Elisha Otis installs the first commercial elevator - March 23rd, 1857

On this day in 1857, the first commercial elevator began operation inside a New York City department store.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those interested in the ups and downs of
everyday history. I'm Gay Blusier, and in this episode, we're

(00:21):
talking about the evolution of elevators, including the day the
invention finally went mainstream and why all of them seemed
to be named Otis. The day was March twenty third,
eighteen fifty seven. The first commercial elevator began operation inside

(00:46):
a New York City department store known as the Eve
Howitt Building. The five story china and porcelain store still
stands at the corner of Broadway and Broome Street and
what's now the city's Soho District. The building was added
to the National Register of Historic Places in eighteen seventy three,
as the elevator it housed marked the beginning of an

(01:09):
architectural revolution, one that would forever change the shape and
height of American cities. Elevators have become a somewhat mundane
fixture of modern living, but riding one used to be
a much more thrilling and dangerous prospect. Elevators as we
know them started to take shape in the eighteen fifties,

(01:31):
but they were around in some form long before that.
For instance, if you take just the basic concept of
an elevator a machine that can lift things vertically, then
the invention is actually thousands of years old. It speculated
that ancient Egyptians may have used vertical lifts to build
their pyramids, but the first recorded use of a vertical

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lift comes from the third century BC, when the Greek
mathematician Archimedes built a platform that could be hoisted up
and down using ropes and pulleys. Those early lifts obviously
didn't run on electricity, but were instead powered by people, animals,
or in some cases, even by water. They didn't move

(02:13):
people either. They were mainly used to lift building materials
or water jugs, and it wasn't until a few centuries
later that primitive elevators were first used to transport living creatures.
That was in the first century a d. When Roman
gladiators and wild animals rode the lifts from the lower
levels up to the floor of the coliseum. Even in

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those days, most people wouldn't have trusted their lives to
an elevator. The devices were considered safe enough for enslaved
combatants and wild beasts, but the average citizen would have
still opted for the stairs. There was just too much
room for error when you had people or donkeys pulling
the ropes. People didn't start using elevators by choice until

(02:58):
more reliable systems were developed. For example, in seventeen forty three,
King Louis the fifteenth had one of the earliest passenger
elevators installed in the Palace of Versailles. Being a ladies man,
his private elevator was an easy way for the king's
mistresses to visit him in secret. He called it his
flying chair, and all he had to do to operate

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it was tug on a cord connected to a pulley system.
From there, gravity and a series of counterweights would do
the rest. By the early eighteen hundreds, steam powered lifts
were in development, allowing much heavier loads of building materials
such as coal, lumber, and steel, to be raised hundreds
of feet in a matter of seconds. That new capacity

(03:43):
led to major booms in construction and mining, and was
a big part of what made the Industrial Revolution so transformative.
That said steam powered elevator still had one major flaw.
They were incredibly dangerous. If a rope snapped, the lift
would plummet, and unfortunately, that happened fairly often all the

(04:04):
way through the first half of the nineteenth century. The
danger finally began to subside in the mid eighteen hundreds,
when an entrepreneur and inventor named Elijah Graves Otis arrived
on the scene. He got into the elevator game in
eighteen fifty two while working on a project for a
company that manufactured bed frames. His client needed a way

(04:25):
to move heavy equipment to the second floor of the factory.
The only problem was the equipment was so heavy the
lifting cables couldn't bear the weight for very long, and
if the cables happened to snap, there would be nothing
to stop the elevator from plunging straight to the ground.
Otis's solution was to develop the world's first safety device

(04:46):
for elevators. It was basically a breaking system that functioned
as a fail safe for the lift. If the cable
should give way, the loss of tension would trigger the
release of levers on either side of the elevator car.
Those levers would then lock into a series of grooves
along the vertical guide rails, arresting the car's fall and

(05:06):
locking it in place to be clear. All of the
elevators of the era were braced on either side by
vertical guide rails that helped keep the car steady as
it was raised or lowered. But until Otis came along,
the rails had been completely smooth, so if a cable broke,
the car would just slide straight down in free fall.

(05:27):
Otis's breakthrough was to carve deep set grooves into the
rails and create a kind of saw toothed ratchet system
to act as brakes. Confident in his new invention, Otis
established the Otis Elevator Company in eighteen fifty three. Industrial
manufacturers recognize the merits of the new breaking system right away,

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but they were still slow to adapt. In fact, Otis
only sold three elevators his first year in business for
about three hundred dollars each, and none of them were
used to carry passengers. Despite the advent of the safety
break the public remained wary of elevators. Most people still
viewed the machines as death traps and were unlikely to

(06:09):
be swayed by confusing diagrams and technical explanations about ratchets
and levers. In order to truly trust in such a system,
people would need to see it in action for themselves,
and at the New York World's Fair in eighteen fifty four,
Elijah Otis allowed them to do just that. Of course,
fair goers weren't actually willing to ride an elevator and

(06:31):
test the break system themselves, but ODIs anticipated that, so
instead he arranged the stunt that would put only one
person's life on the line, his own. Here's how it went.
At the Crystal Palace Exposition, hall Otis constructed a fifty
foot wooden elevator. Then, with some help from none other
than P. T. Barnum, Otis gathered a crowd and promised

(06:54):
them a death defying stunt unlike anything they'd ever seen.
With the crowd sufficiently hyped, Otis then dramatically rode the
elevator to the very top, where he then ordered an
axe wielding assistant to cut the rope that held up
the elevator. The onlookers were stunned and braced themselves for
a tragic scene, but thankfully it never came. Instead, to

(07:17):
their surprise and great relief, the platform dropped just a
few inches before it suddenly stopped. The crowd was blown away,
but they were all so skeptical of how reliable the
brake system really was. Maybe Otis had just gotten lucky
and the brakes wouldn't work a second time. So to
silence the naysayers once and for all, Otis performed the

(07:39):
stunt again and again and again every hour of the
day that the fair was open. And in that way,
little by little, one crowd at a time, Elijah Otis
won over the public and convinced them that elevators were
at long last safe to ride. Those demonstrations, as dangerous
as they were, really were the turning point for Otis.

(08:02):
He sold seven elevators in eighteen fifty four and fifteen
the next year. Sales continued to grow from there, but
all the elevators sold were still used for hauling freight
and employees and factories and mines. Then, on March twenty third,
eighteen fifty seven, the Otis Company made history by installing

(08:23):
the first commercial elevator opened to the public. The Howard
Building elevator moved at a speed of point sixty seven
feet per second and was powered by a steam engine
located in the basement. The building's owner knew that something
as novel as an elevator would draw people in, people
who would then hopefully stick around to buy his goods.

(08:45):
The gambit seems to have paid off, as the stores
foot traffic and profits both increased after the installation. Following
that initial success, the floodgates opened, and within sixteen years,
more than two thousand passenger elevators were in operation all
across the country. That wide adoption rate in the eighteen
seventies launched the invention into its second phase, leading to

(09:09):
all kinds of architectural and cultural changes. For example, before
elevators were popularized, there was no such thing as a skyscraper.
Buildings tended to max out at five or six stories,
as climbing more flights of stairs than that would have
been impractical for most residents and workers. In fact, before

(09:29):
elevators made them more accessible, the top floors were the
least desirable spaces in a building, far from being the
luxury retreats we think of today. Top floor apartments were
typically set aside for either low rent tenants or the
in house janitor. With the advent of elevators, though, those
higher floors got much more appealing and much more valuable,

(09:51):
but they also got much higher advances in steel frame
construction and of course, elevators allowed buildings to be much
taller than ever before. That basically meant that anyone who
owned a building no longer needed to fight for new
land to develop on something that's always in short supply
in cities. Instead, they could simply expand their existing buildings upwards,

(10:16):
constructing new offices or hotel rooms or retail spaces where
there used to be nothing but thin air. In that way,
elevators literally shaped the cities we know today. Instead of
sprawling horizontal cities, we ended up with densely clustered, vertical ones.
It wasn't a happy development for the car industry, but

(10:37):
for elevator manufacturers and maintenance crews, it was a dream
come true. Unfortunately, Elijah Otis didn't live long enough to
see just how widely embraced and impactful his invention became.
He passed away in eighteen sixty one, just a few
years after his first elevator was installed in New York City. However,

(10:58):
his sons did carry on the family business, and along
with others, they made improvements on the original design, including
the switch to hydraulic power and eventually to electricity. All
of that innovation helped secure the elevator's place as one
of the most highly trafficked transport systems in the world.
And that's no exaggeration either. According to the La Times,

(11:22):
the world's elevators now move the equivalent of Earth's population
every seventy two hours. Think about that. Every three days,
over seven and a half billion people take a ride
on an elevator, and a large portion of the elevators
they're riding are operated by the Otis Elevator Company, which
is still going strong today. The elevators in the Eiffel

(11:45):
Tower are Otis elevators, and so are the ones in
the Empire, State Building, the White House, the Vatican, the Kremlin.
The list goes on and on. The company is now
one of the two largest elevator manufacturers in the world,
and that's why if you step into an elevator today,
there's a strong chance you'll still find the name Otus

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inscribed on its walls. I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you
now know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you enjoyed today's episode, consider keeping up
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Show and if you have any comments or suggestions. Feel

(12:27):
free to send them my way by dropping a line
to this day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler
May's for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening.
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in history class