Up & Down with Otis

In Manhattan's new $10 million, 22-story Universal Pictures Building on Park Avenue, visitors were introduced last week to the latest elevator wrinkle. In Universal's double bank of eight elevators the Otis Elevator Co. had installed the electronic "touch" system.

Behind each signal button is an electronic tube. The moment the button is touched (it doesn't have to be pushed), the tube sends an electronic signal which automatically stops the next elevator at that floor. Inside the elevator, the operator also works his door controls by electronic button controls.

The new system does away with a large amount of electric wiring (about 40 electromagnetic relays in a 20-story building). Since the touch button has no moving parts, no mechanical failures are possible.

Biggest & Fastest. All this is a far cry from the elevator seen by New Yorkers at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853. The inventor, a New England master mechanic named Elisha Graves Otis, rode up & down in it, occasionally making the crowd gasp by cutting the elevator's rope cable with a knife. Others, as far back as Archimedes, had built vertical hoists of one kind or another, but Otis was the first to build one with an automatic safety catch to keep it from falling. It was a kind of ratchet, like the gadget that prevents the spring on a mechanical toy from unwinding.

Out of Elisha Otis' tiny workshop in Yonkers, N.Y. grew the Otis Elevator Co., the world's largest. It has built more than half (128,918) of the elevators in the U.S. (224,417), has sold 69,000 elevator installations abroad. Last year it grossed $61 million, in March had a backlog of more than $100 million in orders.

Otis' biggest job was the $3 1/2 million installation of 74 elevators in the Empire State Building. But Westinghouse Electric, Otis' chief competitor, claims the world's fastest elevators: Rockefeller Center's bank of eight, which travel between the first and 65th floors of the RCA Building at 1,400 feet per minute, make passengers' ears pop with the fast change in atmospheric pressure.*

Busiest & Safest. Today the elevator is not only the busiest but the safest form of transportation. Last year, in Manhattan alone, 31,500 elevators carried between four and five billion passengers, injured only 118, killed 15. Half of the accidents were caused by the careless use of keys to elevator shaft doors (people step into cars that aren't there).

Elisha Otis' original safety catch has been succeeded by scores of automatic speed and leveling controls. Until 1945, Otis boasted that not one of its passenger elevators had ever fallen because of broken cables. That year an Army bomber, bursting through the Empire State Building between the 78th and 79th floors, severed the cables and all the safety devices on one Otis elevator, which plummeted to the subbasement. Even so, the operator (who was alone) got out alive.

*Prescribed rate of landing descent for U.S. airliners: 500 feet per minute.

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