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Reviews
| From Ascending Rooms to Express Elevators: A History of the Passenger Elevator in the Nineteenth Century. By Lee E. Gray. Mobile, Ala.: Elevator World, Inc., 2002. vii+316 pp., 175+ illus., tables, notes, bibl., index. $80 hb (ISBN 1-886536-46-5).
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This splendid account of one of the 19th century's key technologies, although largely unstudied, grew from the author's 1982 master's thesis and consequent obsession (his word) with the development of vertical transportation and its effect on architecture and broader culture. In view of the rather astonishing breadth of his research, it is a clear mark of wisdom that he confined this study (mostly) to the last half of the century and (mostly) to the class of lift noted in the title, although there is appropriate spillover in both areas.
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While the few but essential foreign antecedents (for the most part English) are dealt with, this is essentially the story of the American elevator. Where else, after all, were to be found the skyscrapers that so logically led to the "modern" high-rise, high-speed, high-powered, ingeniously controlled, almost always hydraulically powered elevators of the 1880s and '90s? In this vein, Gray properly corrects the oft-repeated fallacy that it was the elevator that made possible the skyscraper, when, in fact, it was the development of each that gave rise to the other in an ongoing symbiotic relationship.
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The genesis of it all is found in the very early-19th century in certain multistory English textile mills, where interior hoisting platforms were used to raise the heavy cotton bales and, in short order, the workers—in both cases inspired by the wish of the owner to turn his employees' energies to more productive purposes than manually hoisting bales and climbing stairs. These relatively crude devices, styled teagles—a dialect version of tackle—were powered from the mill's central power source by line shafting and belting like all the other machinery. The teagle was widely described and illustrated in technical and popular periodicals, and thus it soon migrated to America. By the 1840s it was adopted for like purposes, mainly in the mills and factories of New England and New York State. With various refinements, the powered industrial elevator has remained in use, in decreasing numbers to be sure, to the present, the only essential change to the technology being replacement of the motive power by a dedicated electric motor as the use of centralized power sources in mills and factories gradually gave way to individual motors driving the production machines.
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As Gray points out, the history of elevator technology, as with most other technologies within roughly the last 150 years, cannot be properly examined without viewing its parallel commercial aspects. By about 1850, both freight and some passenger elevators were sufficiently well developed that they could be considered a marketable product, leading to the establishment of a number of elevator-manufacturing concerns. At this point, the firm whose name has become globally synonymous with the elevator entered the picture with Elisha G. Otis's celebrated 1854 demonstration of his "wagon-spring safety" at New York's Crystal Palace exhibition. This simple but effective device that would hold the platform or car in place in the event of the hoisting rope(s) breaking had an enormously positive effect on public acceptance of the elevator, to a considerable extent overcoming a widespread and quite understandable fear of injury or death resulting from smashing into the bottom of the shaft during a runaway.
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The elevator as a practical laborsaving device and commercially successful product blossomed in the 1850s and '60s, either powered from a central source in factories and mills or, usually, by a dedicated steam engine in hotels, exclusive stores, and occasionally apartment buildings.
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One of the most interesting and important elements of the book is the author's attention to the elevator's increasingly complex technology from the 1860s on, as the growing number of manufacturers devoted attention to every aspect of vertical transportation, especially motive power, smoothness of operation, and, above all, safety. The latter two were, naturally, directed more to passenger elevators than freight, an indication of the industry's expansion in that direction.
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Perhaps the most significant factor promoting growing elevator use and more sophisticated design was the evolution of the tall building, leading gradually to the skyscraper, initially in New York in the 1870s. In any building of seven or eight stories (commercial, industrial, or residential), the elevator no longer was a luxury but a necessity, presenting new challenges to both the industry and the architect. These have been well and fully addressed by Gray, by both copious illustrations of the machinery and ancillary equipment involved and by the building plans he reproduces from the architectural and engineering press of the day. Of particular concern to manufacturer, architect, and building owner was the critical relationship between elevator shafts and machinery, on the one hand, and the building itself on the other—a relationship that remains a central concern to the present and that becomes more problematical in direct proportion to building height.
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The appearance of the true skyscraper produced technical problems unanswerable by the dedicated steam engine turning a winding drum and introduced the next major means of powering the elevator—hydraulics—ironically harking back directly to the very first means of powering hoists. The solution to the manifold problems of the steam engine and other forms of internal power in hotels, apartment houses, and office buildings was solved in all cities above a certain size after mid-century by the emergence of central water-supply systems that reached the central business district in mains. The water, being under pressure, provided a constant, clean, reliable, and relatively cheap source of energy, free of boilers, line shafting, and the other space-consuming equipage of the prior power sources. Moreover, it was a power easily adapted to run machinery, presses, and, by the 1870s, elevators. In the hydraulic elevator, pressurized water was used to force a piston or plunger out of a cylinder, raising the car directly or, more commonly, by separating a pair of sheaves that formed a reverse tackle, the free end of its cable being attached to the car and thus raising it.
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Once the advantages of the hydraulic elevator were perceived, the rush was on, among not only the major builders like Otis but also dozens of lesser firms. By the 1880s, refinements in control and other elements of the hydraulic elevator had produced a variety of systems of great rise—up to 20 stories and more—with speed, reliability, and safety, all deftly described by Gray and extensively illustrated by wood engravings drawn largely from the engineering press and an impressive number of manufacturers' catalogs. The hydraulic elevator ruled the industry for the remainder of the 19th century and in certain instances well into the 20th, with installations in a number of large office buildings and department stores remaining in full use well past mid-century.
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Why, if the last quarter of the 19th century was the robust beginning of the age of electricity, did not this eminently flexible power source earlier displace the hydraulic elevator? Gray discloses the variety of reasons why (citing also the single example, the rather curious wedding of the hydraulic and the electric, the Sprague-Pratt of the 1880s). There were, to be sure, numerous low-rise elevator machines from the mid-1880s with electric motors driving winding drums in apartment buildings and factories, and electric car-controls and motor-driven booster pumps in large hydraulic systems where the water main's pressure was inadequate. Here lies a somewhat regrettable aspect of this book, for by ending an exemplary story neatly at the end of a century, readers are deprived of learning about the "gearless traction machine," which in the very first years of the 20th century at last made practical the direct application of electricity to the powering of the heavy-duty, high-rise elevator. This probably is an unfair criticism, and perhaps Gray will open Vol. II: The Twentieth Century with that major development in elevator technology.
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As it stands, the last few chapters cover, with Gray's remarkable attention to detail, the relationship between the (hydraulic) elevator and the large, tall office buildings of New York and Chicago. He does this by means of case studies based largely on detailed accounts and floor plans appearing in the architectural press of the day. As with much of the book, this is an approach unique in the history of the subject, which may easily be determined from the author's vast bibliography.
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In researching the history of the 19th-century elevator, Gray has left no stone unturned. He has explored not only the few existing historical monographs and the greater number of elevator texts but also the available manufacturers' literature, every scrap of pertinent material in the technical journals and the popular press, and several important archives, in particular that of the Otis company—a treasure trove that heretofore was largely unstudied. Rarely is any book the last word on any subject, but in this case, it is hard to imagine that more could be said on the subject—or more skillfully, for that matter.
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Can the 19th-century passenger elevator be construed as industrial archaeology? To be sure. A certain amount of exploring among the factories, warehouses, institutions, office buildings, and grander houses (but probably not the hotels) of the period will reveal a modest number of "original" installations of nearly all types then in use, with the probable exception of steam machines, although the existence of even one or two of these is not entirely unlikely.
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| Finally, a barb must be aimed at the head of the publisher, who should know better: where was the copy editor? Far too many gaffes appear throughout the book, although the same can be said regarding much of today's world of publishing. |
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