Vermonter put cities on the rise
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This is one of the earliest elevators manufactured by the Otis Elevator Corp., founded by Vermonter Elisha Graves Otis in 1853. It stands in the lobby of the company’s headquarters in Farmington, Conn. AP FILE PHOTO |
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By MARK BUSHNELL - Published: November 8, 2009
PT. Barnum needed a way to drum up business. Attendance had dropped off at the Crystal Palace Exposition that the showman was managing at the New York World's Fair. The show had opened in 1853 and drawn crowds interested in seeing the world's newest technological wonders. Now, a year later, those innovations were old news.
Fortunately for Barnum, Elisha Graves Otis, a Vermont inventor, approached him with an idea. Otis, who was working as a master mechanic in a nearby bedstead factory, wanted to demonstrate a device he had recently invented. He believed in the product but had had trouble marketing it, so where better to turn than to Barnum, the king of American marketing?
Once Otis explained the device to Barnum, the showman agreed to pay Otis $100 to demonstrate the mechanism in public. We'll never know whether Barnum understood that this device would change the way we live, but it seems safe to assume that he realized that demonstrating it would be good theater.
So it was that a crowd gathered at the Crystal Palace on May 30, 1854, to see the new wonder that Barnum was proclaiming.
In place of the statue of George Washington that had stood at the center of the exhibition hall, the crowd found that Barnum had positioned Otis' machine, an open-ended wooden platform that could be hoisted between two rails by a steam-powered rope cable. It looked like nothing new. Sure, steam power was relatively new, but hoists themselves had been used to lift heavy objects for millennia, dating back perhaps 5,000 years to the Egyptians.
This looked like an old, and notoriously dangerous, bit of machinery. The trouble with hoists, the crowd knew, was that the rope used to lift them sometimes snapped, injuring or killing the person operating the machine and anyone unfortunate enough to be catching a ride on the hoist's platform.
But these dangers would soon be a thing of the past, announced an elegantly dressed man with a long square beard. Otis climbed onto the platform, which was also burdened by a load of barrels and crates, and had himself hoisted high above the exhibition room floor. Then he called to an assistant to grab an ax and cut the lone rope that held the box aloft.
A shiver went through the crowd. People gasped. Had the man on the hoist assembled them here to witness his suicide? The ax severed the cable and the platform fell. Then, a split-second later, it stopped.
Otis doffed his top hat and yelled down to the audience, "All safe, gentlemen, all safe."
And with that — perhaps the most dramatic 2-inch fall in history — Otis set in motion the transformation of the world's cities. Just try to imagine a world without elevators, in which people's willingness to climb stairs determined the height of buildings. (At the time, buildings rarely rose more than six stories.)
Otis is sometimes wrongly remembered today as the inventor of the elevator. What he created was in fact an elevator safety brake, which made freight elevators safe and passenger elevators possible. The brake system involved a mechanism built around a steel wagon spring that sat atop the elevator. The cable was attached to the spring, keeping it stretched. If the cable broke, the spring would compress, shooting iron teeth or "safety dogs" into notches cut into the elevator shaft.
Vermont ingenuity
It is ironic that this reordering of the built landscape would be prompted by the invention of a man from the backcountry of Vermont — a state where relatively few of Otis' inventions are in use even today. Some would argue that Vermonters had a knack for inventing. After all, Vermonters created such critical devices as the platform scale, the electric motor and the steam paddle-wheeled boat. Perhaps in their isolation, these Vermonters had to learn to make do and find ways to reduce their heavy workload. Or perhaps this discussion ignores the many vital things NOT invented by Vermonters.
Otis' early years seem typical for a boy growing up in early 1800s Vermont. He was born in the town of Halifax in 1811, the youngest of six children. He worked as a carriage maker, sawmill owner and mechanic for a time and started several businesses, none of them particularly successful.
Like many young Vermonters, Otis left the state seeking opportunity. It wasn't that the state didn't offer ways for people to make a comfortable living; it's just that by the mid-1800s, the best positions were already taken and it was difficult for young people to break in.
In 1845, he moved with his wife and children to Albany, N.Y., where he worked as master mechanic for a bedstead manufacturer. While there, Otis invented a train brake and a device to speed the manufacture of four-poster beds. He is said to have worked out his innovations in his mind, rather than developing them on paper.
Next, Otis and family moved to Yonkers, N.Y., where he had found work at another bedstead maker, which was expanding. As part of the expansion, Otis was in charge of moving heavy equipment to the second floor. He wanted an efficient way to do the work. Safety was also of the essence — 12 workers had been killed in elevator accidents over the last four years in Yonkers alone.
The result of Otis' tinkering was the elevator safety brake. Otis saw a business opportunity, though he seems not to have understood how drastically this innovation would change the urban world.
A quick rise
Otis invented his automatic braking system the year before his spectacular display at the Crystal Palace. He had sold his first elevator on Sept. 20, 1853. (The fee: $300 installed. Otis accepted a cannon and its carriage as partial payment.) But when further sales failed to materialize, he decided to follow the Gold Rush west. But then he changed his mind after receiving two unsolicited orders and went into business with his sons Charles and Norton.
Hoping to boost sales, he approached Barnum. It is unclear whether it was Otis or Barnum who dreamed up the dramatic demonstration. Whoever conceived of it, the scheme worked. The publicity generated by the stunt attracted buyers. The company sold seven more devices in 1854 and 15 in 1855.
Three years later, the company installed the first-ever commercial passenger elevator, in the E.V. Haughwout and Co. department store in New York. Most of the company's growth, however, came after Otis' death. He died in 1861, at age 50, after contracting diphtheria.
Today, the Otis Elevator Co. is the world's largest maker of elevators. Its lifts have been installed in the White House, the Washington Monument, the U.S. Capitol, the Kennedy Space Center, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Vatican and the Kremlin. And Otis has been contracted to install 57 elevators in the 2,620-foot-tall Burj Dubai tower in the United Arab Emirates, which will be the world's tallest building when completed.
All this might not have happened if not for a conversation between P.T. Barnum and a Vermont inventor.
Mark Bushnell's column on Vermont history is a weekly feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine. A collection of his columns was recently published in the book "It Happened in Vermont." He can be reached at vermontpastlane@gmail.com.
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