Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al · 11 Apr 2022 · 300pp · 81,293 words
preferences. The first is the most obvious. Technology has always been an important factor allowing for very large buildings. It was the invention of the safety elevator that led to the skyscraper. Then structural steel enabled builders to stack more floors on top of one another, upon which air-conditioning allowed the
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people gasped. The victorious anticlimax followed: nothing else happened. Otis bowed, took off his top hat, and proclaimed. “All safe, gentlemen, all safe!”5 The safety elevator was born. World’s fairs have always excited people with new wonders to change their world. The Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 introduced the
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up cities. But in New York, few people expected that Otis’s elevator safety mechanism would change the shape of cities to come. Yet the safety elevator became “the great emancipator of all horizontal surfaces above the ground floor,” architect Rem Koolhaas later wrote. “Any given site in the metropolis could now
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floors of a New York bedstead factory. Not willing to try his luck with existing hoisting platforms, together with his sons he built his own safety elevator. They designed a clamping mechanism that gripped the guide rails. When the hoist rope would release tension in case of a breakage, a wagon spring
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and pulley system expands the scissors, and the ram rises up to a more suitable height to cause damage to towers. Ironically, while Otis’s safety elevator enabled tall buildings, one of history’s first elevators sought to destroy them. Another forerunner to the elevator was built not to enhance passenger safety
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thought of entering an elevator, a few visionaries knew that elevator technology was on the rise—pun intended. The first elevator shaft preceded the first safety elevator. Even the year before Otis demonstrated his safety mechanism, the industrialist Peter Cooper—who had designed and built the first American locomotive—built an elevator
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elevator innovation. Any progress in technology can drive us forward, but it will never be successful unless it is also safe. Otis eventually designed a safety elevator for the building. It wasn’t until several years after Otis’s safety demonstration that elevator use would become more widespread. In 1857, three years
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after his demonstration, Otis installed the first safety elevator in a New York department store. It traveled at a crawling pace of under half a mile per hour. The owner spent $300 on the
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser · 1 Jan 2011 · 598pp · 140,612 words
Otis elevator was a sensation, and Otis’s company remains one of the world’s leading elevator makers. The first two buildings to install powered safety elevators were both in New York City: a department store on Broadway and the Fifth Avenue Hotel. In the 1870s, the elevator enabled pathbreaking structures, like
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, New York Skyscraper, 35-36. 138 Otis ... took the danger out of vertical transit: Goodwin, Otis, 12-13. 138 first two buildings to install powered safety elevators: Ibid., 17; and Landau and Condit, New York Skyscraper, 36. 138 the elevator enabled pathbreaking structures: Landau and Condit, New York Skyscraper, 62. 139 whether
Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham · 8 Nov 2016 · 519pp · 136,708 words
forcefully but always without precedent.’12 When combined with electric or hydraulic power and cable drum innovations adopted from the mining industry, safely braked or ‘safety’ elevators released cities from the millennia-old constraints created by the need for the human ascent of stairs. The overcoming of gravity for the movement upward
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mines of the Californian Gold Rush in the 1850s, in particular, provided the sites where the ventilators, multilevel telephones, early electric lighting and high-speed safety elevators that would later be pivotal to construction of the first downtown skyscrapers were first used systematically. ‘All were demanded and paid for by the prodigious
High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline
by Jim Rasenberger · 15 Mar 2004 · 397pp · 114,841 words
stairs being about as many as anybody could reasonably be expected to climb. This first problem of height had been solved by Elijah Otis’s “safety elevator,” first demonstrated in 1854 and now commonplace in 10-and 11-story office buildings and hotels around the Loop. But while Otis’s elevators made
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Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe · 8 Sep 2011 · 428pp · 134,832 words
, neither the Chrysler Building nor Rockefeller Center would exist: the horizontal technology of rapid transit, combined with a nineteenth-century breakthrough in vertical transportation—the safety elevator, first installed in a five-story building on Broadway in 1857—made closely spaced skyscrapers truly practical. The underground railway enabled the astonishingly rapid shift
Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures
by Roma Agrawal · 8 Feb 2018 · 277pp · 72,603 words
inches. From the top of it Otis could be heard shouting, ‘All safe, gentlemen. All safe.’ Four years later, Otis installed his first, steam-powered safety elevator in the five-storey E.V. Haughwout & Co. department store on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street in New York. The eponymous company he
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and Empire State Building to the Petronas Towers in Malaysia. Such buildings would hardly have been possible without Otis’s invention. Until he developed the safety elevator, the height of a building was restricted by how many stairs people were prepared to climb. The elevator smashed that barrier and engineers could start
Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis · 31 Mar 2013 · 385pp · 118,314 words
to the skyline, one can still see water towers on top of the brick buildings that were created after Elisha Otis’s technological innovation, the safety elevator, which allowed architects to scale over five storeys high for the first time. We can see similar creative and engineering innovation in Sir Joseph Bazalgette
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield · 14 Sep 2006 · 229pp · 68,426 words
ahead of the fact, to discern the original Napster in Paul Baran's first paper on packet-switched networks, the Manhattan skyline in the Otis safety elevator patent, or the suburb and the strip mall latent in the heart of the internal combustion engine. Let's draw three emerging technologies from the
Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc · 15 Feb 2010 · 1,233pp · 239,800 words
techniques – plate glass, steel, concrete, balloon frames, etc. – changed the scale of development. This coincided with other major developments in technology such as railways, the safety elevator and the internal combustion engine, and a host of related social and economic changes. Architects and engineers sought to meet the new demands and challenges
The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler · 14 Sep 2021 · 735pp · 165,375 words
it easier for commuters to come in and for finished goods to leave. Those building heights required two urbanizing innovations of the nineteenth century: the safety elevator and the metal-framed skyscraper. The skyscraper has a long history. Joseph Paxton, an English gardener, architect, and member of Parliament, borrowed the metal framing
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height. There was little demand for many-storied buildings until elevators eliminated the need to tromp up all those flights. Elisha Otis produced the first safety elevator, which he demonstrated, coincidentally, at New York’s 1853 Crystal Palace exhibition. He stood on an elevator deck and dramatically cut the only rope that
Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan · 15 Oct 2018 · 585pp · 151,239 words
Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar · 6 Sep 2021 · 447pp · 111,991 words