A. B. See to Westinghouse

Like the sap rising in a forest is the morning flow of Manhattanites to work, as packed elevators in tall buildings whisk them upward by thousands to disperse on higher and higher floors. By the time this life has drained out of the office buildings at 5 p.m. and apartment houses and hotels are full for the night, Manhattan elevators have carried 13,000,000 passengers 95,000 miles. In the business of furnishing vertical transportation to New York and other cities, famed Otis Elevator Co. held an unworried near-monopoly from about 1900 to 1926, controlled as much as 75% of elevator installation in the U. S. Then Westinghouse Electric's new elevator division made Otis feel the pinch of competition, now handles about 20% of the business. In Westinghouse engineering Otis met a worthy rival, perhaps for the first time.

All elevator engineering is based on the simple hoist. Suspended by cables (still "ropes" to elevator men) and balanced by a counterweight, the car is drawn upward on its rails by a motor-driven drum ("sheave") at the top of the shaft. The development of this mechanism from the old geared, hand-operated elevator to the modern skyscraper type was chiefly a matter of making the necessary high speeds comfortable and safe. Pioneering Otis engineers experimenting on Otis employes found that a speed of 1,200 ft. per minute was fast enough, that the rate of acceleration upward of an elevator cannot be greater than 14 ft. per sec. without causing passengers' knees to buckle as gravity's pull abruptly increases their weight.* To slow down and stop high speed elevators Otis perfected its "signal control" system, by which contacts made at every floor with the braking mechanism become effective only when a button has been pushed for a certain floor. Of this type are the Otis elevators (capable of 1,200 ft. per min.) in the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.

One of the first big Westinghouse coups was the installation of 36 top-speed (1,400 ft. per min.) elevators in Radio City's 69-story Rockefeller Tower. These smooth performers differ from Otis elevators in the use of photo-electric cells instead of the usual electrical contacts for braking and for leveling off at each floor. In en- gineering innovations Westinghouse has kept in stride with Otis by matching Otis' double-decker elevators in Manhattan's Cities Service Building with a system for running two elevators in the same shaft. But Otis' great advantage lies in its maintenance operations, which during Depression reputedly accounted for two-thirds of its total business.

Most likely field for new elevator business in the near future is that of apartment houses and housing projects. What in view of this appeared to be an extremely astute transaction, was announced by Westinghouse last week: the acquisition of old, privately owned A. B. See Elevator Co., third largest in the land and a specialist in medium-height elevator jobs.

A. B. See Co. was founded as an elevator repair company in 1883, when elevators were still a rarity, by Alonzo Bertram See, an upstate New Yorker with exceptionally downright opinions even in his teens. He worked for Otis for a while, then set up his own shop in a basement on Manhattan's Centre Street. Thence he moved to Brooklyn and started manufacturing A. B. See elevators. By 1909 Mr. See had a $1,000,000 business, still largely consisting of carriage lifts (for storing carriages in stables) and genteel elevators for four-and six-story brownstone houses. About that time Alonzo See began one of the most distinguished careers among U. S. writers of letters-to-the-editor.

Twin bugaboos of Mr. See were modern trends in education and modern trends in womanhood. In many a testy paragraph he inveighed against 1) the stupidity of school superintendents and pedagogs, who overtaxed their pupils' brains with useless study; 2) the brazen influence of women who demanded equal rights for an inferior sex. So copious and infuriated did Mr. See become that at length he composed a book, published it in 1928 with a bitter title: Schools. Sample thoughts of Mr. See:

"Those in charge of the schools act as if they thought the children had committed some heinous crime which could be expiated only by long years of sadness, mental strain and physical injury."

"If the world had had to depend on the inventive and constructive ability of women, we should still be sleeping on the plains."

Not until he was past 70 did Anti-Feminist See begin to mellow. Last year one of his female cousins persuaded him to give a dinner for 15 leading Manhattan women, with the result that Mr. See announced his conversion, at least to the extent of approving women's colleges.

Meanwhile the A. B. See Co. kept on making elevators first in Brooklyn and then in Jersey City, prospered in its quiet way. Son Alva B. See entered the business after graduating from presumably the least punishing prep school the Sees could find (Blair Academy), worked up to succeed his father as president in 1930. Biggest job the company ever handled was the installation of 24 elevators in New York County Courthouse, cost: $400,000. Its biggest job at present is being done for the Library of Congress. First disclosure of the company's financial status occurred last week when Westinghouse bought it from the Sees for 10,000 shares of common stock, worth $1,490,000 at the market price. Assets of the company were estimated at $1,068,000. Sales in 1936 were $1,650,750, compared to $1,262,293 in 1935. After a loss in 1935 of $73,945, the company made $3,348 last year.

* Navy fliers launched by catapults at an acceleration of five times "gravity speed" temporarily weigh five times as much backward as they ordinarily weigh downward.

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