![]() Elisha Otis’ elevator, on the other hand, had nothing but a platform and was patented later, in 1861. The first patent for a “vertical railway” was filed in 1859 by Otis Tufts, a coincidentally named engineer whose design – which debuted the same year within New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel – included an actual car with a bench inside, where people could sit. The legendary American car that vanished for 30 years It was a clever system: if the rope snapped, a ratchet would pop open and catch on racks that ran alongside the shaft, stopping the car’s descent almost immediately. “All safe,” he proclaimed as his safety device halted the fall. Industrialist Elisha Otis, who installed the first passenger elevator in New York, held a public demonstration at the 1854 world’s fair in New York in which he hoisted a platform high above a crowd, then cut the cable with an ax. ![]() That spurred an immediate focus on safety. “That required a complete transformation of the technology, because early freight hoists had no cars: they were simply open platforms and, therefore, very dangerous.” “Mechanized hoisting devices had existed since the early 1800s, but the transition from carrying goods to carrying people happened in the late 1850s,” Lee Gray, a professor of architectural history at UNC Charlotte, said in a phone interview. The 20th century 'war tubas' used to spot warplanes before radarĮven in the 1850s, the elevator wasn’t an entirely new idea.
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