Elisha Otis

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To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Whether you’re selling computers to a giant company or a new bedtime to your youngest child, ask yourself: “What’s the one percent?” If you can answer that question, and convey it to others, they’re likely to be moved. Part Three What to Do 7. Pitch In the fall of 1853, an American craftsman named Elisha Otis, who had found a solution to one of the era’s toughest engineering problems, went looking for a grand stage to demonstrate his invention. At the time, many American buildings had elevators. But the mechanics of how these crude contraptions worked—a combination of ropes, pulleys, and hope—hadn’t changed much since the days of Archimedes.

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The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you. In a world where buyers have ample information and an array of choices, the pitch is often the first word, but it’s rarely the last. The Six Successors to the Elevator Pitch Elisha Otis’s breakthrough had a catalytic effect on many industries, including the business of giving advice. Almost from the moment that elevators became commonplace, gurus like Dale Carnegie advised us to be ever ready with our “elevator speech.” The idea was that if you found yourself stepping into an elevator and encountering the big boss, you needed to be able to explain who you were and what you did between the time the doors closed shut and dinged back open at your floor.

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The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.6 If we leave our desk for a few minutes to grab a cup of coffee, greeting us upon our return will be new e-mails, texts, and tweets—not to mention all the blog posts we haven’t read, videos we haven’t watched, and, if we’re over forty, phone calls we haven’t returned. Today, we have more opportunities to get out our message than Elisha Otis ever imagined. But our recipients have far more distractions than those conventioneers in 1853 who assembled to watch Otis not fall to his death. As a result, we need to broaden our repertoire of pitches for an age of limited attention and caveat venditor. Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting pitches anywhere I could find them.

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures by Roma Agrawal

3D printing, air gap, Anthropocene, British Empire, clean water, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elisha Otis, Guggenheim Bilbao, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Leo Hollis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method

The equivalent of the entire world’s population is moved in an elevator every 72 hours. * I was reminded of Elisha Otis during my visit to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building (at 829.8m), because his company installed the elevators that were about to take me to the observation deck on the 124th of its 163 floors. It was a more serene journey than my trip up the outside of the tallest tower in Western Europe in a cage-like hoist, although the floor number on the LCD display changed with a bewildering rapidity as we ascended at 36km/h. (Elisha Otis’s original elevator in the E.V. Haughwout Building climbed at just over 0.7km/h.)

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Today, we’re so used to pressing a button and summoning a mobile cubicle to whisk us up and down our multi-storey towers that we don’t give it a second thought. But before the 1850s, elevators in this form didn’t exist. And although we started to build skyscrapers fairly soon after the invention of the elevator, such a device wasn’t originally designed with buildings in mind, but as a safer way to move materials around a factory. Like Archimedes, Elisha Otis had a restless and creative imagination. While working in a variety of jobs – carpenter, mechanic, bedstead manufacturer, factory owner – he invented an automatic turner that made the production of bedsteads four times faster; a new type of railway safety brake; and even an automatic bread-baking oven.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

dock builder: Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the New York Jewish Merchant and Community, 1654–1820.” Joseph Paxton: “Sir Joseph Paxton,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Victor Baltard: Ardagh, “Paris: The Halles.” William Le Baron Jenney: “William Le Baron Jenney,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Elisha Otis: “Elisha Otis.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. thirty more years: “William Le Baron Jenney.” Abraham Brower: “New York City Transit—History and Chronology,” World-Wide Business Centres. John Stephenson: “Death of John Stephenson; the Builder of Street Cars Passes Away Suddenly,” The New York Times.

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“Elementary and Secondary Education Expenditures.” Urban Institute, October 23, 2017. www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/elementary-and-secondary-education-expenditures. “Elisha Otis.” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Accessed January 18, 2021. www.britannica.com/biography/Elisha-Otis. Elliott, Farley. “Someone Smashed the Front Window of Divisive Boyle Heights Coffee Shop Again.” Eater Los Angeles, September 4, 2018. https://la.eater.com/2018/9/4/17819262/weird-wave-coffee-window-broken-smashed-news-update. ———. “This New Boyle Heights Coffee Bar Has Become a Gentrification Battleground.”

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The American architect William Le Baron Jenney studied in Paris and inserted a partial steel frame into Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, which is sometimes credited as being the world’s first skyscraper. Skyscrapers replace horizontal space with height. There was little demand for many-storied buildings until elevators eliminated the need to tromp up all those flights. Elisha Otis produced the first safety elevator, which he demonstrated, coincidentally, at New York’s 1853 Crystal Palace exhibition. He stood on an elevator deck and dramatically cut the only rope that was holding him aloft. The crowd watched as the Otis mechanism stopped the deck’s downward trajectory and kept its inventor safe.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

With ever-lighter elevators moving ever faster across ever-thinner cables, we will soon be able to reach higher grounds even more swiftly. Future cabins may even move along frictionless magnetic rails, ditching the cable altogether, and crisscross sideways through multiple buildings. IN 1854, DURING the World’s Fair in New York, Elisha Otis conducted a groundbreaking experiment. Wearing a suit and a top hat, he stood on a platform suspended by a single rope. He hoisted himself up above the crowds. He then invited his assistant bearing an ax to do the unthinkable. His assistant swung the ax and slashed the rope, the platform jerked, and people gasped.

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With elevator companies vying to be the fastest, most efficient, and most state-of-the-art, they are eager to find projects to demonstrate their latest innovations. Although innovation does not always mean “progress.” For some, digital screens enliven elevator rides. For others, it’s nothing but an annoyance and an unwanted claim on attention. One hundred sixty years after Elisha Otis sold his first elevator, the Shanghai Tower became the battleground to claim elevator supremacy. IT IS RARE that an elevator ride creates excitement. Yet, as people enter one of the express elevators in the Shanghai Tower, they often pull out their cameras and start recording. All eyes are on a blue television screen displaying the elevator speed, accompanied by a screen section showing the cabin’s rapid ascent up the tower.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The whole exhibition showcased the many wonders of the thrusting modern city to awesome effect. Each day a crowd gathered in one of the main halls, huddling in front of a stage upon which stood a structure that appeared at first glance like a gallows. As workmen took the strain, pulling the ropes taut, a platform rose bearing aloft the inventor Elisha Otis, accompanied by several barrels and heavy boxes, until it reached 30 feet above the heads of the throng. After a dramatic pause an assistant cut the hoists with an axe and the crowds gasped as they anticipated seeing the engineer crash to the floor. But the platform only dropped a few inches and remained there, suspended in the air.

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The ways that we come together have changed over the centuries, and this has had a huge impact on how we interact and behave with each other. Walking through New York, heading southwards along Hudson Street, it is hard to forget that Manhattan is a nineteenth-century city, created on a grid first set out in 1811. Looking up to the skyline, one can still see water towers on top of the brick buildings that were created after Elisha Otis’s technological innovation, the safety elevator, which allowed architects to scale over five storeys high for the first time. We can see similar creative and engineering innovation in Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s London, Baron Haussmann’s Paris, Boston after the fire of 1872, the San Francisco that was built from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake.

St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, food miles, Frank Gehry, Great Leap Forward, means of production, railway mania, value engineering

Though novel enough to lack a settled terminology, this perilous-seeming device was already established in London’s grand hotels: the Charing Cross and Grosvenor both had one, as did the two biggest non-railway hotels of the early 1860s, the Westminster Palace and the Langham. This was only a little behind the United States, where hydraulically operated lifts on the safety-catch principle pioneered by Elisha Otis were introduced to a New York hotel for the first time in 1859. St Pancras had two passenger lifts and two for goods, arranged in pairs and likewise hydraulically operated, of which the western passenger lift and its goods companion were replaced by electric Otis-type safety fittings in 1891. This in turn was two years after the first American electric lift began operation, and seventeen years before self-closing doors were invented, inevitably also in America.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In the late nineteenth century, major technological innovations removed traditional barriers to urban growth: innovations in building technology removed barriers to vertical expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. With the first steel-frame building going up in Chicago in 1885, the physical constraints associated with load-bearing walls were removed, allowing structures to efficiently rise ten stories and above for the first time. Rapid improvements in elevator technology, such as Elisha Otis’s safety locking mechanism, took the burden out of having an upper-floor office or warehouse. Collectively, these innovations allowed developers to build exponentially more floor area on the same plot of land, allowing densities to follow demand.3 All of this building supported ongoing urban industrialization between 1890 and 1920, leaving cities with a near insatiable appetite for labor.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

airport security, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Elisha Otis, out of africa, The Soul of a New Machine

It was Charlie who came for me. I remarked on the apparent age of the elevator, and Charlie began—in a deep and measured voice, which wasn’t a drawl but carried traces of the South, like phrases of an old song: “The original passenger elevator was installed across the street. In the Haughwout Building. Built by old man Elisha Otis, in 1857. Without which, of course, the high-rise would not be possible. That and structural steel. Cast iron was the last-generation technology….” The elevator opened right into the living area, itself open to the kitchen. The furniture was plain. Everything in the tidy kitchen seemed to have been there for years.

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

However, in the 1970s, a new CEO named Harry Gray sought to diversify the company’s interests away from aerospace, changing the name to United Technologies. In the years that followed, he acquired several iconic companies including Carrier Air Conditioning, founded by Willis Carrier, the inventor of modern air conditioning, and Otis Elevator, started by Elisha Otis, designer of the world’s first elevator. These businesses operated in industries outside of United Technologies’ legacy businesses, which included Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines and Sikorsky Helicopter, founded by Igor Sikorsky, the inventor of the first mass-produced helicopter. Taken together, this was a collection of some of the strongest brands in the world.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

Automobile, airplane, city subway, electric elevator: We have la belle époque to thank for our cities' streets not being littered with horse manure, and for our ability to travel around the world. The automobile was invented by Karl Benz in 1885, the airplane by the Wright brothers in 1906, the subway by Charles Pearson in 1843, and the electric elevator by Elisha Otis in 1852. Heart surgery; organ transplant; appendectomy; baby incubator; radiation therapy; anesthetics, aspirin, blood types and blood transfusions, vitamins, electrocardiograph, stethoscope: Surgery and modern medicine owe their most significant advances to la belle époque as well. The introduction of modern sanitation and reliable hydrocarbon energy allowed doctors to transform the way they cared for their patients after centuries of largely counterproductive measures.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

In the 3D maps used in time geography, a vertical line actually means a person is standing still or at rest.10 Elevator Histories The elevator has a history of at least 2,000 years: Rome’s Colosseum had a system of twelve winch-powered elevators operated by slaves to lift wild animals and gladiators straight into the bloody action of the arena. Without a means of drawing power greater than that available from human or animal muscle, however, such systems were inevitably highly limited in their speed and reach. It was Elisha Otis’s invention of a safe, automatically braking elevator in Yonkers, New York, in the 1850s that created a technology enabling the vertical movement of people as well as goods that has been central to the rapid colonisation of vertical space through urban growth. Otis’s innovation opened up the vertical frontier to architectural construction like no innovation in human history.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Church spires and belfry towers could pierce the heavens, but only because those towers were narrow and because few people, other than the occasional bell ringer, had to climb them. Tall buildings became possible in the nineteenth century when American innovators solved the twin problems of crafting tall buildings without enormously thick lower walls and of safely moving up and down in them. Elisha Otis didn’t invent the elevator; Archimedes allegedly built one, possibly in Sicily, twenty-two hundred years ago. And Louis XV had his own personal lift in Versailles so that he could visit his mistress. Yet for the elevator to become mass transit, it needed a good source of power, and it needed to be safe.

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

book value, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Edmond Halley, Elisha Otis, Ford Model T, index card, Lewis Mumford, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Silicon Valley

“The elegant and varied assortment of new goods with which we shall open has probably NEVER BEEN EQUALED IN THIS COUNTRY” the owner announced on March 17 of that year in the New York Times. But the piece didn’t mention the store’s true distinction: the first real passenger elevator ran between its floors, installed by Mr. Elisha Otis. While Otis is widely credited with the “invention” of the elevator itself, his patent was for the safety device that would eventually make high-rise buildings a real possibility; this new device had its first outing at Haughwout’s. In the beginning elevator ropes—just as in the days of the portage railway—were made of hemp; but before long the work of Mr.

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

The rambunctious and boisterously enthusiastic radio-engineer Lee De Forest created the triode, known as the Audion, around the same time and with it sent the first voice broadcasts across the oceans; later he transmitted music from the top of the Eiffel Tower during his honeymoon (second of the four he would enjoy in his lifetime), with the signal being picked up 500 miles away. And, finally, though Elisha Otis had invented the principle of the elevator as early as 1852, with the first such device having been installed in a New York department store in 1857, and though the Bessemer Process allowed steel girders to be used (in place of iron columns), thus permitting taller and taller buildings to be made, it was not until these early-twentieth-century years that a combination of engineering, ambition and architectural enthusiasm coalesced sufficiently to allow for the building in New York of the world’s first true skyscrapers.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

.; the 1854 structure’s cast-iron facade was added in 1901, and today it serves as a Banana Republic store. A block and a half south, on the northeast corner of Broome and Broadway, stands the magnificent 1857 Haughwout Building, the oldest cast-iron structure in the city, as well as the first building of any kind to boast a passenger elevator – the lift, designed by Elisha Otis, was steam-powered. The facade of 75 Soho’s cast-iron architecture TRIBE CA AND S OHO | Soho In vogue from around 1860 to the turn of the twentieth century, the cast-iron architecture that is visible all over Soho initiated the age of prefabricated buildings. With mix-and-match components molded from iron, which was cheaper than brick or stone, a building of four stories could go up in as many months.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Today, the first floor is a Mango fashion store while the rest is a posh residential co-op. Haughwout Building 488–492 Broadway, at Broome St • Subway N, R, W to Prince St; #6 to Spring St The magnificent 1857 Haughwout Building is the oldest cast-iron structure in the city, as well as the first building of any kind to boast a passenger elevator – the lift, designed by Elisha Otis, was steam-powered. Despite its dreary grey colour, the facade of the former housewares emporium is still mesmerizing; 92 colonnaded arches are framed behind taller columns and the whole building looks more like an elaborate sculpture. Broome Street Building 451 Broome St, at Broadway • Subway N, R, W to Prince St; #6 to Spring St Diagonally opposite the Haughwout Building and equally impossible to ignore, the ostentatious wedding-cake exterior of the Broome Street Building was completed in 1896.