What if its only going to fall one floor??
“Can I give a :whoosh: on that?”
It’s not so obvious a woosh when I’ve heard people seriously express similar sentiments.
BTW, there SHOULD be a :woosh: smiley. Perhaps a smiley face with wind over its head and a hat flying away?
So we could probably sum it up that it would suck either way.
What if the elevator has a handrail along the inner wall? When the elevator plummets, climb up onto this railing and when it lands, absorb as much of the impact as possible by collapsing your knees and then falling the relatively small distance from the railing to the elvator floor, rolling as much as possible.
The point being to spread out your mass’s impact with the shaft floor as long as possible.
Damn, don’t you people read the books or the archives? Cecil already answered this exact question.
Hmmm, I think not; you’re on the handrail and the car stops abruptly (note that this isn’t any easier on your legs than it would be if you were standing on the floor, so your legs break (or are forced behind the handrail and torn off) then an instant later the rest of you smashes into the stationary floor at only slightly less speed than someone who didn’t bother to stand on the handrail.
A little off the subject, but I discovered when I was a kid that when riding the express elevator from the top of the IDS tower back down to the ground floor you could make quite an impression on the other passengers if you jumped straight up in the air during the few seconds while the elevator was accelerating downwards. I would appear to leap an unnatural distance off the floor and then descend just a little… too… slowly.
You have to time this right, though. Once I leaped a bit too late. The elevator’s downward speed smoothed out just as I was about at the top of my jump. My landing was a little on the rough and abrupt side.
They also apparently don’t read MEBuckner’s posts.
There were Whoosh smilies up for vote not too long ago. None of them won. But, we did get this wonderful smack smiley: :smack:.
Actually, can there be a reverse-whoosh, since if there’s an earthquake right now, the Transbay Tunnel WILL collapse? To sum up the article, the tunnel needs $1.1 BILLION in retrofit work. 
I’ve never heard of an elevator actually falling all the way. Has it happened recently?
Peace,
mangeorge
I believe that most elevators are equipped with some sort of braking system in the event of cable failure.
It, of course, depends on the age and maintenance of the particular elevator, but I believe most are equipped with some sort of “Shit! The cable broke!” sensors, either actual cable continuity sensors or possibly accelerometers. In any case, there are brakes that can “fire”, extending out to the shaft walls and decelerating the 'vator to livable speeds.
I remember in a beginning engineering class having to design a spring that would absorb the impact of a falling elevator without exceeding the “human flattening” threshold. The springs were very large, and sent their supposed “beneficiaries” on a very wild ride indeed once they started bouncing!
I did that same thing once, just to test, and it scared the hell out of me. I don’t think I landed for a full 2 seconds… :eek:
You folks should realize that, Allan Sherman’s song “Good Advice” notwithstanding*, the whole point of Otis’ invention of the elevator is not just “a room that goes up and down”. Those have been around for a long time. You can see several such “elevators”, for instance in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Tower of Babel (large version). I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually did date back to the building of Babylon.
No, Otis, invention was such a vertically traveling car with an automatic braking system in case of things like cable breaks. One of his very first was still in operation in Washington, D.C. until at least a few years ago (there was an article about it in the American Heritage Magazine of Science and Technology).
So to all of you who wonder about whether elevators have such safety mechanisms – yep, they do. By definition.
- There was a Mr. Otis who invented a room
And his heart was filled with pride.
I said to Mr. Otis, “What does your room do?”
He said “It goes from Side to Side.”
I said to Mr. Otis, “Well, take my advice,
And you’ll be the richest man in town.
Take your room that goes from Side to Side
And Make it go Up and Down.”
– Allan Sherman “Good Advice”
Otis Improvement…
I believe the weight of the car on the cable keeps the brake closed. Should a cable break…without the weight of the car pulling on the cable, the break expands.
It’s sort of like the catch-22 of brakes. The cable load w/ the elevator keeps the brake from expanding…should the load disappear from the cable, the brakes expand…and slow the car.
(Boy, I can’t believe how messed up the grammar got in that previous post. Please excuse.)
Just a few additional points:
1.) The first time I heard this idea was on the 1967 TV sitcon He and She. Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, and Jack Cassidy are trapped in an elevator, and speculate about what they would do if it fell. “I know – just before it hits, we’ll all — Jump Up!” says Cassidy’s self-absorbed and self-important character, Oscar North. I’m sure the joke’s a lot older than 1967, though.
2.) In Otto Bettman’s book The Good Old Days – They Were Terrible! he reproduces an editorial cartoon from the 19th century showing Death sawing away at the cable of an elevator. Certainly the fear of falling goes back to the first widespread use of them as passenger conveyances in the 19th C. The cartoon suggests that there were non-Otis (pre-Otis?) non-brake-equipped passenger elevators.
Well, if you consider 1945 recent. A lady fell 79 stories in an Empire State Building elevator when a B-25 crashed into it and sliced the cables. She lived, but it wasn’t fun at all.
http://bldgservices.freeservers.com/empire.htm
Thanks, stockton.
I think this statement, from the linked article, answers my question;
Kind of negates the rest of this thread, doesn’t it? :smack:
(My first chance to use the new smiley)
Peace,
mangeorge