam Engine (1800), Empire State Building (1931).

Elisha Otis’s elevator (1861 patent shown here) was the first with a safety catch to protect passengers in the event of a broken cable.