Coventina's History Thread: Otis - The Next Generation!

[Coventina]

Charles and Norton Otis proved better businessmen and rivaled their father as technicians, making important improvements to their useful device. By 1873, Otis Brothers & Company, revenues soaring, had installed 2000 elevators into buildings. Replacing steam-powered lifts, their hydraulic elevators sat on steel tubes sunk into shafts deep below the buildings. An influx of water pushed the platforms up. Reducing the water pressure lowered the elevators.

Where hotel guests previously had preferred the accessible first floor, they now opted to "make the transit with ease" (as an Otis catalog boasted), to the top floors, which offered "an exemption from noise, dust, and exhalations of every kind."

Though taken for granted today, elevators were the height of opulence then. One elevator from that era in Saratoga Springs, New York, was outfitted with chandeliers and paneled in ebony and tulipwood.

Riding the skyscraper boom, the Otis firm went from one noted project to another. In 1889, the firm completed lifts for the bottom section of the Eiffel Tower. Around 1900, it bought the patents to a related invention, the escalator. In 1913, the Otis firm installed 26 electric elevators for the world's then-tallest structure, New York's Woolworth Building. In 1931, Otis installed 73 elevators and more than 120 miles of cables in another record-breaker, the 1250-foot Empire State Building.


Photograph of the original Otis elevators on the Eiffel Tower.
They have been replaced by newer Otis elevators.
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[electric_blue68]

1. Wow, hydraulic versions! And...

I thought I remembered something special about my college's elevator! 😄

From Amusing Planet:

"The Cooper Union's Foundation Building in Lower Manhattan was completed in 1859. This large six-story brownstone building of Anglo-Italianate style featuring heavy, ornate, round-arched windows was the first building in the world that was designed to accommodate an elevator—four years before such an invention became available for passenger use. At that time, New York was growing vertically and Peter Cooper, the founder of Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science—one of America’s leading private college today—believed that soon people would need elevators to reach the higher floors. Indeed, the development of skyscrapers would not have been possible without elevators. Many architects and engineers of the time must have felt the same, but Peter Cooper—an inventor himself—was one of the first to act.".

So he had his architect build an empty shaft in place. Elevators were in use for lifting, and lowering supplies, etc, but not yet considered safe for people.

[Coventina]

2. Cool! A true visionary!! n/t