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Engineering Advancements and the Invention of the Otis Elevator

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Late in the nineteenth century, several significant advances in the field of engineering, as well as the invention of Elisha Otis's electric elevator, changed the way the United States (and eventually the world) looked at city skyscrapers. New building materials, which included iron, steel, and concrete, would serve as the basis of tall buildings in the early twentieth-century (Williams 256). Eventually, more unique substances such as glass would also be used. To incorporate the large masses of people traveling in and out of buildings, devices such as the hydraulic elevator, and the more efficient electric elevator were designed by the masterminds at the Otis Elevator Company (OEC) (Klaw 41). The elevator design coincided with the newer, taller buildings, and in turn, effected the United States economically, socially, and even geographically.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, "America gobbled up its frontier land, and one had to look upward for new undiscovered territory" (Walker et al. 10). The answer to this dilemma was the development of steel-framed and reinforced concrete structures. Buildings of the 1800’s were only supported by the outer walls, which carried the weight of the inner-structure, as well as upper floors. This limited the height of nineteenth-century buildings to around five stories (10). In 1903, that limitation would change with the opening of the Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, Ohio (10). At a height of two hundred twelve feet ("Ingalls Building"), the entire perimeter of the building was fabricated with cement reinforced with steel rods (Walker et al. 10). At first, this was a very skeptical design.

By itself, concrete is an unsuccessful construction technique; it cracks under pressure. However, when embedded with bars of twisted steel, the material is stable enough to hold more than five hundred times its weight ("Reinforced Concrete"). This breakthrough would be one of many in the early twentieth-century that redefined tall buildings. Throughout the next few years, steel would be introduced as a building material with the completion of the Woolworth Building in 1913 (Walker et al.10). With sixty stories and a height of seven hundred ninety two feet, the entire building was built with a steel-framed configuration. Contradicting earlier techniques, the weight of the building was held evenly throughout the entire structure allowing a taller design. The steel-framed building was the "…internal steel frame on which the fabric would be strung like flesh upon a skeleton" envisioned by Chicago architect William Le Barron Jenney back in 1885 (10).

Aside from the base and support of buildings, the use of artistic materials, such as glass, were also used in skyscraper. Though perfected in the 1950's the combination of steel and glass was first introduced in Germany, by German-born Mies van der Rohe in the late 1800's (Walker et al. 11). These would prove to be necessary in building taller, yet attractive buildings in the future.

Along with the growing height of skyscrapers came the innovative ways of transporting people throughout them. Stairs were only effective to a certain degree, and to cope with the growing size of buildings, the Otis Elevator Company was invented. Founded by Elisha Graves Otis in 1853 in Yonkers, New York ("Otis Elevator Company"), the Otis Elevator Company would redefine the meaning of the word "elevator". Replacing the current-day hydraulic elevators, which were only effective to about twenty stories (Walker et al. 10), Otis's electric elevator design had the capability to more than double that amount (11). The design included a car situated between two vertical guide rails that ran the length of the vertical elevator shaft. When pulled or lowered by an attached cable, the car moved up and down between the guiding towers (41). In the event of a cable collapse, two steel bars (referred to as "iron teeth" or "safety dogs") would thrust outward and catch themselves in notches in the guide rails, thus preventing a possibly fatal crash. The design was perfected in the winter of 1856, and first installed >on March 23, 1857 at 448 Broadway in New York City The second was added two months later at the Congress Hall Hotel in Saratoga Springs (Klaw 41). The first international elevator (designed by Elisha Otis) was completed in a steel-framed building in London, England in 1904 (Walker et al. 10). It would be the first of many world-wide transportation devices built by the Otis Elevator Company in the twentieth century.

Aside from the electric elevator designed by Otis, one other design by Otis Tufts was made famous when it was first installed in 1859 (41). With the same purpose as the Otis Elevator, the “Vertical Screw Railway consisted of a single central pole, or screw, that ran down the entire length of the elevator shaft (41-42). With an angled grove in the surface of the pole, the car moved towards the top of the building when rotated in the right direction (41-42). Even after much anticipation and media coverage, the design proved to be "too stately" (41) or slow, and was only installed in a single location at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York (41). The failure of the Tuft's elevator made The Otis Elevator Company the leader in elevator manufacturing. By 1903, the company had achieved a world record-breaking speed for elevators: five hundred meters, or one thousand six hundred forty feet, per minute (Williams 257). Even today, that speed is above average in terms of elevators.

In the economic world of the early twentieth century, the Otis Elevator Company became the most lucrative vertical transportation systems company in the world. By 1911, the company was making net earnings of $1,137,371 per year ("Otis Company" 1), the equivalent to $45,494,840 in 2006. This was an eight percent increase from the year prior (1910), in which the company earned $1,048,080 (1). Staring in 1906, the company made itself one of the most recognizable within the Stock Exchange ("Otis Elevator's" 1), with a stock on a three-per-cent basis, while the average company had a stock on a one or two-per-cent basis (1). 

Today, the Otis Elevator Company remains the world's largest producer and manufacturer of elevators and escalators ("Otis Elevator Company"), and has built elevators for buildings such as the Empire State Building (1931) and the former World Trade Center (1971)("Otis Elevator Company").

Socially, the new movement towards "the bigger, the better" was generally accepted (Williams 157). As buildings grew, the distance needed to travel to get to a certain point in a building also grew. Everyday occupants could not be depended on to travel any more then a minimal amount of levels, and to solve that problem was Otis's elevator (157). It reduced the walking distance both horizontally and vertically as well as reducing time.

Geographically, the Otis elevator (aside from the new developments in engineering) provided a diverse advantage. With major cities such as New York limited on horizontal space, the only way to get new space was to build upward (Walker et al. 10). With steel and concrete as supplies, and the New York City skyline as their backdrop, engineers spent the early years of the 1900's building up into the skies. By 1920, New York City alone had two skyscrapers exceeding seven hundred feet ("Tallest"), and by 1931, the city had nine buildings topping six hundred feet, five topping seven hundred, one topping eight hundred, two topping nine hundred, and two clearing one thousand feet ("Tallest"). These buildings would be the basis for designs of taller buildings in the future.

In all, the innovations in the field of engineering in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century set the stage for construction today. Originally just square buildings made from bricks, the incorporation of steel (and iron) and concrete reestablished the way buildings were designed and constructed. Hand in hand with the invention of the successful Otis Elevator, developed by Elisha Graves Otis in 1859 (and the not-so-successful Tuft's elevator), the advancements in engineering in the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century still stand as a basis for skyscraper construction today.