The early elevators (for people) were much like freight elevators.
You have the wire mesh panels that have to be manually closed. Then the regular door has to be closed. They used to have a guy in the elevator just to operate it.
Why were the early elevators so clunky? Whats so hard about a door that opens/closes automatically? Also why have that darn wire mesh door? Why did the early elevators require an professional operator?
I like to read more about early elevators and how they developed.
Early elevators didn’t have push buttons for selecting floors. They cars needed to be stopped manually when they reached the right location, and that meant the operator was controlling the speed and stopping of the car. Push button controls didn’t come around until around 1900, IIRC.
The elevator at my dad’s office had an operator up until 1977.
Up until the late 1980’s I knew of several old buildings in Chicago that still had elevator operators. For whatever reason the elevators weren’t updated with modern controls until that late.
My first apartment building had floor selection buttons in the elevator, but you had to manual close the exterior doors and the inner metal mesh one yourself. The floor selection method was…um… sort of creative at times, getting stuck in odd positions was common. If that was typical of the first “automatic” floor selectors that might account for the persistence of human operators for some decades after the innovation.
The Fine Arts Building in Chicago had elevator operators in the 90s, when I took piano lessons there, and according to this, still had elevator operators in 2008.
It still does when I went there a few months ago…
A friend of mine used to live in a loft, a converted warehouse. It had one elevator and no operator. He lived on the seventh (top) floor. When someone wanted to use the elevator, they rang. The last person who used it was obligated to get the person who rang, who took him back to his floor and then became the last person. The result was that people below the fifth floor hardly ever used it (and no one used it to go down). And it was a cage with manual doors and you had to be very careful to line it up with the floor.
You have to remember that electricity was very new in the early days of elevators and automatic controls non-existent. The only control device was the relay. Did you ever see an old fashioned telephone exchange where everything was done with relays? The big thing that made elevators usable were automatic braking systems for when the cable broke. Everything else was secondary.
By the fifties, operators were no longer needed on newer elevators, but many, say in dept. stores, still had them to announce the floors and such. I guess by then, it was a kind of featherbedding.
In the 80’s I worked for a department store. On the floor you could see where the oprator’s seat was bolted. And these stores were built in the 50’s. At that time in the higher end stores it was custom to provide an operator for customer service. When they desided to lay off the operator the only thing that had to be done was unbolt the seat and turn the key switch in the car from attendant to Auto.
Cost and complexity vs the cost of human labor.
For automatic doors you need motors and controller logic to operate them. Each floor will require these doors. For automatic floor finding you need to have quite a bit of logic in there. On top of it all it needs to be done safely.
With a manual elevator its essentially a motor with a lever to control power. You paid a guy to run it. He can also help people load packages, etc.
I think historically all new technology is done in a way to that uses the a human operator when later on its realized (or made feasible) that it can be done without. Im sure our grandkids will be wondering why we bothered to learn how to drive, when cars just drive themselves.
I understand elevator operators are still quite common in New York. And if you think it’s strange to have someone whose job is to run the elevator all day, take a look at the 1960 movie The Apartment. Shirley MacLaine’s character, Miss Kubelik, is an elevator dispatcher in a large building (which evidently is entirely occupied by one company). Early in the film you see her perambulating through the lobby, during the morning rush, making sure the elevators are sufficiently full before giving the operators the OK to start their ascents.
ETA: come to think of it, I might be misremembering here; I think it’s doormen who are still quite common in NYC.
As a kid, around 1970, I remember the elevators in the L.A. County Natural History Museum having operators. The elevators themselves were huge, and I remember the operator saying she couldn’t let me in the elevator without an “AY-dult”; I was about twelve at the time. That part of the Museum was built around 1910, and obviously they’d never upgraded the elevators.
My father met met mother while she was an elevator operator in Dallas, TX sometime in the early '50’s (man, I’d love to hear that pick-up line). So at least one elevator operator was responsible for my existence. Let’s hear it for elevator operators.
In manual systems with multiple lifts do (or did) the operators talk to each other to even out the number of stops, passenger loads, and so on? When a passenger on some floor presses the call button, was there a signaling system that notified all operators? Similarly, was it possible for one operator to acknowledge the call, informing the other operators that he was taking care of it? In automated, multiple lift systems, scheduling and load balancing is an important aspect, and that might have been one of the stumbling blocks in the move towards automation.
Elevator operators perform a similar duty to security guards, so it can make sense to keep one even when the actual job of running the elevator could easily be done by automated machinery.
Part of it may have been fear. In the old day people were afraid they’d fall and crash so operators provided a certain amount of security to people who were not sure of them.
I worked in a building that had the old mesh doors you had to close and then the doors shut.
It was a buiding on the Historical Register so the owners had to jump through hoops to get anything changed. It’s very difficult to get permission to change anything on a historical landmark.
He finally got it for the guest/general use elevtors and put in a modern one. However the employee and freight elevators remained the same old kind.
The last time I was in the Empire State Bldg in New York, they had elevator operators. Maybe they have changed since then, but I doubt it.
The library where I work is a very old building. They have modern elevators.
Except for one ancient elevator that runs in a shaft in the middle of the stacks. That has a pull-across screen and manual start-stop button. I love riding it - its the main reason I go into the library (the other being the overstuffed leather wing-back chairs next to the huge fireplace in the reading room - only in winter!).
As a kid in my town, I used to love to go to this department store downtown. They had a manual elevator with an operator. I wanted to become an elevator operator. Luckily, my career aspirations widened somewhat.
In the 60’s the capital building in Lincoln Nebraska had
an operator in an automatic elevator.
Feather bedding I suppose:dubious: