Elevators
The press of other Georgetown business has delayed my first Noteof the academic year. Since I last wrote, much has been accomplished on the Capitol Crossing Project. Construction Notesrecently took the opportunity to visit Georgetown’s award winning Center for Transnational Legal Studies located in London. CTLS has moved into new classroom and office space at Kings College as it celebrates the first ten years of the program. The skyline in London, like the skyline above Capitol Crossing and much of the rest of Washington, is dotted with tower cranes. The difference, of course, is the height of the London buildings. Buildings in Washington have had height limits imposed since 1893. Contrary to common belief, the limitations have nothing to do with the height of the Washington Monument or the United States Capitol. Instead they were enacted as a protest to the Cairo Apartment Building located at 16thand Q Streets, N.W. Rising to 164 feet, the Cairo was then the tallest building in the District of Columbia. Capitol Crossing rises to about one hundred and twenty feet. No such limitations exist in London so the cranes fly high over the city, often perched on new buildings rising more than seven hundred feet. It was the advent of safe elevators in the 1800s that permitted buildings to rise to the height of the Cairo and to the extreme heights of modern skyscrapers. I will say more about that later but let me bring you up to date on the current progress of Capitol Crossing.
Little remains to be done at 200 Massachusetts Avenue. Punch list items are being addressed, final inspections are occurring, commissioning is nearly complete, revised trade permits are being received, and training is mostly completed. The top floors are being built-out for the first tenants, the American Petroleum Industry, which will occupy the building sometime around the first of the year.
Materials have all been removed from the first floor restaurant space so its expansiveness is now apparent. A few weeks ago, the structural elements of the bridge that will connect 200 Massachusetts Avenue to 250 Massachusetts Avenue began arriving. When completed, the glass enclosed bridge will permit easy passage between buildings during inclement weather. It will also add an attractive design feature above the retail promenade between the buildings. You can see the early stages of its construction as you walk down Massachusetts Avenue.
Both towers of 250 Massachusetts Avenue are now topped-off and work is accelerating inside the building. Plumbing, sink fixtures, and counter tops are being installed in bathrooms throughout the north tower. Mechanical rooms, electrical closets, and fire alarm rooms are also being fitted out. Work is beginning on the skylight for the connector lobby and will soon be completed.
Reshores (supports between newly poured concrete floors) have been removed through the eighth floor in the south tower, and ductwork, copper risers, and sprinkler pipe are being installed in both towers. The glass curtain wall on the north tower extends from the third floor to the top floor, leaving only the retail space open to the elements. Work on the south tower curtain wall will begin later this month.
Work continues inside the north parking garage. Fire suppression systems and light fixtures are being installed, and electrical, switchgear, and generator rooms are being built. Concrete is being poured in the center block garage which should top out in October and in portions of the south block while excavation continues toward E Street.
The desire to move vertically from the ground up to higher areas has driven invention for centuries. People often think that Elisha Graves Otis — whose name appears on millions of elevators — invented the lifting device; but that is not true. He did, however, invent an automatic safety catch that prevented catastrophic falls of the elevator cab should a rope or cable break.
Rope and pulley hoists of various kinds have been used for two thousand years, often with great apprehension. Ropes and cables could break, platforms could collapse spilling materials onto the workers below, and operators could make fatal mistakes. Today, however, we take elevators for granted. Most people enter, ride, and exit without fear or anxiety. Heavy weights glide easily to great heights. Indeed the tall buildings that dot the urban landscape could not exist without elevators and Capitol Crossing is no exception. The elevators in 200 Massachusetts Avenue have been waiting for tenants for some time. Shafts exist for the elevators in both towers of 250 Massachusetts Avenue and a freight elevator has already been installed in the north tower. Before it was installed, a materials hoist was transporting people and supplies to the upper levels of the buildings.
The need for vertical transportation has led to the creation of various devices. Some, like ladders and stairways, are simple and require no moving parts. More sophisticated devices, such as hoists and manually driven windlasses were among the earliest forms of mechanical vertical transport. Hoists use cords that attach to the object to be lifted which then run through elongated tubes attached to a base. The cords, when powered by animals, humans turning cranks, and later motors, lift and then hold people and materials at the upper level. The Greek mathematician Archimedes is often credited with inventing the first known elevator, which actually was more of a hoist using a screw. This provenance, however, is sometimes disputed.
Windlasses have been used to vertically transport people for centuries. Unlike a hoist, a windlass uses a horizontal barrel that is turned by an operator with a crank to wind a rope. The rope is attached to a pulley that can then lift objects. Windlasses were sometimes attached to the top of buildings and used to move people using baskets, pulleys, and ropes. The Chinese official Wang Zhen illustrated one in the Book of Agriculturein 1313; some windlasses, though more sophisticated, remain in use today. Long before windlasses were attached to buildings, however, the Tibetan people used windlasses to transport people up mountains.
Modern elevators, unlike hoists and windlasses, are powered by electricity and require vertical rails for movement.
The early Romans adapted anything they could find from ancient Greece. They were using primitive elevators in Rome as early as 336 B.C. By 80 A.D., the Romans employed shaft-ways with movable platforms to raise wild animals from their cages onto the arena floor in their coliseums. Each of these elevators relied on eight slaves to turn a wheel that raised the cage to the floor of the arena. The elevator used a system of shafts, pulleys, levers, and ropes to operate the elevator. The slaves pushed levers attached to a wheel wound with ropes that activated pulleys and lead weights attached to the wooden cage. The platform rose up wooden shafts and could carry more than 600 pounds per load. The Colosseum in Rome had twenty-four elevators.
Early elevators were used for both love and war. The Spanish Islamic writer, al-Muradi, wrote in his Book of Secretsin 1000 A.D. that armies used an elevator-like lifting device to raise a large battering ram to destroy a fortress. In 1743, King Louis XV of France used a system designed to secretly transport his mistresses into his bedroom chambers. The system, known as the infamous “flying chair,” required the mistress to sit in a crate that she operated by pulling a cord which then triggered a pulley system. The chair was created by Louis’ favorite machinist, Blaise-Henri Arnoult, based on a design developed by Count de Villayer. Madame de Châteauroux was the first to use the device. The more famous courtesan, Madame de Pompadour, used it as well. Screw-type elevators were also in use in the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg and in the Arkhangelskoye Palace near Moscow as early as the late 1790s.
Unless one is in the construction or maintenance professions, the word elevator is usually associated with moving passengers rather than materials vertically. The earliest record of a passenger elevator dates back to the seventeenth century; but modern elevators date from the mid-1800s. In 1823, the British architect Thomas Horner built a steam-powered lifting device designed by another architect named Decimus Burton. Horner placed his lift, called an “Ascending Room,” inside the London Colosseum built in Regents Park. The Ascending Room, which opened in January, 1829, carried twelve people to a platform at the top of the Colosseum for a 360 degree view of London. It was, until then, a nearly unimaginable view of London. Sadly, neither the Ascending Room nor the Colosseum exit today.
It was the early industrialists who drove the demand for elevators as labor moved off the farms and out of the countryside to the mines and to the emerging manufacturing cities of Europe and America. Steam driven elevators were used in coal mines and in the lumber industry during the mid-1800s. The first known application of the traction system elevator was the “Teagle” hoist in England in 1835. This steam-driven elevator was invented by British architects Stutt and Frost. The elevator used hand-pulled ropes to activate a pulley system, which created friction within its sheaves (grooved pulleys) to move the elevator cab up and down. The hand-pulled ropes were managed by an operator in the cab. The first high-rise use of this elevator system was in the fifteen-story Beaver Building in New York City in 1903. A strong enough rope with the correct counterweight on a traction elevator can lift the cab 100 stories. However, the traction elevator was limited by the strength of the ropes and counterweights and it was soon replaced by the hydraulic elevator.
The hydraulic cranewas invented bySir William Armstrong in 1846 for loading cargo at the Tyneside docks along the river in Newcastle on Tyne. The cylinders are hidden away under the deck of the crane. The ends of the pistons are attached to steel cables and pulleys so that they can cause the main cable to wind up and the main tower to rotate. Armstrong’s hydraulic system was adapted for elevators. The system was supported by a heavy piston that moved in a cylinder powered by oil or water pressure inside a motor-activated pump. The pump pushed hydraulic fluid into a hydraulic jack which then raised or lowered the elevator using generated pressure. The opening and closing of the control valve can be manually adjusted to control the elevator’s movement. Together with a stop ball or ring, the valve regulated how fast the elevator moved up and down the shaft. Hydraulic lifts began to replace steam-powered elevators by the 1870s, and were commonly found in ten to twelve story buildings between 1880 and 1900. Although limited by the length of the system’s cylinders, hydraulic elevators had the capacity to rise up to thirty stories with the help of steel-frame construction. They could only travel up to one mile per hour.
The height limitations of hydraulic elevators and the desire for taller buildings gave rise to the use of traction elevators. The cabs of traction elevators are pulled over grooved pulleys called sheaves to generate friction on ropes. The counterweight creates a cohesive system for vertical movement by balancing the weight of the car, ensuring that the rope stays in place, and stopping the elevator cab.The Teagle mentioned above was the first traction elevator but the system had advanced later in the century.
Despite the elevator’s utility, people feared its cables would break, sending them down elevator shafts to their deaths. Consequently, most early elevators hauled goods and equipment. As noted above, Elisha Graves Otis realized that elevators needed a safety brake that would engage immediately to stop the falling platform if the elevator cable broke and invented one. To demonstrate his invention, he built his safety-equipped elevator in the Crystal Palace Exhibition at the New York World’s Fair in 1854. The Fair was held in what is now Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library, one of the great urban parks in America. After he loaded the elevator with equipment, he stepped upon the platform and raised it to full height. He then instructed his assistants to cut the rope with an axe. Instead of falling and killing Otis, the platform stopped, demonstrating that elevators could safely transport people and materials without the risk of catastrophic accidents. Otis’s system was, as Joseph J. Fucini and Suzy Fucini wrote in their book, Entrepreneurs: The Men and Women Behind Famous Brand Names and How They Made It, a “model of engineering simplicity. The safety device consisted of a used wagon spring that was attached to both the top of the hoist platform and the overhead lifting cable. Under ordinary circumstances, the spring was kept in place by the pull of the platform’s weight on the lifting cable. If the cable broke, however, this pressure was suddenly released, causing the big spring to snap open in a jaw-like motion. When this occurred, both ends of the spring would engage the saw-toothed ratchet-bar beams that Otis had installed on either side of the elevator shaft, thereby bringing the falling hoist platform to a complete stop.”
Despite this significant innovation, Otis wasn’t initially successful. In 1856, for example, he sold only 27 elevators. But the advent of the automatic-safety-catch in 1853, and later versions of optimized catch mechanisms, calmed public concern. Nonetheless, all the elevators Otis sold prior to 1857 were for freight. In March of 1857, Otis installed the first passenger elevator in the fashionable emporium of H.V. Haughwout in New York City where the likes of Mary Todd Lincoln bought china, chandeliers, and cut glass. The building, designed by John P. Gaynor, rose five stories to a height of seventy-nine feet. The steam-powered elevator was driven by belts and “sped” upwards at forty feet per minute. A typical elevator today moves between five and twenty-two miles per hour. The fastest modern elevator can travel up to forty-five miles per hour in the 128-story Shanghai Tower building. The Haughwout Building continues to stand today in the SoHo neighborhood in Manhattan, despite efforts between 1941 and 1969 to tear it down and replace it with a highway. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Despite a depression in the 1870s, the economy of the United States grew rapidly at the turn of the century. The innovations in elevator technology, combined with optimism, emerging wealth, and a golden era of great architects to produce tall fireproofed cast iron framed buildings, primarily in New York and Chicago. The first successful passenger elevator in an office building was installed in what was arguably the first skyscraper, the Equitable Life Building in Manhattan. Built in 1870 at 120 Broadway by architects Arthur Gilman and Edward Kendall, the building stood at 130 feet and was equipped with hydraulic elevators built by the Elisha Otis Company. Although the building was reputed to be fireproof, it burned down in 1912. Three months after the “fireproofed building” burned down, the “unsinkable” Titanic went down to the ocean floor in the North Atlantic. The turn of the century was a boisterous time with great industrial innovation and great optimism on both sides of the Atlantic. 1912, however, was not a very good year for boasting.
For many years, an antique dealer named Fred Litwin operated his store on 6thStreet and Indiana Avenue, N.W. (now a Potbelly Sandwich shop). It was reputed to hold an open cage Otis elevator dating to 1853, which would have made it one of the oldest in the world. Freddy’s love affair with his elevator led to a kind of celebrity for him and his elevator. At some point, Otis investigated the claim and discovered it was really a Bates elevator dating from the 1870s or 1880s. Alas, Freddy has passed away; but he died before the discovery that his beloved elevator was not what it seemed to be.
Today, one cannot think of Chicago or New York without thinking of skyscrapers or the Otis Elevator Company. Otis reports that more than 2.6 million escalators (he invented those too) and elevators are in operation in more than two hundred countries around the globe. We don’t pay much attention to elevators these days; they have become utilitarian even when beautiful. We seldom even look at the beauty of the design of the old skyscrapers and think of the new ones only when they are breaking height records. But elevators and the buildings they serviced once were almost magical marvels of science and design, thrilling the passersby, capturing the eye of artists who designed the cabs and their intricate doors, and capturing the voice of poets and authors. As the designers brought beauty to the urban environments, the authors watched and wrote about the change in the pace and quality of life, sometimes of optimism and wealth shared, but more often of poverty lurking footsteps away. They wrote of the marvel and the tragedy of the human condition as it marched through the doors of the tall buildings and their wondrous elevators. Perhaps we have lost the sense of optimism that America once held; perhaps the extreme edges of modern art have pushed away our appreciation of the subtle nuance of bold yet delicate style; perhaps the interplay of science and art, so perfectly balanced during the Gilded Age, has been worn thin by our realization that those treasures seemed to belong to so few. Or maybe we are just too busy to notice as we hurry through the elevators doors of our modern buildings, glued to our phones, trying hard to keep up with the abundance of information that floods our senses every day.
But once it was different. The advent of elevators and skyscrapers at the turn of the 20thcentury changed the urban landscape and changed the way people thought about themselves and the world around them. The poet Carl Sandburg, capturing the evolving city and the era as only he could, wrote these words as that world was emerging in 1916. I leave you with them.
SKYSCRAPER
BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
the way to it?)Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
and tell terrors and profits and loves — curses of men
grappling plans of business and questions of women
in plots of love.Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.***
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.***
On the office doors from tier to tier — hundreds of names
and each name standing for a face written across
with a dead child, a passionate lover, a drivingambition for a million dollar business or a lobster’s
ease of life.Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
the building just the same as the master-men who
rule the building.Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
empties its men and women who go away and eat
and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
elevator men are gone.
There is so much more to say about elevators and about those elevator men; but that will have to wait for another Construction Note.
Wally Mlyniec
SOURCES
Janelle Sampana, Georgetown L’20, researched and wrote parts of this Construction Note.
Andreas Bernard, Lifted, A Cultural History of the Elevator,(David Dollenmayer trans., New York University Press ed. (2014)
Joseph J. Fucini and Suzy Fucini, Entrepreneurs: The Men And Women Behind Famous Brand Names And How They Made It(G K Hall & Co. 1985)
Alisia Goetz, Up Down Across, Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks, (Merrill Publishers 2013)
George R. Strakosch & Robert S. Caporale,The Vertical Transportation Handbook #1 (John Wiley & Sons Inc. 2010)
The First One Hundred Years, (Otis Centennial Report to the Shareholders 1953)
Asme Engineering, Elisha Graves Otis, https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/elevators/elisha-graves-otis
Atlas Obscura, Historic Elevator at Potbelly, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/potbelly-elevator
Matt Blitz, A New Recreation Shows How Ancient Romans Lifted Wild Animals Into the Colosseum, June 16, 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-ancient-romans-got-wild-animals-colosseum-180955580/
ClipArt Etc., Windlass, http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/28200/28231/windlass_28231.htm(last visited August 22, 2018)
Ip.com, Looking Forward, Backward, and Sideways: A Patent History of Elevators, https://ip.com/blog/looking-forward-backwards-sideways-patent-history-elevators/
Gearpatrol, Weird Happenings in Elevator History, https://gearpatrol.com/2014/05/19/weirdest-elevator-happenings-in-history/(last visited August 2018)
Landmark Elevator, History of Elevator Technology, https://landmarkelevator.com/history-of-elevator-technology/ (last visited August 2018)
Made Up in Britain, The Elevator, http://madeupinbritain.uk/Elevator
Lorenzo Moz Ortolani, Ricostruito il montacarichi del Colosseo, July 9, 2015, http://www.backstagenews.it/2015/06/09/ricostruito-il-montacarichi-del-colosseo/
Prismatec, Elevator Industry, https://www.prisma-tec.com/elevator-industry/
Revolvy, Equitable Life Building (Manhattan), https://www.revolvy.com/page/Equitable-Life-Building-%28Manhattan%29
Rodden et al., United States Patent 6,463,886 B1, 2002
T. L. Shield, The Invention of the Elevator, https://www.tlshield.com/invention-elevator
The Teagle, https://www.facebook.com/pg/teagleelevator/about/
This is Versailles, The Flying Chair, http://thisisversaillesmadame.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-flying-chair.html
Wikipedia, E. V. Haughwout Building, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._V._Haughwout_Building
Wikipedia, Elisha Otis,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis
Wikipedia, Jesuit China Missions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_China_Missions
Wikipedia, Shanghai Tower, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Tower
