The safety elevator is an astonishingly successful mass transit system which has changed the very shape of our cities.
In 1853 Elisha Otis climbed onto a platform which was then hoisted high above a large crowd of onlookers, nervy with anticipation. A man with an axe cut the cable, the crowd gasped, and Otis鈥檚 platform shuddered 鈥� but it did not plunge. 鈥淎ll safe, gentlemen, all safe!鈥� he boomed. The city landscape was about to be turned on its head by the man who had invented not the elevator, but the elevator brake. As Tim Harford explains, the safety elevator is an astonishingly successful mass transit system which has changed the very shape of our cities.
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: Modern Elevator, Credit: iurii/Shutterstock)
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Sources and related links
David Owen -聽鈥淕reen Manhattan鈥� The New Yorker 18 October 2004
Richard Florida -聽鈥淭he World Is Spiky鈥� The Atlantic Monthly October 2005
Nick Paumgarten -聽鈥淯p and Then Down鈥� The New Yorker 21 April聽聽
Kheir Al-Kodmany -聽 鈥淭all Buildings and Elevators: A Review of Recent Technological Advances鈥� Buildings 2015, 5, 1070-1104
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