When I was a kid I would grab the handrails of the escalators at the mall to try to stop them. Of course it did not work. But I wonder, is anyone strong enough to do this? How powerful are an escalators motors?
I wouldn’t expect anybody to be able to stop an escalator. Not even several anybodys working together.
At best, with some good gloves, they might be able to stall the handrail as that’s usually just a rubber on steel wheels friction drive, but the treads are chain and gear driven by big motors that are strong enough to carry the load of several dozen people at a time, and do serious damage to any body parts that get caught.
I bet Batman could do it, if he was prepared.
I’m pretty sure even the handrail would be hard to stop; you can do what feels like slowing it down/stalling it, but not for more than a second and I think that’s an indication that it’s still moving at the point where the drive is applied, but just stretching a bit to allow the part you have grabbed to slow down momentarily.
But the metail stairway itself? No way could you stop that; as gotpasswords says; it’s designed to move/lift tens, or in some cases hundreds of people. Stopping it with your bare hands would be about as effective as stopping a blender with your tongue.
Of course I can stop it with just one finger. Press the red button.
I have stopped a handrail, but considering that a escalator can carry a lot of people uphill, lets make that a lot of fat people uphill, I don’t think a person could stop it without significant machanical advantage.
Not even Arnold Schwarzenegger?
You couldn’t stop it. And if you could, you’d have to rescue the blondes stranded on it.
So I guess the logical follow-up question would be: Is anyone strong enough to stop a blender with their tongue?
What’s more, are they willing to take a video of their attempt? I might be willing to pay to see something like that. Well, if they did it naked, of course.
The beautiful shiny button?
The jolly candy-like button?
'nother anecdotal vote for being able to stop the handrails by holding/pulling on them. Lots of confused looks on the passengers ahead of this former teenager.
My trivial escalator stories:
I was maybe eight and sitting on the side of the escalator (the metal slide-like ramp on the outside of the handrail where the escalator curves to meet the lower floor) minding my own business when I glanced over and saw the emergency stop button. I had not previously noticed such a thing and thought it was interesting when the escalator did indeed screech to a halt. As the riders climbed down, some gave me dirty looks, probably thinking I’d pushed the button. How to explain that I was just thinking about it?
A few years later, at age 12 or so, I amused myself by standing beside another escalator, griping the handrail, and letting it lift me to the second floor like some particularly unsafe ski-lift.
Nope. Think about it; to stop the escalator, you have to exert a force greater than the force required to lift lots of people upwards on a moving staircase. If Arnie could win the uphill side of an inclined tug-o-war contest against, say, 100 people, he might have a chance of stopping the escalator.
**Is anyone strong enough to stop an escalator with their bare hands? **
If the definition of stopping with bare hands can be expanded to include “picking up a steel bar with my bare hands and jamming it into a gear box in the escalator’s machine room”…
…then almost certainly yes.
Well, heck, I can use my normal human strength to drive a limousine into the side of the escalator, stopping the mechanism with brute force.
A small escalator rotates with the force of a Pontiac Firefly, so trying to stop it bare-handed’ll just get you mangled.
Warning: anecdote, so you’re free to ignore me.
I’ve seen it done. My 325 pound friend stood on the flood and hauled backwards on the handrail – the escalator likely had a built-in sensor that detected when the escalator stopped moving, in case somebody or something was being ‘sucked inside’.
This was in a shopping mall. We ran away quickly.
They’re actually easy to stop - at least at the Mall of Millenia in Orlando. I probably weighed about 150 lbs or so, my friend about the same, and we both just sat on the sliding handrail (each on one end.) That’s pretty much all it takes and the thing will shut down, I’m guessing out of some safety feature. We did it to the down escalator too.
When we came by again there were some of the mall cops standing at the top chatting about it, and we stopped and talked to them about it for a little bit. They mentioned how they had cameras so it was just “a matter of time” before they found out who did it. We asked how they knew it wasn’t an accident, and, very dramatically, he replied, “One is an accident. Two? That’s no accident.”
Superman?