The safety elevator

technology · earth · United States, then worldwide

A hoist fitted with a governor-and-ratchet device that grips the guide rails if the hoisting rope fails, so that a falling car stops instead of falling. Elisha Otis demonstrated the safety mechanism publicly at the New York Crystal Palace exhibition in 1854, cutting the rope on a loaded platform; the first passenger installation followed in a New York store building in the later 1850s. Its importance to architecture is that it converts height from a liability into an asset. Before it, upper floors were cheap because nobody wanted to climb to them; after it, upper floors command higher rents for light and view, and the economic case for building tall inverts. The steel frame made great height structurally possible and the elevator made it worth paying for; neither alone produces the tall building.