160 Years of Claustrophobia

It was to elevators what the phrase “Mr. Watson, come here” was to telephones: “Cut the rope.”

Elisha Gray Otis said it. His assistant sliced through the thick piece of hemp that raised and lowered Otis’s newfangled elevator. The elevator dropped a bit, and stopped. Otis’s safety brake had done its job.

Otis Elevators Elisha Otis

The device made elevators practical, and made the modern vertical city possible. “It would have been a two- or a three-story world, as opposed to now,” said Robert S. Caporale, the editor of Elevator World magazine.

Why bring this up now For anyone who met that special person in an elevator, or endured the long silences in one with a boss who did not go for small talk, or has been stuck in one while the super figured out how to get it going again, Wednesday is an anniversary â€" the 160th anniversary of when Otis founded his company in Yonkers.

Otis did not invent the elevator any more than Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg â€" the original name of the patriarch before the ampersand in Steinway & Sons, also established in 1853 â€" invented the piano. “Elevators go back to the early 1800s,” Mr. Caporale said. “They came out of the manufacturing industry, in the mills in England where they had to transport material, fabrics and the raw materials to make fabrics, in multistory buildings. At first they used very crude lifting devices, hand-operated hoisting lifts, open platforms.”

Otis sold his first three elevators for $300 apiece and went on to the 1854 exposition at the Crystal Palace in Midtown Manhattan, where he demonstrated “the first elevator wherein provision was made for stopping the fall of the car in the contingency of the breaking of the hoisting cables.” In other words, if the cables snapped, the device would keep it from plunging.

Every hour at the exposition, the World’s Fair of its day, Otis stepped into his machine. He gave the order to an assistant who cut the rope. The crowd held its breath. The brake kicked in, the elevator stopped and Otis announced: “All safe, gentlemen. All safe.”

“Otis allowed passengers to ride in relative safety,” said Patrick Carrajat, the founder and curator of the Elevator Historical Society, which runs a museum in Long Island City, Queens. “So many elevators, when the cable broke, they’d crash into the pit. The elevators were little more than open platforms, and they’d come apart and people would be seriously injured and killed.”

Otis installed the first commercial passenger elevator in the five-story Haughwout Building at 488 Broadway, at Broome Street, in 1857. It was a steam-powered machine that took more than a minute to climb to the top floor.

Later, the company says, it installed the elevators in the Empire State Building. It is now refurbishing and modernizing all 68 of them as the last major step in the building’s $550 million modernization project. The elevators carry 10 million people a year, from tenants in the offices to visitors bound for the Observatory.

New York City now has about 70,000 elevators, Mr. Caporale said, and the cables are steel. “When Otis developed the safety device, they were using hemp ropes,” he said. (He said he knew of only two cable failures: In July 1945, when a B-25 slammed into the Empire State Building and sliced through an elevator cable, and on Sept. 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. “We’re not even sure, he said, “but we think because the planes went through the buildings, the ropes were severed to the point that an elevator fell.”)

Mr. Caporale said his tally includes elevators not under the jurisdiction of the city’s Department of Buildings, like those in housing projects. Last year the New York City Housing Authority agreed to overhaul the way it maintains and repairs elevators in its buildings as part of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in 2009 by lawyers for seven tenants with disabilities, had accused the agency of “widespread disrepair and dysfunction.”

Elevator accidents have made headlines since the earliest days. Mr. Carrajat of the Elevator Historical Society pointed to an accident at a confectioner in Lower Manhattan in 1861. “A workman got killed,” Mr. Carrajat said. But The New York Times reported in 1853 on the death of a 13-year-old boy who had been playing in the office at a print shop and got caught in the elevator mechanism.

In 2011, an elevator in a Midtown office building lurched upward, crushing a passenger to death. The Buildings Department said that in 2012 there were 47 elevator accidents, with three fatalities.

If New York is elevator country, Elevator World’s office is in a remote outpost: Mobile, Ala. So what kind of building is Elevator World in

“Primarily a one-story building with a conference room on the second story,” Mr. Caporale said. “And no, we don’t have an elevator.”