On This Day in the Old West: August 9

 If you’ve ever ridden in an elevator, chances are you’ve noticed the name Otis on the machine somewhere. You may even know that Otis was the inventor’s last name. This is the story of the other elevator Otis, not the one on the plaque.

On August 9, 1859, Otis Tufts patented the first passenger elevator. Until then, elevators were used to carry freight from floor to floor, like the dumbwaiters in homes, carrying food from the kitchen up to the dining room. Yes, Elisha Otis patented the safety elevator, which kept the cars from plummeting to the ground if a rope broke, but his invention was intended for the freight elevator’s workers. Tufts describes his invention as "an elevator for the conveyance of persons from the different stories of hotels, public buildings and even private residences." 

Tufts’ system involved a capsule, enclosed rather than open as the freight elevators were, with doors that could close or open automatically, protecting the passengers from the elevator machinery in the hoistway, which could catch clothing or body parts as the elevator passed up and down. Tufts included bench seats for his passengers to sit on, further proof that his device was designed to move people, not freight. Lee Gray, an architectural historian at UNC Charlotte, put it this way: “He gave us the concept of the modern elevator.”

In his patent description, Otis Tufts calls his machine a “vertical railway elevator,” which immediately clued people in on the fact that he was using the steam engine, the main power source in the mid-19^th Century, and simply applying it in a new direction. While Elisha Otis made an important contribution to elevator safety, Otis Tufts had conceived of the elevator in an entirely new way. “As a people-mover, the elevator could become a transformative technology.” Otis Tufts “got it,” as Gray said. Elisha Otis didn’t. So why is the name on the modern elevator that of Elisha Otis rather than Otis Tufts?

Like Elisha, Tufts was concerned with safety. In his patent, he explains his “unconquerable dread and distrust of the principle of suspension." Instead of fragile ropes, Tufts utilized the concept of a nut and bolt. The elevator car was the nut mounted on guide rails. A gigantic screw extending the entire length of the hoistway was the bolt, threaded through the car. As it slowly turned, the car moved up or down the shaft. Tufts’ system was installed in New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel in 1859. For fifteen years, it serviced the seven-story building without accident. However, in Gray’s assessment, it was “far too complex, far too expensive.” 

Elisha’s simpler safety system won out. Neither Tufts nor Elisha could possibly anticipate the way elevators would allow buildings to become taller and taller by eliminating the need for people to climb all those stairs. If Tuft’s screw design was marginal for a seven-story hotel, imagine the size of the screw needed for a modern skyscraper! Steel cables, not screws, were eventually the better solution. Eventually, Elisha Otis’ sons, Charles and Norton, took over their father’s company. Most elevator companies made other things as well, but the Otis brothers focused exclusively on elevator production. Through “tireless promotion,” they dominated the elevator industry.

Your character may never have heard of Otis Tufts, so this is more an exercise in trivial information, but if they were in New York City at the right time, they may have ridden in Tufts’ people-moving machine. And later, they would certainly have ridden in an Otis elevator.

 J.E.S. Hays

www.jeshays.com

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