Going Up

Renee: There's a very specific sensory memory I have from being about seven years old, standing in Kaufman's, which is the department store in Pittsburgh with my grandmother. Kaufman's. Kaufman's and that. I'm going downtown to the Kaufman. You guys want to come? And the elevator operator closing those brass accordion gates, right? The actual sound of it, that heavy metallic clank. And then this guy in a little uniform says, throw. Apparel with the gravity of someone announcing the arrival of a head of state, right? And I remember thinking, this is a person whose entire job is to know when to stop. And I thought that was the most sophisticated thing I'd ever seen in my life. Like, here's a guy. His whole job is to make sure we get the ladies apparel just fine. And I was grateful. Yeah, I was great.

Marc: Yeah. Mine's about Los Angeles City Hall. And I love, as you were just talking about, I love the architecture of City Hall and the Art Deco and all of that stuff. My dad worked in City Hall. And so this is just, you know, going to see, you know, what dad's, you know, dad's office was like and stuff like that. But we would, I went into his office a lot because they had printers and, you know, you could print a lot and he had computers and, you know, so that was, that's why we would go to his office. But we'd park in the basement over at City Hall East in downtown Los Angeles, downtown. town. And then you elevator up to the third floor. Then there's this footbridge across the city hall from Eddie goes across. I don't remember what street that is there, but you know, it goes across, you know, the street, you get into city hall, it puts you on the third floor, the rotunda, which is also amazing piece of architecture in Los Angeles. Then you go to the first bank of elevators, you ride those up as far as they go. And then you get out, you walk to the second bank, You write those up, you get out again. There's this one.

Renee: This sounds like the studios for CBS. Follow the red line. It'll take you to a bank of elevators. When you get up, go to the third floor, get off, follow the blue line. It's going to take you to another bank of elevators. You're going to get in that bank, but go down one. Like, okay.

Marc: It is totally like that. Like there was some, and I don't remember exactly because it's been a long time since I was there, but you go up and then you go up and then, and I think you had to go, like to get up to the next round of elevators, you had to. Go down one and then across and i don't take it to the very top but take it to the second to the top you know and then go to this one but anyways there's this one elevator this one tiny elevator that you took to the last couple of floors and if you've ever been to city hall it's got the the pyramid at the top the ziggurat you know looking yeah you guys

Renee: If you like if you if you're wondering like what the building is it's city hall is the one you see on dragnet.

Marc: It's an amazing building it's like you know 30 stories or so and and that little ziggurat at the top there's an observation deck and you get to the observation deck the thomas bradley observation oh yeah right because you know bradley so and there's actually like a huelhauser you know thing about it yeah so if you like the huelhauser ah huel what's that show california gold

Renee: Yeah so it's a pbs show or local pbs and he'll hauser was a guy walked around with a mic with a cable on.

Marc: It oh yeah

Renee: A camera that apparently had a tripod and he would just tell you about stuff in.

Marc: California yeah anyways but the the to get that you had to take this little tiny elevator and you know this elevator is the last couple floors and his his office was like on the 25th, 26th, 27th, something like that, a couple of down from where the ziggurat starts.

Renee: So three separate elevators just to get to see your dad at work. My dad worked at a car house. We just had to sneak in, not get hit by a trolley, and then we could see dad work.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, three separate elevators and the footbridge. And that last elevator is sort of, it was really tiny. Two, maybe three people gets in. You know, it was original to the building, 1928. Nobody had touched it. gilding on the panels all the small art deco details still in there the rest of the building had kind of been you know how los angeles was in 60s and 70s right gray and beige right comes out on page but this one car was still exactly what it had been and his whole office the floor that they were on it felt like you know they put up there because nobody else wanted to make the trip up to all this like maze

Renee: Of oh like how we got moved get out of their building when we worked at cooking because like no one wanted to walk across the parking lot for sure so let's send it over there like the network people not even all of it just.

Marc: Just the network just those crazy ones yeah

Renee: The loud mouse we'll put them in the other building so we both we both got a family elevator mine's my you know my grandma's department store yours is your dad's office, you know what that feels right for this topic because the elevator is one of those technologies It's so woven into the architecture of daily life that most people never think about the fact that at its core, a box suspended in air by cables. Like it's a box in the air that you voluntarily entered, pushed a button and had absolute faith it was going to do what it was supposed to do.

Marc: Yeah. And voluntarily entering for about 170 years now.

Renee: And today we're going to talk about how that happened, why it matters, and why the story of the elevator is secretly also the story of the entire modern city. You ready? Let's do it. Let's set the scene, because the world before the passenger elevator is a world that most people have never really stopped to think about, right? Cities were horizontal, not because people preferred it that way, and not because of any philosophical attachment to being close to the ground. They were horizontal because vertical was punishing. If you lived or worked above the third or fourth floor of a building, you were climbing stairs every day. And that fact had enormous consequences for how cities were organized socially and economically.

Marc: Yeah, the structural engineering of the time actually could support taller buildings. The load-bearing math worked. Haha, load-bearing. The constraint was not the walls or the foundation. The constraint was the human body and how many stairs it was willing to climb on a daily basis.

Renee: With groceries. And this inverses.

Marc: Or your mattress.

Renee: Or your mattress, your bike. Like, I don't care what it is. Like, you're going to carry something. Not just my big butt, but something else, right? And this inverts the way we think about real estate today. The ground floor was premium. The higher you went, the cheaper it got. The top floor was where the poor people lived. It was hot and it took a long time to get up there. Like, this is the world of all glass balconies and no, no, no, no. Right? So... Rich people lived close to the street because they didn't want to climb four flights of stairs to get home. So in cities like Paris, New York, and London, vertical social hierarchy was literally inverted from what it is now. Ground floor desirable, attic miserable, penthouse. That concept does not exist yet because no one wants to live up there. It's too hot and it takes too long to get there. And by the time you get there, I bet you have to stop a couple of times to just sit on the landing. That's why there's always, like, chairs on landings, I think. And then, like, you got to keep going, right?

Marc: Yeah. And this is why in places like Paris, you still sometimes see these, like, oh, I love some of the upper floor Paris apartments. They're these beautiful, ornate apartments on the first and second floors with these increasingly modest and cramped spaces as you go up, right? You know, they have a great view, right, out to the little tiny window, the hatch windows, right, with the slanted walls and that. But yeah, they're tiny and not exactly built for the wealthy. And the building designed for the wealthy was the one that they'd never have to climb.

Renee: And that physical reality was not just a comfort issue. It shaped zoning. It shaped commerce. It shaped the density limits of cities. A building could only be practically useful up to the height a person was willing to walk, which is somewhere around five or six stories, depending on the person and what they were carrying. And above that, you were basically just building storage. So, yeah, you just did like six stories was as high as it got.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. You know, like Paris is a great example because you go down some of the classic roads with the apartment buildings and stuff. It's like, yeah, six. That's it. That's as tall as they get. And there were hoists. I actually lived in a place in London that had a hoist on the outside. It was really cool. Lifting devices go back a really long way. All right. Big history. You know, love the history. Archimedes gets credited with a compound pulley hoist about 236 BCE, whatever you want to, you know. Okay. Medieval builders used counterweighted pulley systems to move stone. The one I like to talk about or think about and did in the research here is about the Coliseum, all right? Because it wasn't a hoist, it was a whole system. Underneath the arena floor, there's a basement called the Hypogeum. And in the basement, 28 lifts. Each one had eight men on two decks turning a wooden capstan, working ropes and pulleys and lead counterweights. Raising a cage that can hold 600 pounds or more about 24 feet straight up. The cage lid and the trap door above it opened at the same moment and whatever was inside came out of the light, you know, in front of the full house.

Renee: So eight men per lift under the floor in the dark turning a crank so a lion could arrive on cue and eat someone. Oh, so the stage crew, right? The Romans built a stage crew into the basement.

Marc: Yeah, there you go. The Russell Crowe, right? It comes out and, you know, snacks on.

Renee: Right.

Marc: Yeah, running all 28 at once took something like 224 people. There were another 20 mobile platforms in the central corridor for scenery. And later under the Severins, they rebuilt it as about 60 smaller lifts that carried people as well as animals. So the mechanism was never the hard part, right? The mechanism existed for hundreds, thousands of years. Rope over wheel, a counterweight on the other side, someone turning a crank. That's all first century technology. The problem in all of this was the safety model, you know, the safety model is basically do not let the rope break and do not let the rope break is fine, you know, as a safety model, right up until the rope breaks.

Renee: Which, of course, it did constantly because ropes were made of hemp in many cases and hemp degrades and cables snap. And when your lifting mechanism fails, whatever's on the platform fails. If that thing's cargo, you got a mess. If that thing's a person, you got a tragedy. And if it was a lion, you had people screaming and running.

Marc: Yeah. Right.

Renee: Yeah. It'd be crazy to have a lion on loose down there. And if that thing is cargo, yeah, you have a mess. Right. It's not a theoretical concern. It's known as risk, a documented risk, and a risk that made freight hoist acceptable, but passenger hoist essentially unthinkable for most of the mid-19th century. Can't kill people. Go fast and break things did not exist for LA. Let's just remember that.

Marc: We do talk about go fast and break things a lot. And yeah, this is not one of those that you can go fast and break things.

Renee: Cars shouldn't be like that. Planes shouldn't be like that. Submarines shouldn't be like that. An elevator should not be like that.

Marc: That's right. That's right. The gap between we can move things vertically and we can move people vertically safely is the entire problem with elevators. And it took a specific kind of engineer thinking about the problem in a specific way to close that gap. Why don't we always come back to risk and risk management all the time?

Renee: It's novel. And when it's novel, right, like risk comes with it. Right. And either you care about that risk or you don't. I mean, at the same time, people are building their own steam engines and blowing themselves up on rivers. We didn't care about that.

Marc: And people are watching.

Renee: Yeah, right. And people, that was a good date night. Like, yeah, so, all right. Anyway, the engineer who figured all this out, Alicia Otis. And I want to be precise about what Otis actually invented, because he gets credited with the elevator, and that's not quite right. Otis did not invent the elevator. Vertical lifting devices, just like Marc just said, are ancient. What Otis invented was the safety elevator. The safety. The mechanism that made it so that a broken cable no longer meant a dead passenger. That specific invention that one piece of the puzzle is what changed everything.

Marc: Yeah yeah so let's talk about what the safety it's always about death with us why is that it's always

Renee: Dying honestly because no one does anything until someone dies so if we're going to tell a story where technology makes it all the way until us like clearly people died because otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to fix it so that we could be here to use it.

Marc: That's right there you go Yeah. All right. So let's talk about the safety, you know, what that safety mechanism was, because it's really a simple piece of engineering when you look at it. Otis designed a guide rail system, a pair of rails that the elevator car rode along inside the shaft, and he attached a spring-loaded ratchet mechanism to the car itself. The mechanism was connected to the rope. When the rope was under tension, the way it is when the car is being held up, the spring was compressed and the ratchet was retracted. The moment the rope went slack, which is exactly what happens when it breaks, the spring released and the ratchet teeth engaged the guide rails so the car stops. Not gradually, like immediately.

Renee: The elegant thing about that design is that the failure condition is the activation condition. The safety doesn't require someone to pull a lever or push a button. It does not require a human operator to notice something is wrong and react in time. Like, oh no, we're in free fall. Like, why are my feet no longer on the ground? Oh my gosh, I should push a button. It's none of that. It's none of that. Right. Like the physics of the rope going slack is what triggers it. The moment the worst thing happens, the safety mechanism is already responding. You cannot be too slow or too distracted or too scared. Oh, it just works like an airbag. Like if I had to push the airbag button, it would never go off. Oh, no, I should push the airbag button. Like, that's not how it works. Yeah.

Marc: You'd be pushing it like after you know you'd crash them and delay it yeah So Otis develops this in 1852 while he was working as a master mechanic at a Bedstead factory in Yonkers, New York. He was trying to solve a problem for the factory, not trying to revolutionize urban living. He needed a safe hoist for his workers to use, built the safety mechanism, and then someone suggested that this, hey, this might actually be commercially interesting.

Renee: And the commercial question then becomes, how do you sell a safety device to a public that doesn't need one for an application that doesn't exist yet? Oh, you know what that sounds just it sounds just like AI. We have a solution to a problem that doesn't exist because there is no market for safe passenger elevators in 1852. The passenger elevator isn't a thing. You're asking people to trust a completely new concept and trust the safety mechanism for that concept simultaneously. Simultaneously and we all know in the world of go-to-market that is a really hard sell that's right like hey get in this thing i promise you if that rope goes slack you won't die like yeah no.

Marc: It's the have you seen the uh the the the saws that you know they put the the like the hot dog or whatever and it and it you know touches the hot dog and the saw you know it suddenly stops it breaks the blade essentially you've seen the same thing like like would you stick your fingers in there like no you know no you're definitely not gonna stick your nose in there hot dog no problem

Renee: I'll do that all day long yeah yeah and if you thought it would work every time you might have stuck your finger in there but you picked a hot dog so you're like so you know what i mean.

Marc: You know like or the the guy that invented the like the polycarbon you know glass for for bulletproof he i think that guy we should we should probably talk about that at some point I think that guy used his wife to shoot like, yeah, like she would hold the polycarbonate and he would shoot. Yeah. No. It's one or the other. I don't remember which, but like one of them was testing on the other.

Renee: And then I got a bullet hole in my head and he's like, oh, it was a B.

Marc: Like, yeah, yeah, no. It takes a lot of trust. That's a lot of trust. All right. So anyway, that level of trust, right? That's why the Crystal Palace demonstration in 1854 is one of the great pieces of theatrical engineering in all of history. So tell us about it.

Renee: It was one of the best product demos ever staged. And I know you're thinking, no, that's the Cybertruck. No, no, it's this. And I will not. And I will not let the tech industry take credit for inventing the product demo because this guy, Otis, did it first and he did it better. The World's Fair in New York in 1854, Crystal Palace Exhibition. Otis had himself hoisted up on the platform in front of a crowd. He rode it up and then he had an assistant cut the cable with an axe. An axe in front of everybody.

Marc: Oh my gosh i yeah the car drops like two or three inches the safety caught it instantly he stood there calm and said look all safe gentlemen and that was it that was the whole pitch

Renee: Oh my gosh you know what that's seriously like steve job standing on that stage talking about the iphone he said three words yeah it's music maps phone and walked away. Like he just walked away. That's exactly the same pitch, right? Two or three inches and I'll say, gentlemen, that's the entire marketing strategy. And the man understood that no amount of technical explanation would do that one visual demonstration of not, you know, dying could do, right? Like, look, look, I didn't die. Look, look, like it actually works. He understood the emotional barrier that he was trying to clear and he cleared it in about 15 seconds. He didn't clear it, Marc, by saying this is the most dangerous thing ever invented and it's definitely going to kill everybody. That's right. He didn't do that, did he? No, he didn't.

Marc: No, he didn't. Why it worked. The engineering behind the demonstration was sound because the mechanism worked. That would be bad if he had bad demo juju, right?

Renee: If he threw that metal ball and it went right through the window, yes. Yes, you don't recover from that. And then you say, do it again, and that one goes through the window and you're like, okay, stop.

Marc: Yeah, stop. It's going to go well. Yeah. But the genius of it was the theatricality, right? So he made himself the test subject. His own life was the proof of concept on this.

Renee: And the sales after that were, to put it mildly, not immediate. The first commercial passenger elevator installation in the United States was in 1857, three years later, in the Hobwalk building?

Marc: Yeah, I don't know.

Renee: In Broadway in New York. It's a steam-powered Otis elevator. It traveled about 40 feet per minute, and it served a five-story building. So we're not talking about rocketing to the top of a skyscraper. We're talking about a five-story building moving very slowly. But doing it safely, and that was the beginning.

Marc: Yeah. And for just context on how slow 40 feet per minute is, it's, you know, that's less than half a mile an hour. A slow walk is about two and a half miles an hour. So the elevator was moving at roughly a fifth of walking speed. You could beat it on the stairs if you're willing to, like, marginally hurry.

Renee: My walking speed on stairs is like seven.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Anyway, so the first selling point is not speed. It's the first selling point is safety and novelty and honestly, status. Having an elevator in your building in 1857 was a statement. It says this building is modern. This business is prosperous. This is not a walk-up situation. Thank you very much.

Marc: Yeah, the technology improved quickly after that first installation. Steam gave way to hydraulic systems in the 1860s and 70s. Hydraulic elevators work by pushing water into a cylinder under the car, which raises the piston, you know, which raises the car. It's a smooth ride. It's very controllable. And you don't need a steam boil running continuously. But, you know, hydraulics have limitations. The cylinder has to be as deep as the building is tall, which means you're digging a very deep hole under the building. And the height limit on hydraulic systems is, you know, there's real limits there. It's meaningful. Physics will not let you push water infinitely far up a column.

Renee: Which is why the hydraulics era was really important, but it wasn't the endgame. The thing that broke the height limit open was electrification. Werner Juan Siemens, you heard me, the people who make the computers, built the first electric elevator in 1880 for an industrial exhibition in Mannheim, Germany. And Otis was watching that very carefully.

Marc: Yeah, Otis installed their first electric elevator in 1889. And the electric elevator design is fundamentally close to what we ride today. There's not a whole lot of difference. Electric motor, steel cables, counterweight system. Counterweight is the piece that a lot of people don't think about. It sits on the other side of the pulley from the car, and it's weighted to roughly Equal the empty car plus about half or so of its load capacity. So when you have a partially loaded car, the counterweight in the car are approximately balanced, and the motor is only doing the work of the difference. We can talk about, you know, potential energy and raising and lowering and physics and all that stuff. But, you know, that's basically what we're looking at. The energy efficiency of the system is much better than having a motor that has to lift the entire weight of the car and all the passengers every single time.

Renee: So the counterweight's doing the real work and getting none of the credit. I bet she's a girl.

Marc: Go ahead. Yeah, the counterweight's never complained about this as far as I know.

Renee: I'm choosing to believe it complains constantly and we just can't hear it. But the bigger point here is that once you have an electric motor and steel cables and a counterweight and a reliable braking system, the height limit becomes a different kind of question entirely. You're no longer fighting physics in the way you were with hydraulics. You are fighting engineering complexity, which engineers are much better at fighting than physics. Yeah, if you think your engineer is a physics guy, they're just not. Yeah, they're not.

Marc: The Eiffel Tower's elevators installed in 1889 are a good example of the engineering complexity involved in solving a non-standard problem. The legs of the Eiffel Tower curve, which means elevator cars, you know, they don't just go straight up. They had to design cars that traveled along the curves of the legs and then transitioned to vertical movement. Otis won that contract, and the solution involved hydraulic pistons for the curved lower section and the cable traction for the upper vertical section. It was exactly as complicated as it needed to be and not, you know, not more.

Renee: And right around the same time, the word skyscraper enters the vocabulary. And it's not a coincidence that it enters the vocabulary right after the electric elevators become viable. The causal relationship runs directly from the elevator to the skyscraper. The elevator does not enable tall buildings by solving a structural problem. Structural engineers have been building tall for decades. The elevator enables tall buildings by solving a human problem, which is that people will not willingly climb 10, 15, 20 flights of stairs every day to get to their office. You know, once you remove that constraint, the sky does become the limit. Or, well, yeah, or at least the budget does. The budget becomes the limit, not how many floors you can.

Marc: I like that so like because i work a lot in london now and they all the buildings have names right all the skyscrapers have oh yeah the cheese grater i worked in the cheese grater you know that's the leadenhall building and the you know the gherkin that looks like the you know the pickle bullet thing and the you know all those sorts of sort of things the leadenhall building is cool because they're the elevators are all on like one side and all the mechanics are at the top and the building itself is it was engineered to sort of hold all of that stuff at the top and then because there's this the weight would tilt the building to vertical it's quite it's really interesting but the elevators essentially become this kind of architectural element that you know you know take care of one side of the building so anyways sorry yeah

Renee: All right, so now this is where the story takes a turn. And this is the chapter of elevator history that I think gets skipped over the most, because everything up to this point is a story about technology getting better. The safety mechanism, the hydraulics, the electric motor, the counterweight, all of it is a story of engineering progress. But once you have working, reliable passenger elevators and buildings all over New York and Chicago and every other major American city, you've created an entirely new profession. And that profession had about 80 years of life before it got automated out of existence. And the way that happened is a fascinating piece of labor history.

Marc: Yeah, the elevator operator was a real and skilled job. Like we don't, I can't, you talk about Kaufman's. I don't know if I've ever been in an elevator that I can remember that had an operator in it. Other than like, you know, when the dude has to run the fireman key or something like that. Anyways, it took more skill than people assume. Early electric elevators didn't have automatic leveling. The operator controlled the car with a handle that varied the speed of the motor. Too fast on the approach and you overshot the floor. Darn it, Bill, you know, you overshot my floor again. You always do that.

Renee: Yeah, but I'm only making you walk down. Get out. Yeah, okay.

Marc: The guy that constantly missed the floor, he'd get fired. So too slow and you stop short. You know, you get into the car, getting the car to land flush with the floor of a landing every single time for every stop on every floor for an entire eight-hour shift was a learned skill that took time to develop. A bad operator left a gap between the car floor and the landing floor, and passengers were constantly tripping, and in a busy building, that, you know, that adds up.

Renee: And it wasn't just the physical skill of stopping the car. Elevator operators were, in many buildings, the face of the building. They knew tenants by their name. They managed the flow of people during, you know, rush times. They knew which floors were busy at which hours. In high-end residential buildings, they were part of the social fabric. The building concierge and the elevator operator were your first and last point of human contact every day.

Marc: What floor are you going to? I've never seen you in this building before.

Renee: Yeah, right? And you know, Trump Tower still has one.

Marc: Oh, do they have an operator?

Renee: You want to get into any of those floors that Trump owns? Oh, right. Yeah, there's a guy that'll take you there.

Marc: There's a guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but you know, those guys, like, you know, I have seen that.

Renee: Oh, you think that's a mob thing? That's probably a mob thing.

Marc: It's a mob thing. Like, I don't know if it's a mob thing. It might be a union thing, though, right? You know, the last of the operators. But, you know, they're just pressing the buttons. You know, they just have the control. They don't have the skill. They don't have the skill. So anyways, there's just a genuine safety argument for keeping operators at the time. Early automatic elevator technology existed by the 20s and 30s. The Otis Autotronic system, developed in the 40s, could level the car and stop at floors automatically. The technology to eliminate the operator was available well before operators were actually eliminated. The resistance was not purely about technology, but, you know, not about the technology not being ready.

Renee: The resistance was about labor and about fear and about the two things that got tangled together in ways that made automation a charged issue for about 30 years. And the moment that crystallized all of it was the New York elevator operator strike in 1945. 12,000 operators in apartment buildings, all 12,000 all over New York City. They walked out and stayed out for 17 days. And because this was New York, where essentially everything is vertical and tall buildings are everywhere, the strike paralyzed the city. People wouldn't leave their homes. They wouldn't go to offices. There was about 400,000 workers could not get into their offices because the buildings they worked in had no elevators. And no one was going to walk 15 floors. See, that's how we know that's true. Nobody went to work.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. The building owners and the city tried to introduce automatic elevator operation during the strike as a way to break it. And they ran into an unexpected problem. People did not want to ride automatic elevators, not because the technology didn't work. The technology was fine, right? They didn't want to ride them because the idea of being in an elevator with no operator felt unsafe and frightening in a way that was hard to address through rational argument. We have that today in the UK. Like all of the, all the trains, except the DLR are run by operators. You know, they've got a real person. People like, I don't trust that DLR doesn't have a person in it.

Renee: So what if you have a blue screen of death? Cause we all know that's probably running on Windows 95. What if you B-Sod and then all of a sudden, like, it's like, it can't stop. Like I'm with them on that. Next thing you know, it's like airport 75 where someone's telling you, Renee, do you see that red button? Okay. Don't hit it right now. You're going to hit it in 38 seconds. Start counting now. Like, no. No. Just put someone who knows what they're doing there. I wouldn't take an Amtrak without an Amtrak conductor either. Like, I get it. I get it. I wouldn't do it. Yeah, I know.

Marc: But the technical...

Renee: I don't know. Technical solution was ready before the... You know what? We get on them all the time in airports, though. There's no one running those. Yeah. There's no one running those. The trams that take you in between, they just run.

Marc: They just run.

Renee: You get caught in the door, it's on you. The technical solution... Solution was ready before the psychological solution was ready. And the psychological gap is not a small thing. The fear of the automatic elevator, that wasn't irrational. It was actually a completely reasonable response to being asked to trust a machine with your life in a context where for your entire experience of elevators, there's always been a person managing it. The operator was the reassurance, right? That's why I felt safe. The operator's presence was proof that someone competent was in charge and paying attention. Removing the operator, remove the visible evidence that safety, even though the actual safety was, if anything, better than automatic systems, like at least seeing that guy meant I was safe. Now, granted, if anything really happened, he'd be in the same situation. You know, pile of bodies as everybody else, right? Because we'd all die. But, you know, you feel better about it. Like pilots on planes. Like you just feel better about it. Pretty sure 747 could fly itself.

Marc: They do. They do all the time. But the operators, it was the skill to level and get to the floors and do all that. Like the safety mechanism wasn't them. You know, they weren't the safety mechanism. So, yeah, I don't know. The industry's solution to this was, in hindsight, though, both clever and a little absurd. They installed recorded voices. Going up, third floor, watch your step. In the UK, it'd be mind the gap, right? Right, right, right. The voices were designed to simulate the presence of a person, to give writers something human-sounding to hold onto. And then they piped in music. Oh, calm, unobtrusive, utterly inoffensive music. Specifically to fill the silence and reduce anxiety.

Renee: You know, what are you bagging on Muzak for? The music was Muzak. And I want everyone to appreciate the full weight of what I'm saying. Muzak, which became synonymous with blandness, with elevator music, with the kind of music that is opposite of any artistic intention, was created as a psychological intervention. It was engineered blandness. It was designed to be imperceptible, to occupy just enough of your auditory attention that you could not dwell on the fact that you were suspended in a metal box and something could theoretically go wrong. Instead, you were humming Barry Manilow in your head.

Marc: Without lyrics.

Renee: Without lyrics.

Marc: I don't. You know, like all the high rises I go to now, they don't have, they have TVs in them and they showed like the news or something, you know, I don't, I can't think of the last one I did that had Muzak that was actually playing. But anyways, the science behind Muzak is it's real, or at least Muzak believed it was real. They had a whole system called a stimulus progression. These 15 minute segments that were arranged by tempo and instrumentation to manage mood and energy at different times of day. They sold them to offices and the factories and the restaurants. The elevator application was just the most visible one.

Renee: And it worked, by the way, not because it was secretly good music. It really wasn't. It worked because the combination of recorded voices and continuous music and familiarity and time gradually persuaded people that an elevator without a human operator was a normal and acceptable thing. The strike ended in 1945, by the way. Operators continued working through the 1950s, but automated elevators expanded. steadily. And by the 1970s, the elevator operator as a profession had been largely eliminated in commercial and office buildings. Residential buildings in certain cities held onto them longer. Some luxury buildings in New York still have them. But as a mass occupation, yeah, it was gone.

Marc: Yeah. There's one more psychological trick that the elevator industry played during this transition that I think is really neat, which is the closed door button. The button in every elevator on the control panel, labeled with the two arrows pointing at each other with the line in the middle. Almost everyone is pressed it, expecting it to actually get the doors to close faster.

Renee: Oh, yeah. Spoiler alert. It does not work. In most passenger elevators in the United States, on most floors under normal operating conditions, the open door, the closed door button, it's a placebo. It's either disabled or is programmed with a delay that means pressing it has no meaningful effect on the door closing. The doors close when they're going to close. It doesn't really matter what you do. You know what, though? I think it would make you feel better? Like, no, no, I don't want a bunch of kids in here. No.

Marc: Close the door.

Renee: If it does close, you're like, yes. It didn't matter at all, but you feel like you won one.

Marc: Yeah. The technical reason is actually rooted in the Americans with Disabilities Act. ADA regulations require elevator doors to remain open long enough for a person with a mobility impairment to safely board. So the door open time is legally mandated. And that's not just in the U.S. And other countries and stuff as well. The closed door button has an override function, but it's accessible only to building staff and emergency responders. I'm not saying that it doesn't work everywhere, because it does work in some places, but for the most part, it doesn't do anything. And the version available to regular passengers is either decorative or has such minimal effect that, you know, it might as well be decorative.

Renee: And the industry kept it there because it works. Not in the sense that it's actually closing the door faster. We've already decided it actually doesn't. It works in the sense that pressing a button that you believe is doing something makes you feel less impatient and less anxious than standing there waiting. Like, yes, the sense of agency reduces the discomfort of waiting. Oh, they should do that at the bank. Just let me start counting money. Like, then it doesn't care if I'm standing there for a half an hour. I'm counting money. It's fun. Oh, look, we're up to the tens. Like, yay. It's the same reason some crosswalk buttons in major cities are fake. They were disconnected when the city went to computerized traffic signal timing, but they kept the physical buttons because pedestrians who press it feel less frustrated. You give people something to do with the anxiety, and the anxiety becomes manageable.

Marc: Yeah, in London, none of those crosswalk buttons do anything. Yeah, never. The elevator also survived one of the most dramatic accidents in American history. In 1945, the same year as the operator strike, a B-25 Mitchell bomber flew into the Empire State Building in dense fog and hit the 79th floor. An elevator operator named Betty Lou Oliver was on the 80th floor when it struck and the impact threw her out of the car. She was badly burned. Rescue workers found her and put her into a different elevator to take her down for treatment. The car's cables had been damaged in the crash, and somewhere around the 75th floor, they snapped.

Renee: Okay, so she survives the plane, and then the rescue nearly finishes the job. She fell 75 floors to the basement, broken neck, broken back, broken pelvis, but she lived. Two things saved her. The compressed air in the shaft below the falling car created a cushion effect as the car dropped. And the severed cable piled up beneath the car, coiling on the bottom of the shaft, and it took some of the impact. Neither of those was a design safety feature. Both of them were physics doing the right thing at the right time. She still holds the Guinness World Book of Records for the longest survived elevator fall, which is a sentence that deserves to be said out loud. Good for you. Good for you, Betty Lou. I'm glad they gave you, like, a poster that was framed. Good for you.

Marc: Yeah, the structural safety systems in modern elevators are layered in a way that makes that kind of accident pretty much impossible to translate into a fatality today. You have multiple independent steel cables, any one of which is rated to hold the car all by itself. You have the governor mechanism, a speed regulator that triggers the safety brakes if the car exceeds a preset downward velocity, regardless of cable condition. You have an oil-filled buffer at the bottom of the shaft, and the probability of all of these failing simultaneously is astronomically small.

Renee: Elevators are statistically one of the safest forms of transportation that exists. They're far safer than escalators.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Vastly safer than cars. The number of people killed in an elevator accident in the United States in any given year is in the single digits for passenger falls. And most of those involve maintenance the thing that feels most alarming about them the enclosed space the height the dependency on cables you can't see is not the thing that's actually dangerous.

Marc: Yeah yeah but one of the kids has a like yeah one of the kids doesn't like elevators does just does not like them and it's the enclosed space thing rather than you know any of the technical stuff that yeah

Renee: Then you see stuff Like the office where Dwight gets stuck in the elevator and he clears a pee corner, like right, like in 10 minutes. He tells, fam, this is the P-Corner. He's like, why does there need to be a P-Corner? Yeah, people do weird things when they're stuck in elevators.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. They do weird things.

Renee: So, okay, so the legacy of the elevator is so large that it's actually hard to see. The same way you can't see the whole shape of a building when you're standing inside one room of it. The elevator, it didn't just make tall buildings convenient. It made them more economically rational. The modern skyscraper is a real estate product that people want to buy and rent and work in. It exists because the elevator solved the human problem of vertical distance. Without the elevator, the architectural history of the 20th century is unrecognizable.

Marc: Yeah. The density of cities like New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Although I will say Tokyo is pretty spread out. All of the places where you have this extraordinary concentration of people and commerce and culture in a relatively small geographic footprint. That density is only possible because of the vertical building. And vertical building at that scale is only possible because of reliable passenger elevators. When people talk about what technology has built in the modern world, they usually go, you know, obvious things. Electricity, we talked about that one. Internet, we talked about that one. Internal combustion engine, we kind of sort. Yeah, cars, yeah, we talked about that. And the elevator almost never makes the list, and it should be on the list. Here's to you, elevator.

Renee: Yeah, right? And there's also a social legacy that I think is underappreciated. When the elevator made upper floors desirable, it completely reshuffled the social geography of buildings and of cities. The penthouse, the top floor, the highest point, became aspirational. The ground floor became less desirable in commercial contexts because the foot traffic and noise. And in residential contexts, it became actively undesirable in many cities because of security and, Although, you do remember Laverne and Shirley lived in a basement apartment. They could see people walking by their window. The vertical class of structure of the 19th century buildings was literally inverted over the course of about 50 years. And it happened so completely that people today have no idea it was ever the other way. Can I tell you, I think the first, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the first elevator ever built in the city of Pittsburgh was in Andrew Carnegie's home. He had a two-story, three-story home, and he had an elevator. Because rich men don't walk up to second floors, not even in their own home.

Marc: There you go. I mean, Carnegie, he had the money. Right. There you go. The elevator changes the shape of building interiors as well as their height, though. In a building that relies on stairs, you distribute staircases at multiple points throughout the building to keep distances manageable. In an elevator building, you can concentrate vertical circulation in a single core, which frees up the rest of the floor, the floor plan to be used however you want. The open floor plan, which people either love or hate, is partly a consequence of the elevator consolidating vertical movement into a core. And there's something else that happened to the inside of the car for about 20 years. Roughly, you know, the mid-20s or so through the end of the 30s, a little bit into the early 40s pre-war. The cab got created as a room, something with a floor and walls and a ceiling that a person was going to stand inside. So it got designed like a room. The Chrysler building is probably the best, I love the Chrysler building. It's probably the best surviving example. 30 cabs, walls done in inlaid wood veneer over steel, Japanese ash, oriental walnut, Cuban plum pudding mahogany, four different marquetry patterns chevron sunburst and they didn't repeat across the bank you could ride two elevators out of the same lobby and be standing in two different rooms

Renee: 30 seconds, that's how long you're going to be in there. Someone looked at a 30-second experience and decided it warned Cuban mahogany in four patterns and no two cars alike. That's a lot of care for a space no one was meant to linger in.

Marc: Yeah, and then it just stops. Post-war, the cab becomes stainless steel, fluorescent lights, and a handrail. And the usual explanation is the international style arriving and everyone losing patience with ornament. And I think that's just part of it, though. The larger reason is that the elevator core is the one part of the tall building you can't rent. Every shaft takes a floor plate on every floor, and none of that square footage earns you anything. There's no rental money coming in. So the core becomes the cost, and the taller you build, the more of it you need. Because you can't—this is something I don't think people have thought about in skyscraper design. You know, when you kind of, if you're not really like, if you're not a skyscraper, you know, person, but like you can't have one core that goes from zero to a hundred in a hundred floor building. You know, you gotta, you gotta stagger them because it would take too long to get from zero to a hundred. So you got to go up and then down and up and down. Anyways, anyways, but anyways, decoration inside, you know, the cost center, you know, in that, that central core is the first thing that goes right. The other half of it's the operator. When there's a person working in that car eight hours a day, it's a staffed room. Once the operator's gone, it's an unattended machine. And you design an unattended machine for durability, something that cleans easily and, you know, survives being kicked. Or the kid running, you know, hitting every single button, right? You know, those two changes land inside the same 20 years. And I don't think that's a separate case there.

Renee: And the camps that don't get modernized get removed, and that's the other end of this. There's a whole category of elevators that only existed because of something the city used to need. And once the need is gone, the machine is just sitting there waiting for someone to notice it.

Marc: Yeah, so these sort of disappearing use cases, the horse elevators in New York, I think, are the best version of that. 19th century buildings with stables on the upper floors. The land at street level was worth too much to hand over to horses, so you put horses upstairs, which means you need a car big enough and strong enough to carry a horse, right? So Bloomberg did a piece last year on one in a Chelsea Loft building that went in around 1887. It was still running. They did this thing because they were about to pull it out, but, you know, it's like it's still running. Then there's maybe a dozen or so left in the city. The recent safety regulations, they can't be met by the equipment and you can't retrofit an 1887 horse elevator into compliance. So it comes out and a modern car goes in and that's the last one in that building, you know, and so they're slowly disappearing.

Renee: Okay, I can't even. I mean, the reason we have cars today is because there was so much horse crap in large cities. Like, I can't. It's now raining from the skies. Like, is that what's happening now? Is there an extra car that the horses are taking the horse manure up and down? Like, I can't even begin to imagine. I stuck a horse in an elevator to get it up to the second floor because, you know, why take up the floor space downstairs? Like, I can't. I'm just, I'm going to keep going. And then there's a phrase elevator pitch, which I mentioned because it's a small and direct linguistic trace of how completely the elevator has been absorbed into the way we think. The idea that you have a limited window of time, the duration of an elevator ride, to make a compelling case for an idea, is so embedded in business culture that most people saying it have completely lost the connection with an actual elevator, right? The physical object became a metaphor for brevity and urgency, and then the metaphor outran the object. So, yeah, I don't think anybody sits there and thinks, okay, there might be a chance that I'm in the elevator next to the CEO. Like, no, of course not. I guess it's never going to happen. I've got news for you.

Marc: If I get in on the 40th floor and they go down to the second, you know, is that going to—

Renee: And if I do it right at this time, I'm going to catch that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly how it happens.

Marc: It does not. Modern elevator technology has gotten more sophisticated in the last 20 years in ways that probably aren't obvious due to casual rider. The destination dispatch system, which you see in a lot of newer high-traffic buildings, changes the entire logic of how elevators work. Instead of pressing up or down at the landing and then selecting your floor inside the car, you enter your floor number at a lobby kiosk, and the system tells you which specific elevator to take. The system then groups passengers going to nearby floors together, which cuts the number of stops each car makes. And that reduces travel time for everyone in the building.

Renee: I'm noticing that more and more in new hotels. Like, so I go to conferences and you check in and the first thing they say to you is like, do you know how to use the elevators? That's when your first clue is, oh, it's one of those crazy ones with the kiosk. Yeah, I'll be fine. But it's the destination dispatch system. It's better, right? The math on it is compelling, but it requires you to commit to your floor before you get in that elevator. And it eliminates car selection ritual that people have been doing for decades, right? You watch the floor numbers. It comes down. It opens up. A bunch of people get out. Bunch of other people get in. You watch those doors close and you hit the up button one more time because the next one you get is going to be empty.

Marc: Yeah, yeah.

Renee: I watch one fill up and then I'm like, nope, taking the next one. You guys can stop at every single floor. right, um which is the same for psychological because it's unfamiliar and it so this idea that i'm going to pick the floor before i get in it like you could see why people would resist that right like like how is it going to go to the right floor and then you get in the damn thing there's no buttons like so if anything happens like you're like i got no button i got an emergency button but other than that i got no button, i got a closed door button but renee told me that doesn't actually work yeah so like yeah it's funny right so, it eliminates the car selection ritual you've been doing for decades, watching the floor numbers, the strategic positioning near the car door you think it's going to open. And some people hate it, not because it's worse, because it's unfamiliar and it removes their sense of control over the process. So we gave them no control. We gave them all the control. Then we kind of took the control back from them. And now we're like, we need to make up our minds, right? And it's the same psychological pattern as the automatic elevator in the 1940s, right? The technology gets better. the human relationship to the technology lags. If we were, If I'm ever going to write a book, it would be that, right? The human's relationship to that technology is always going to lag AI. Always going to lag AI. Always.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we are working on a book. I'll eventually get you the stupid outline.

Renee: Thank you. I would appreciate that so I can help.

Marc: I think I have part of a chapter up on the website, so you can go check it out.

Renee: I'll go check it out.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: All right.

Marc: The fastest elevators in service now travel at over 40 miles an hour.

Renee: That's crazy.

Marc: I remember when I was a kid, like, there were certain buildings that my dad worked in that were, like, faster elevators versus not as fast, you know? And so the really fast ones were like, you know, like, oh, you know, you hold your gun, you know? Yeah. The Guangzhou CTF Finance Center in China has elevators running at 47 miles an hour. Yeah. They have to be pressurized like aircraft cabins because the speed of ascent is fast enough to cause ear discomfort from a pressure change.

Renee: Wait, so when the door opens, is there like a wind that comes out of it? Yeah, right? Like in fog? Then you just step out?

Marc: There are multiple layers of active damping systems to prevent the car from swaying in the shaft because of that speed. Even small oscillations would be felt by the passengers. The problem set is, you know, it's really hard, and it's actually kind of really interesting engineering.

Renee: And Otis, the company that was founded in 1853, is still one of the largest elevator companies in the world. It spun off from United Technologies in 2020 as its own public company. They claim their elevators move the equivalent of the entire world's population every three days. Yeah, I can't verify that number, but I believe it because when you actually think about how many people ride elevators in a day in any major city, it becomes one of those statistics that is surprising only until you do like the Fermi math in your head. And you say, no, it's totally possible, right? Like 5,000 skyscrapers, like 6,000 people per place. You're going to move them all? They're not going to take stairs. Like, there it is, right? Like, there it is.

Marc: Yeah. The Otis name is survived mergers, acquisitions, multiple corporate restructurings, and 170 years of technological change. And it still means something in the elevator world. There is something, you know, it's like durable. It's, you know, about the brand identity that traces directly back to Elijah Otis. Cutting that cable in front of a crowd in 1854 and just standing there perfectly calm, all safe gentlemen. That posture, the confidence, you know, the mechanism is still what the company is selling.

Renee: And he built that brand with an axe and a rope and a crowd of nervous people, which I will take over any amount of sponsored content. There, I said it. Not to say we wouldn't love a sponsor. Just going to put that out there. I'm just saying...

Marc: But, like, a sponsor, like, that we didn't have to do anything with, you know?

Renee: Right, right, right, that I didn't have to lie about or anything. Yeah, exactly. Like, if you're a, like, doll, call me. There you go. I could do canned food.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: I like pineapple. It's good. It's good. What I keep coming back to with the elevator is the gap between how mundane the experience is and how radical that history is. Every time I step into an elevator, I'm engaging with a technology that reshaped the skyline of every major city. Inverted the social meaning of height, eliminated a profession, invented elevator music as a psychological intervention, and introduced the placebo closed door button as a piece of design deception. All of that is happening in the background while I stand there and stare at my phone for 30 seconds. And there's something I find moving about that fact. Most technologies we use every day have this kind of accumulated weight behind them, right? This chain of problems solved and decisions made and trade-offs accepted and we just use them. We just ride the box. And we have no idea. We have no idea. I don't know how it got there. I don't know why it's still here. I don't know what... I just ride the box, dude. I just get in the box.

Marc: It's such a... That's crazy. Take it for granted technology.

Renee: Right. Yeah.

Marc: So for me, I think it comes back to Otis, you know, standing on the platform at the Crystal Palace and having someone cut the rope. Like, but yeah, there's a version of that story where the mechanism fails and the demonstration is a catastrophe and the development of the passenger elevator is set back by a generation because no one will go near one like that. Can you imagine if that had happened? Right. That would it would have killed the passenger elevator for a long time.

Renee: I guess I don't understand why it didn't kill the Cybertruck, too. Like, why didn't that happen? Yeah. Go ahead.

Marc: Yeah, the fact that it didn't fail, the fact that those two or three inches of drop is all it took and then it stopped, this is the reason we have the cities that we have. And he knew that. Like, he understood what was riding on that demonstration, like, literally. That he did it anyway. The combination of confidence in your own engineering and the theatrical boldness to prove it publicly in front of people with your own body as a test subject is something I think, you know, I think about when I think about what engineering actually is.

Renee: All right, nerds. That is going up and also going down on the elevator. The technology that built the modern city and gave us Muzak. We should do a whole Muzak thing. Which is either a gift or a punishment, depending on your feelings about pleasant background sound. Marc is not a fan.

Marc: Apparently. Yeah, no, I'm not a fan. And it gives us the closed door button, which will not do what you want it to do, but will make you feel better about waiting anyways. And that's honestly, you know, a great metaphor for lots of things.

Renee: Marc has feelings about that button. Very personal feelings.

Marc: Today, coming back from the airport, I hit the button. I spent years pressing it with, you know, that sincerity, and I deserve to know the truth sooner.

Renee: Yeah. Well, you know what? Captcha just ruined me. So I'm glad that button ruined you.

Marc: Okay. All right. Okay. So side thing here. Every time I get the Google caption out, do you know what I do? I go to Bing every single time. Wow. Yeah.

Renee: Nice.

Marc: You know what? Screw you, Waymo. Screw you, Google. Like, it's just so, like, I was fed up with it a couple, like, I don't know, a couple weeks ago. Literally, I couldn't get past the caption. And I was like, why am I doing this to myself? This is dumb. Right. I'll just go to freaking Bing.

Renee: There you go. Everybody, go to Bing. So you and everyone else, if you're listening to this show for the first time, welcome. Please go back and listen to more. We're having a great time, and we think you will too. If you've been here for a while, thank you for riding the box with us.

Marc: We'll see you next time. All safe, everybody.

Renee: All safe. Thanks, Marc.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: I did a wrong tonight. Can't take it back.