Lifted by Andreas Bernard

Author:Andreas Bernard [Bernard, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2014-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

Blanche Hildebrand, a woman elevator operator, at Marshall Field’s and Company, Chicago, 1918. Photograph by Chicago Daily News, negative DN-0070326. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.

PUSH-BUTTON CONTROLS AND THE PATH TO SELF-OPERATED ELEVATORS

Not every elevator operator was blessed with the ambition and talent of a Felix Krull. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the carelessness of the personnel led to increasing demands for self-regulating elevator operation, which also became feasible at a time of improvements in electronic control technology. Above all in New York, which in 1900 still lacked a legally required examination for operators, there was discussion of the need for such an improvement.14 The topic arose as early as 1891, in the American Architect and Building News:

Another improvement, which is yet to come, will consist, we think, in an automatic stop for the elevator. Nothing is more tedious, clumsy and dangerous than the way in which an inexperienced boy stops and starts an elevator, particularly if he wishes to astonish the passengers by his skill. Often, he purposely fails to stop it entirely at the landing, expecting the passengers to leap in or out. … At other times he fails to pull the slipper rope in time, and the elevator stops a foot or two above its proper place. … All this dangerous and annoying ineffectiveness might be done away with by an automatic contrivance.15

This passage clearly shows the consequences when the skills required to drive a mechanically operated elevator were lacking: carelessness and showing off. In the following years, the apparatus that put an end to the unreliability of all manually operated controls was introduced, first in the United States and France. It consisted of an array of push buttons inside the cab and outside, at the door into the shaft. Their use required no practice or technical know-how whatsoever, and they have remained ubiquitous right up to the present day. The first American building to trust this new device was apparently the Postal Telegraph Building, built in New York City in 1893. Its elevators used a short-lived transitional system: instead of separate buttons for each floor, there was only an Up and a Down button and a dial one had to use to set the intended floor before beginning the ride.16 The architect Maurice Saglio reported on a similar array in an 1896 article, “City Apartment Houses in Paris.” The new buildings he visited in the rue du Luxembourg, for instance, “are served by elevators which seem to me to have reached the last perfection, and I hardly conceive how they could be better.” The elevators were intended only for the use of the small number of tenants in the building and therefore were not supposed to need an elevator operator,

and, as they are to be handled by impractical folks, they are very easily moved and offer complete security. … The engineer, M. Pifre, had the idea of adding electric buttons by which every movement can be arranged. … The handling is done by means of two buttons; one bearing the inscription ascent and the other descent.

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