Elevators and the Humans who Use Them

take two different sets of elevators. I had twice, twice the fun twice. H See, I took an escalator up from Marta and then the elevator up in our building. I could have taken the Marta elevator, though I think it doubles as a bathroom, so I tried to avoid it. I was about to say, it's it's part of our public transportation system, right Marta, and I will confirm that

it does smell like you're in the elevator banks. Now, in this episode, of course, we're going to talk about elevators, and it's not just gonna be uh, We're not just gonna focus on the mechanics and all that. Though the mechanics are pretty fascinating when you break them down. We're going to get into the psychology of the culture of the elevators of the past are possible elevators of the future a little bit. But to kick things off here, I want to ask you, and then I'm gonna ask

myself the same question. Name me a fictional elevator or an elevator scene that particularly um excited you, and a real life elevator that you loved and or feared. Mm okay, all right. So I debated about this thing. Because I was thinking about this, I thought, well, I think that the one that made the most impact on me is probably the elevators from the Shining because blood gushes out of them. But you don't really spend much time in the elevators, so but it's just the idea that blood

would come gushing them. And then that that thought me too. That that got me to thinking about how in a lot of UM movies, at least, elevators are are the scene for awful things happening? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's usually some sort of I know, heist going on or in sil lambs. Yeah yeah, there's that, Remember there's the blood dripping down from the hatch. I totally forgot about that elevator scene. But that is that is a great sequence, terrifying, awful, awful.

So I started to think about how that really feeds into sometimes our phobia is about elevators, because really, mean, what is it but a little metal canister that you seal yourself into. Um, which leads to again fears because I was thinking about a building called the West and Peach Tree in Atlanta, and it's a very tall tone guess the West And this is the one that looks like a big paper towel rolly, a glass paper towel roll has a revolving restaurant at the top, the Sun

Died restaurant Us Atlanteans take out of town. Guess yeah, because like we look at us, we're moving around as we eat um. But the terrifying thing is that their elevator is glass, and it's you're going up on the side and you see um. If you if you're from like me who has a fear of heights, then obviously you began to see the landscape unfold in front of you, and you began to in chup more towards the door. Yea, those are some some interesting elevators for sure. Um they're

the ones at the Weston. I tend to really enjoy the ride, but my wife she uh, she just kind of looks at the door and try because she and she's not crazy about the glass, I think. And also she's a little bit claustrophobic and an elevators sometimes so um so. But we'll discuss the the psychology of of elevators a little more as we continue. For my own part, the real world elevator that I often think about, I have to go back to my college days in Knoxville, Tennessee,

the University of Tennessee. There is a dorm there called mel Rose Hall, and I think mel Rose Hall is still there. I don't know if it's still a dorm

or if it's been incorporated into something else. But when I went there, it was it was really cool because it was the It was a door arm exclusively for international students and socially introverted people like myself who you know, upperclassmen who weren't leaving campus to find exciting apartment living, but but did a room to themselves in a dorm. When you got off the elevator banks. Did it say that?

Did it say Melrose Hall for the International students essentially introverted, but it was they updated it in recent years because when I went there, the beds were all really short, like left over from World War two, so I had to I had to like sleep with the mattress in early weird position because it had a footboard and I'm I'm fairly tall and uh and there was no air conditioning, so during the summer you just had to sweat it out or live exclusively at night, or go down and

sleep and like the one or two refrigerator and regreated basically refrigerated um wreck rooms, and it had this ancient elevator that this dorm was not that tall. I think it was three two or three floors above ground. But one of the things that made it awesome was that there were two basements. There was a basement where there was just a lot of their offices and dorms. Some people actually lived in the basement, and then there was

a sub basement. And to this day I wish I had found a way talk to somebody and found a way to visit the sub basement, because I love the idea the idea of of there being an extra subworld down there, and like, what does it consist of? There are no dorms down there or are there what kind of strange creatures uh lived down there in the sub

basement of Melrose Hall. I don't know. Uh. And it also had a little gate, the old school gate you had to pull across, and the clunky buttons that they look like they're they're part of a furnace or something. So I I loved that elevator. I have no idea if they still have it. Maybe they replaced it. Sure they upgraded it probably took out the great it was.

It was indeed great. Though in the g R E A t since fictional elevators, I always come back to one of my favorite movies, John Carpenter's Big Trouble in a Little China. In this particular movie, you keep encountering elevators that only go down, and I'm all, I've always been inspired and uh and fascinated by by sub worlds and UH and underground spaces and in dis sense and so uh, these elevators that that only go down are always just really fascinating to me. UM and Big trom

a little China. There's a scene where they they're taking it down, ends up, the elevator goes into water and they have to escape and swim out through this kind of watery dungeon hell environment. And then there's another elevator they take straight down, which is plush and it looks

like a really fancy Chinese restaurant on the inside. And there's a wonderful scene where all the heroes are packed into this little elevator, and you have sort of a cliche elevator scene where you know, people are just standing there doing nothing, kind of awkwardly. But then there there's this they're also having all this magic potion that they just consumed. It's kicking in and so they're beginning to feel kind of magical and invincible. It's it's a wonderful scene.

But it you mentioned all the scenes that take place in movies involving elevators, and and when you do think about them, the elevator becomes this interesting space from just a storytelling because it is that it is a space between is a space where you can encapsulate your characters and force them to have a little small talk and maybe you know, push the plot a little a little forward. Uh.

It's a great way to transition between one set and another. Uh. And then you get into all the high jinks of climbing out of elevators, climbing on top of them, becoming stuck in an elevator. Classic, um, classic way to do a very limited episode of a TV show. I wonder how And it's always like a woman giving birth and an elevator. That's a That's another big one that's always happening on TV. So it is, Yeah, I miss that one.

I feel like there's a super cut online on YouTube somewhere of just scenes of women who are pregnant in elevators, So I'm not going to check that out. Um. You know, as we're discussing this, this actually reminds me of the movie Inception, which we bring up every once in a while. It there is a great narrative technique now that I'm thinking about it, of his psyche being in line with

an elevator. So when he plunges into his dream world Leonardo DiCaprio's character, then he descends in the elevator, particularly when when he has like a very tragic memories that

he's rebusiting. So yeah, I mean it turns out that the elevator is is a great metaphor for as you say, that in between spaces and life, and it's something that we do take for granted, but it is so fascinating to me because really you're talking about I don't know, maybe a twenty to thirty second ride on an elevator, and yet it can sometimes be the most awkward ride. And it is one of these great things is it's

a microcosm for really how we act in social situations. Um, there's so much going on and just that little span of time and when you really think about it, I mean, what is an elevator, But it's really a box suspended by ropes and a counterweight. And remember that, you know, for us it's not a big deal. But if you were in the early twentieth century and you are an office worker in one of the beautiful, beautiful, new sparkling skyscrapers,

this would be a really weird experience for you. And you know you wouldn't you'd have to deal with getting into this this metal box that's going to go up this narrow little shaft and what that meant to you psychologically. And I wanted to point out that This is about the time, at least in the forties when skyscrapers really

became prevalent. Yet you began to see musaic or music being piped into elevators because what they're trying to do there is psychologically set you up for this feeling that everything is okay, and they give you the most bland, vanilla music to pipe in. Uh So, you know, again, we take that stuff for granted, but if you are someone in that time period forties, this would be kind

of a weird thing. And by the way, the music playing in the background there it was was tracked two from the nineteen seventy four music LP known to collectors as the Blue Album. So, yeah, you don't see music anymore, or at least I have an encountered music and forever on on board and l elevator. Now they try different tactics to try and make you, um think about something other than the tiny suspended box and a shaft that

that is your environment. Yeah. I read somewhere that the music became so associated with elevator rides that they go out rid of it because it was just reminding people that they were in an elevator. Yeah, I mean, you

still see it in movies. I think people still reference that the idea that you know, it kind of drives home the awkwardness of an environment where it's like you're standing right next to a total stranger and there's funky music playing like this but not but not real funky music, but like music acts, which is kind of the uncanny valley of music. Anyway, this driving home the awkwardness and

artificiality of your setting. I love that. And now I'm thinking about a robot just staring back at me, vehicing in in in the form of music, which really that is what the old music was like. Um okay, So before we go and give you guys a little bit of history, um of elevators and get then go into the psychology, we did want to cover something really important, and that is the door closed button. Yes, the door closed button, which I think we've all hit it at

least once, probably ten twenty times in a row. You know that that feeling where you did I get when I've I've I've arrived on the train, I hurry up the escalator. I walked in through the front door of the building and then there's an elevator already arrived on the on the ground floor just waiting for me. So I get inside and I'm the first person in there.

Now at this point, I want those doors to shut because if they don't, like eight people are going to show up and they're all going to like different floors, and we're on the floor. We on the tenth uh somewhere up there. Yeah, well, I don't know why I can't remember that I pushed this button. Every day I've been reminded that we were on the fifteenth floor, technically the fourteenth because you know, they skipped, because that would

be unlucky. Yeah, So anyway, Um, you know, I rushed onto the elevator and I start pushing that door closed button and it seems to take forever, and I always think it's in the past. I was just thought, well, they don't. You don't want it to be a situation where you just push that button and it slams shut like a like guillotines, twin guillotines. You know, that would

be dangerous. You would need some sort of delay. But it never really occurred to me that the button does not work at all, or at least probably does not work at all. Yeah, it probably doesn't because it turns out that buildings that were built, particularly from the nineties and onward, they are not usually keyed so that the door button works. Usually there they are just in case of an emergency. So the door closed button is really only going to work if you have a key for

the elevator. So I just won't want everybody to know that, because if you've ever been frustrated and said, why won't the door close? And also it felt a little bit of a fool and a jerk because you know, there was a huge amount of people that were stampeding towards you as you were pushing the door close, and it's all for not yeah, And then sometimes I mean really, but occasionally it will be someone I know out there.

And also I'll go to push the door open button and it won't work or something, and then I feel like a jerk because they're thinking I was frantically pushing their clothes button to leave them on the bottom floor. And people get kind of been out of shape about

their their elevator situation. Um has pointed out in some of the resources we were looking at, including the fabulous article Up and then Down the Lines of Elevators by Nick Palm, Garden a two thousand and eight New Yorker article, which is about a thousand pages long course since the

New Yorker article, but it's excellent. It's like a it's like a mini novel about the history of the elevator, the culture of the elevator, and one particularly harrowing example of someone trapped in an elevator for I believe, forty one hours. Yeah, well we'll we'll mention him in a moment. But it's a you're right, it's set up really great because they take this guy, Nick White, the guy that was trapped, and they use that as a reference point. Right.

But one of the points that the Palm Garden keeps coming back to is that in some of the people interviews keep discussing, is that we hold elevator to this different standard, uh than we do anything else. Like I take the train to work, and if I have to wait twenty minutes on a train, it's it's just kind of part of it. It's smarta so I just you know, whatever, it's just gonna be a slow ride. And then oh I'm next to somebody that's that's either a stranger or

kind of awful. That's just public transportation, No big deal if there's a delay, all right, this is part of the experience on an elevator. I expect to wait no more than thirty seconds. I expect to ascend and pretty hopefully directly to my floor, which I'm told again is the fifteenth floor. And and I don't technically, Yeah, and if any of these things get messed up, I get a little bit out of shape about it. Yeah, And and that's what it's so interesting when you look at

trying to actually engineer a decent set of elevators. And we'll get more into that, but let's talk about the Otis Elevator Company, because this really is the gold standard in the industry. Yeah, you've all been seeing the word Otis inside your elevators all your live and uh. And I never really thought about it beyond and just making a quick reference in my mind to old Andy Griffith's episodes, you know where you had to Ovis the Drunk, and I imagine him on an elevator. And that's kind of

the end of it. But they are the elevator company in the United States and one of the major players globally. Uh. Most of their work these days isn't even in the United States. They're they're going to uh to Asia and the Middle East, and they're they're advising and installing elevator systems in these magnificent high rises that that everyone you know,

freaks out about. On the internet, everyone's you know, always sharing a picture of either the newest skyscraper under under construction or the plans for this elaborate skyscraper that they're gonna build in the desert somewhere. And uh, of course, any time you're designing a building like that, anytime you're looking to create to create something like that, elevators are

an essential part of it. I mean, without elevators, we would not have skyscrapers because you need a way for um able bodied people to reach any floor in pretty uh you know, pretty been a pretty a short amount of time. And then you also need um disabled individuals, individuals who are not up to multiple So just for it to make sense at all, you have to have

an elevator system. And it's a particularly an interesting vision business now with the skyscrapers and the tallness of them, because you know, basic physics will tell you that if you reach beyond a thousand feet up in cabling for an elevator system, that's about the top of what you can get there, because otherwise your cables will snap. So you've got a bunch of engineers working on the spots because a lot of these buildings are much higher than that,

especially if you look at something like the Burge. So there's some really good media problems to work on for engineers and mathematicians. Um. But before we start looking more at the modern systems, let's talk about Alicia Graves Otis. He founded the company Otis Elevators in eighteen fifty three when he figured out an operating system that could prevent free falls and passenger elevators, which is always nice because the bay it's the idea of an elevator is pretty ancient.

The basics of hauling a box up, I mean that dates back to you know, to the ancient Greeks. Well, yeah, it read something to you about the first century BC. Romans would operate lifts using pulleys with humans, animal and water power. So yeah, it is a very simple process if you think about it. But yeah, it wasn't until we really had the safety features in mind that we could and also the the ability to build multiple skyscrapers

that it really became a thing. Yeah, and then in Otis introduced the automatic elevator system, and that eliminated the need for operators. So no longer did you get into the elevator, at least in most office buildings, and was there an attendant there. Now, that did introduce an element of randomness, because before this you had someone in the elevator who knew where you were going and knew sort of the traffic patterns of people and would call that

out to the operators. So it was easy to anticipate traffic. But when they moved to the automated system, it was a little bit more of of um, okay, well nobody knows really what the traffic patterns are anymore, and people had to wait a little bit more. Yeah, it was apparently in the nineties we obviously saw that shift from elevator operators to operator less elevators, which instantly makes me think of Madman. Um, yeah, I can't remember do you

watch mad Man? I've caught it before, I haven't seen all the season's will they make a lot of use of the elevators because they work in a high rise, so there's a lot of room for scenes where individuals encounter each other awkwardly or well generally awkwardly in the elevator,

but then also some excellent scenes. There's one in particular where Draper goes to take the elevator down and the doors open to just an empty shaft, and it has a lot to do with I mean, it's a thematically with what's going on in the show at that point. But but but it's it's a fascinating scene. And likewise, there's generally, i think, at least up until now, in

the show, there's always an elevator operator. So I'm kind of looking forward to the point when the elevator operator is no longer present because I guess it's kind of an old fashioned building, uh that they're they're hanging onto that tradition, and I kind of want to see Draper's

face when that goes away. That's kind of interesting to you how that the tails with the changing social ways at that time, because you can kind of think of the attendant as the chaperone, and uh, you know that's sort of because you could say, very um controlled relationship is flying away during that time, right the sixties, and

people are beginning to be freer. So again, here here's the elevators, a microcosm of society in which you know, no longer as a chaperone there and anything can happen in an elevator, right, and now, as we'll discuss a little later, where in an age where we see that amount of freedom vanishing more and more in the elevator, we see technology taking over to the point to where we feel just like, where at the whim of whatever

mysterious mechanical force is controlling this magic box? Yeah, and so in there you go with the door closed button, right, that's just an illusion of free will, right right. One of my favorite things that I stumbled upon when we were researching this is an old clip from a Candid Camera show. You remember that show? Yeah, This is where they would you know, kind of a forerunner of reality shows. Um,

kind of like what was the show Punked? I think with the MTV things several years Yeah, yeah, where they would prank people. You know, it's just a prank show they do, and some of it bordered on what we would now call almost performance art or theater everywhere kind of shenanigans where you're creating something weird in a public space. And then seeing how people react to it. Yeah. So I mean, actually, and its purest format, it really is kind of a social experiment because nobody was doing them

before that. And so you had this candid camera crew set up basically basically confederates, and we've talked about confederates before. These are people who are in on an experiment or a joke. And what they did is they filmed an elevator, a bank of elevators. They had I don't know, like five different confederates go into an elevator and then a person who's not in on it and go in and

observe what's going on. And quickly you could see that people would react accordingly, like they would feel the pressure of those around them to do the right thing socially. So what I mean is that if five Confederates went in and they all turned around and faced the wall, which is an unusual thing to do in an elevator, the person will look around and then join them, right And some of these they would sort of hold out at first, but then they would succumb to the group

think and look at the walls. And it's it's fascinating, yeah, because there's this sense of you know, conformity and wanting to to look like you know what's going on. Like I've been in We've all probably been in elevators before. We have a door on both sides. I particularly seem to to encounter these in hospitals for some reason. I just just because some of the weird floor layouts that are involved, and there is this kind of confusion that

takes all which door is going to open. Not only do I need to know which way I'm going, and there's that sort of basic directional survival instinct in your mind, but you also don't want to look like you don't know which doors though you know you want to look you want to appear in control. You want to feel in control in this thing. You don't want to look

like a rube. And that's what's so funny about this candid camera clip, because the Confederates continue to turn, will turn to the right, and then the guy turns to the right, and then they turn, you know, to the opposite, to the left, and so on and so forth. Or they they all are wearing hats and they take their hats off and he takes his hat off. So again microcosm of what's going on socially and the pressures that

we feel to conform. And it was just a really elegant little social experiment that was conducted by candid camera of all people. We're talking about the psychology of elevators at this point. So there are a few different factors that are mandatory and discussing our mindset inside of this magic box. The first of which, of course, is we left on earlier wait times. How long is this ride

going to take? Because even if you're in there alone, you don't want to be there too long, and and and and this is actually the sort of thing that elevator strategists and elevator designers are are very key to understand, and it varies from culture to culture. But in the United States, thirty seconds, like that's as long as anyone is tolerant being on an elevator, And this is really important. It sounds kind of random, right, thirty seconds, so what's

the big deal? But it turns out that UM office space is far more desirable if they can deliver people in that thirty seconds or less timeframe. So you want to have a good office space that that can deliver this UM. And what's interesting about this is that when you get out of an office situation and morans to say, like an apartment building situation, people are much more forgiving, so you can add another ten or fifteen seconds onto that in an apartment building. In an apartment building, yeah,

because people they have their their their personal effects. There, it's more about life going on and less this is a job. I need to get where I'm going. I don't have time for your job. It reminds me though. Another another college elevator thing was another dorm and I was in was one called North Carrick In in the University of Tennessee, and this one was I think I was on the tenth floor of this particular dorm and it was awful because we had two elevators serving the

entire building. And the white times were just colossal unless you were like you're gonna be you know, it was the middle of the night or something or some weird time, but the morning hours, afternoon hours, like key traffic times

of the day, it was just a colossal weight. The door would open and it would already be packed, and you end up just taking ten flights of stairs, uh, you know, in the summer and just totally exhausting yourself and sweating all over the place just because the elevators were that bad, and like nobody wants to encounter that like that just made this's just we have no tolerance

for it. Well, you know, and every once in a while you will encounter an elevator bank like that, right, And what it's doing is that it's it's a it's not cross referencing any of the data that we'll talk about later, it's not very sophistic caated. It's basically just saying I'm going to stop at every stop that's going up, load people up, and then I'm gonna go back down, and I'm gonna stop at every single floor. So it's

just sort of a single function elevator. Yeah. In the New Yorker article that we were looking at, he interviews a man by the James Fortune, who's pretty much the

the top class elevator advisor strategist designer. Gets into all of all of these questions of you know, how are we gonna lay this out from maximum affecient efficiency and uh, and some of the things they discussed where things that I had never really thought of, like, for instance, you want to cut down as much as possible on Florida floor um travel, you know, because that the idea is something like, even in our building, where I know that

you cannot travel between floors via the staircase because of the lock system. It's set up so that if you want to take the stairs, you better be going to the ground floor. There's no using it to go in between floors. It's just part of the safety system here. So I'll see individuals who work for a business that

occupies two different floors in this building. I'll see them go from one floor to the other, and even though I rationally know that they have no choice but to do that, I still have this really judgmental voice in my head. It's like, come on, lazy, take the stairs. That's the matter with you. I guess it's a holdout

from from my college days and that awful dorm. It's funny in that New Yorker article, uh, I think that the author talks about how that's really infuriating as well, and I believe that his perspective is like, Okay, you're gonna go get on the StairMaster for an hour after work, but you won't take the stairs. Now. Of course, not everybody, can you know, has that luxury for the next with a bunch of files or some coffee right right, or maybe you have something physically going on that prevents you

from doing that. But you're right, mathematicians cannot stand it. They hate that because that is an X factor that they can't account for because they have all these probability um, you know, scales that they can rely on. But that's the one thing that will throw them off, because how can you can account how can you account for that? Yes,

some of the other real city he goes into. For instance, if you have a hotel and you have a cafeteria, or you have a check in on a second floor, that floor better be accessible via an escalator or likewise, for a high traffic um subfloor. For instance, when we were in Minneapolis for the educational talk we gave, I noticed that the like the bottom three floors were all connected via escalators and uh, and I realized now that is because they didn't want traffic, high traffic between those

three floors monopolizing the elevator banks, that's right. And they only because they had a very small amount of elevator banks, right, it was a pretty small amount for a tall building. And that's another thing. Architects don't want to seed a lot of square footage two elevators because that's going to decrease the profits on the amount of office space for hotail space that they can rent out. So they have to make it as small of space and as efficient

as possible. And they also have to take into account personal space, which is tied into culture. We'll talk a little bit more about that. How close am I willing to get the person in the elevator with? Yeah. Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxymix, called the smallest range less than eighteen inches between people intimate distance. Now, this is then the point at which you can sense another

person's odor and temperature. And the thing is that Americans typically like to be at least two point three feet away from from one another, so they don't want to get to the point where they can smell you or feel your body temperature. Yeah. I mean, even in the United States, you see a certain breakdown between say New

York City and everywhere else. You know, like if you're dining, say in a in a New York restaurant versus elsewhere, like like you're in Atlanta, you go to a restaurant you expect to have a certain amount of space between you and the other diners. You expect the table to be at the fair, you know, the fair distance across. But like you go into a lot of New York eateries and you are going to be they're gonna be elbows bumping, You're gonna be looking down the shirt of

the person the right way in front of you. It's just there's just a different proxy many rule in New York City. Uh, then there isn't in the rest of the country. Yeah, And it turns out that in uh, the United States, at least, you can sort of infringe on the two point three feet. You can go about two feet in with Americans and and still be okay with it. You can jam that elevator and as long

as everybody has two feet, they're okay with it. But as you say, like you know, there are different rules in different places, and in Asia, you could double pack that elevator and people would be fine because they don't have that much of a need for distance. Right. And you see that, you see that you know elsewhere like public transportation, Um, you see that in the difference between the Japanese subway system and then public transportation here in

the States. How comfortable are people willing to pack? Now, I've certainly been on some Martyat trains before where it's just like sardines in there, but everyone is is visibly upset by the situation. Yeah, yeah, especially in the summertime when the cars air conditioning isn't working. Um So again this is pointing more toward cultural nor rooms, right, what

is what works out for each culture? And there's a really great article in the Wall Street Journal and they have profiled in Otis elevator mathematician Teresa Christie, and she tries to account for all the different cultural aspects as well as as everything else that's involved in getting an

elevator to run smoothly. And so she was saying that in the hotel in say Mecca in Saudi Arabia, she now has to account for the fact that people are getting ready to pray at least five times a day, so she has to make sure that those elevator banks can respond to those high traffic times. Yeah, I mean certain that's certainly a factor that is going to be involved in any of these Middle Eastern high rises that

are always, you know, making the news. Neither in construction or in planning, and then she was saying that in Japan, uh, there's a psychological element to waiting, so, um, they want to know when their elevator is coming. So in Japan, the light over your perspective elevator lights up even if

it's not there yet. And the author of the Wall Street Journal likened it to a nod of acknowledgment from a busy bartender, which I thought was great because if you've ever gone up to the bar and it's completely slammed and you feel that frustration until you get noticed I hear, am I do? I am? I not classy enough looking and it's because of me, And yeah, you can get a little stressed out about it. So I can.

I can imagine that you you get to the elevator banks, you want to know an elevator is coming, and so they're set up to deal with that. Yeah. So those are just some of the cultural aspects of it. Um. No,

we probably should mention Nick White real quick. This is the guy that was trapped in the elevator in hours, Yes, and his his story is covered in various articles across the net, uh, and it serves as kind of the the narrative backbone of Palm Gardens two tho eight article, which again either recommend everyone read because it's it's brilliant. But yeah, he what he he worked at a business week I think it was. Yeah, and uh and the

elevator system there was a little archaic. I think they had four elevators, or at least they were there were four on the video camera. Yeah, so he's he's at work and he I think he goes down for smoke and then he's coming back up. It's like a Friday evening, let's say five o'clock or something a minutes later in

the evening. Yeah, so he's going down for the smoke, and what happens, Well, you know, I think that he was traveling up to the forty third floor and he must have made it up to well, he definitely made it up to the thirteen floor, because I believe that's where it stopped. And so he doesn't freak out right away. He starts calling the emergency button. Yeah, why why you do again? There's a button there for the emergency, so

you push it. No one, no one, nothing zero. So the video camera, sorry, the security system that you see the video footage from this is pretty fascinating because they speeded up over that forty one hours and you see him pacing, you see him lying down, you see him fiddling with his cigarettes because at first he wants to be the model employee and not smoke in the elevator, you know, even though he's definitely feeling pretty stressed out at this point because hours are going by, and then

he begins to have aural hallucinations, right, because he's hearing things. I mean, you're talking about we talked before of this on the on on the podcast. You have a limited environment.

Our brains need more stimulation than that. So they start over analyzing everything and eventually they start interpreting data that isn't actually there, right, and you know, twenty hours past, thirty hours past, you know, he's getting dehydrated, he hasn't eaten um, and of course this hallucinations are coming on, and he begins to think that this is a tomb, that this is that he's going to die. This they're going to open the doors, because yeah, he's he's tried

pushing the button, nothing's happened. He's pride open the doors and it's just a solid wall. And I think he sees thirteen scrawled there in, which is also pretty ominous. That doesn't help. And uh, and of course he's seen enough movies to know that he should try to open that little hatch in the ceiling, but he can't because in real life, surprise surprise, climbing on top of an elevator is incredibly dangerous, so they do not want you

to do it. It's bolted from the outside. That's so that if someone needs to get in and help you out, they can, But it prohibits people from potentially killing themselves by climbing on the roofe well, because apparently, and it's not gonna surprising me, righty. At some point in history, elevator elevator writing became a thing and people day like elevator surfing. Yeah, yeah, elevator surfing. And you've got those

counterweights going by, which can decapitate you. So has for good reason the lock those It is only for emergency situations, and he's in an emergency situation. He still can't do anything about it. But yeah, I feel just bad for this guy because the elevator kind of broke him. Yeah, forty one hours passes, he gets out. He asked for a beer he's disoriented. Yeah, he didn't know what day it is. He doesn't really know how long he's been in there totally, and and it it kind of ruins

his life. Yeah. Yeah, there's this job of fifteen years that he held he's let go from. He's obsessed and angry about it. He doesn't know why people didn't come and find him. Why because here's someone who's he just went out for a cigarette break and he went just there like somebody was setting there walking by and just did not notice that there was only ever one individual inside of that car. And it's sometimes they were laying

down for hours at a time. So, yeah, you totally sympathized with this man's breakdown because it was really dealt a foul card on this one. Yeah, and it's a it's funny. I believe it's in the that up and down article, um or one of the articles that we read at least um it may be another one, but in one of those articles they talked to him about He's like, well, of course I still have to use elevators, and yes, I just still tried to distract myself. But I thought about that, you know, when I go into

my own elevator bank. You know, you've got the Captivate At least in our office, we've got the Captivate screen that is trying to distract you from the fact that you're an elevator, which is brilliant because you, yeah, you get in there and there's no music, but there's this little TV screen that gives your quick tidbits about the weather, quick headlines, that sort of thing, and it can be a lifesaver if you're stuck on there, not with a

complete stranger, but sort of a pseudo work stranger, like something you really don't know that well, but you feel obligated to speak to them. And then all you have to do is look at at Captivate and then it'll give you the weather and you'd be like, whoa, look it's raining Saturday. How about that? Or look at that Olympic headline. You know, install you have some sort of nugget that you can probably discuss awkwardly for thirty seconds

or last. Yeah, because I mean that that again, is the thing about the elevator is psychologically you're going to want to have the again, the most vanilla conversation because on a very primal level, what's happening is that you're all stuffed into this elevator. You have no control, and so what the human thing to do here is to try to go to the spot where you feel non threatened.

And really that's what we're talking about here, is I mean, in the day, we're all a bunch of animals anyway, so we're all stuck in this elevator trying to make sure that in that twenty seconds nothing bad is going to happen. Therefore, the weather is fine. You can talk about that if you must talk. And then we go home in the evening and watch movies and TV shows about bad things happening in elevators because we can't help it. Upset.

We have to find that release in our fiction where somebody's having to have a baby in an elevator, somebody's having to crawl on the roof of an elevator, or your elevator is descending into the Chinese hell where people are drowned alive. So you know, on that note, we

should probably take a break. Yes, we are going to take a quick break I guess for like thirty seconds, and then when we when we come back, we will continue with elevators and to the planning that goes into them, the uh and and and also the future of the elevator. What what might that look like? All right, we're back. Uh. The elevator doors have opened and we have arrived on the floor for our second to second half of this

episode on elevators. That's right. And in order for us to start talking more about the mathematical puzzle in earnest, we have to talk a little bit more about how our modern elevator system works. So one of the first things to know is that when you get into an elevator, it is automatically outfitted with loads sensors in the floor and that manages the amount of weight that's in the car. So if you've ever been in an overcrowded elevator and you hear the door is danging, it's because the sensor

is saying, hey man, someone's got to get off. Yeah, And that's why elevator sensors and also hotel personnel can and will get visibly upset if people are jumping up and down an elevator. Now, most elevator systems have a computer that logs a bunch of things, a bunch of I will say a request, Um, these things that they lost is where a person wants to go, where each floor is, and where the elevator car is in that

time and space. So if you press a button for the floor you want to go to, the computer logs the request, and then the computer notes where a car is by either a magnetic sensor or a light sensor, and it's feeding all that information to itself an algorithm. More advanced programs will take passenger traffic patterns into account. Uh, they know which floors have the highest demand and at what time of the day, and they direct the elevator

cars accordingly. If you're lucky, if you're in the office building right north Carrick Hall, a U t K did not have advances. It did not. In a multiple car system, the elevator will direct individual cars based on the location of other cars. So all of that is going on in the background as soon as you press a button. So it all leads to this big mathematical puzzle. It's, you know, how do you get from point A to

point B? How do you get the cargo, the human cargo, from point A to point B with the least amount of issue without just totally clogging up the whole system. Without angering the people that are working there, but then but also getting by with really maybe not the minimum, but a minimum amount of elevators, because elevators take up a lot of space. You need the shafts, you need

the the equipment rooms for them. And granted, uh, certain technological advancements have cut down on the amount of equipment needed to run it, but for the most part, you're talking about a lot of space in a building, and space is is valuable. Space is pricy. Remember that's why we're building skyscrapers to begin with, because we want to maximize the amount of office that we can fit on a single piece of land. And if we end up filling up most of that with elevators, that kind of

defeats the purpose. And it also kind of depends on the function of that building. That's something that a lot of engineers and mathematicians have to take into account. So if you look at something like the Bronx Family Court system, the building that that's housed in, and you look and back in two thousand and seven, and you'll see that that whole court system was completely messed up. It was an absolute disarray because the elevators at its courthouse kept

breaking down and they couldn't use the stairs. It's not and it wasn't like in our situation where the stairs are only for fire exits. So it's it's just not they're not accessible. They shut off the stairs because they were a safety risk. They were just like an escape from New York hell hole if you try to take

the stairs down to the Bronx. Yeah, so if you had to go to the court, uh the courthouse in the Bronx in two thousand and seven, you were screwed because this led to our long waits, which led to miss court dates, which led to needless arrest warrants, and of course just the general messing up of people's lives. Now, this is something that mathematicians and engineers really want to try to avoid if they can. So they start to

look at various probabilities. Right, They've got um probability tables that they rely on when they start to try to figure out this puzzle of elevator systems. So, for instance, if there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make six point five stops. You've got ten people, thirty floors, then you've got nine point five stops. This is somewhere they can start, just the odds of traffic. Now, there are two basic elevator metrics.

One is handling capacity, so that's carrying a certain percentage of the building's population in five minutes, and by the way, is ideal. So if you have I don't know, five thousand people in a building, then percent of those five thousand people should be serviced by your elevator system. The other metric is the interval or the frequency of service. So the average round trip time of one elevator divided

by the number of elevators. Okay, so now think of all the other factors like door open and closed time, loading and unloading time. You guys out there who are looking at your smartphones or your blackberries when you should be disembarking. You know who the last second you were supposed to get off, So then you make a dark everything else, that's right, you're increasing the unlearning time. Or you know the situation where the thing is packed and

and who needs to get off the elevator. The little old lady in the back of the car, you know, so everyone has to sort of disembark and they're a little they're a little wigged out because they're having to do this, and oh what if they get stranded on the on the elevator, because that's that's kind of a mild fear. If you get off on the wrong floor, you're gonna have to take the elevator again to maybe to the bottom, depending on the system, and it's going

to be a whole headache. And you also have acceleration rate and deceleration rate, so when the elevator is stopping, and of course what we talked about before, inter floor traffic, which is the thing that's sort of the wrench that that you throw in that just kind of messes everything up. And then to say nothing of phantom button pushers, that is always the worst. When it opens and the nobody

there where did they go? I guess in reality there might have been another elevator coming up and someone got off on that floor and then they just hitched a ride on that one since it was there. But then my elevator arrives and it opens, and you're just like, I guess it's the little girl from the Shining again or the phantom farter the phantom is that an that is a thing. I think the phantom farter push the phantom floor m because that is another unfortunate reality of

of elevators. Two people in an elevator, nobody is allowed to pass gas because it will be known who did it. But three or more people just feel like they have just an open license to just let it rip. And it's just an enclosed environment. So well, and there's some people who do it on purpose, people like I know someone in my family, and I'm not going to mention I told you I have a very scatological family who

they do this on purpose. Um, it's good to know. Anyway, that is not fortunately a factor that mathematicians have to figure out the actual parting capacity. But I did want to mention again. The otis elevator mathematician Theresa Christie because she developed algorithms using a computer simulation program and that replays elevator decision making, so she gets to see it

in real time. And in that Wall Street Journal article called the Ups and Downs of Making Elevators Go, she says, I feel like I get paid to play video games. I watched the simulation and I see what happens, and I try to improve the score I'm getting, which is so cool. I love that that that's part of her process. She's thinking about it that way, and she recently worked on the Empire State Building and was able to decrease the amount of time, but I think ten seconds um

the time that they're actually in the elevator. The history you could, based on some of the material we're looking at, you could basically write a book just about the history of elevators in the Empire State Building, because you have

you haven't, they've been around for so long. You have some really catastrophic things happening from in the fens which when the uh the aircraft crashed into the Empire State Building and it and the impact severed the cables in one, perhaps two of the elevators, and at this time you still had elevator operators. So they plummeted with those elevator operators on board, and I believe no, no, I believe

one operator was on board and one was not. And the one woman aboard the elevator ended up living, as I recall, because the cables were coiling up at the bottom of the elevator shaft as a plummeted, because they had to fall quite quite a distance, and by the time that it hit the bottom and had a sort of cushion going, so she was really she was badly injured, but she did survive, and she was crouched in the corner right so that when the impact came at the

bottom of the elevator too and kind of crumpled the middle, she wasn't affected by that part. Um So of course we should say that elevators are really really safe. I mean, the statistics on how safe they are we will make you feel much better. OTIS will typically show you statistics that argue that they are safer that safer than esk lators, because you know, they are more elevators than escalators. The

percentage of accidents is apparently higher with escalators. Um Likewise, most of the individuals who are injured or killed aboard elevators are people who are working on them, so they're in a heightened state of danger because they're on top of them, or they're repairing broken elevators, etcetera. Now, again, this is something that someone like Teresa Christie has to keep in mind when she's developing algorithms UM and when she programs an elevator system. She also uses different weights

for the average person by region. So for instance, the average American is twenty two pounds heavier than the average Chinese um, and she has to account for the way that people arrange themselves in an elevator, which turns out is across cultures. It turns out that people will arrange themselves into various geometric patterns each time a new passenger gets on an elevator. So it's pretty it seems very instinctive. So if you have two strangers on an elevator, they

will gravitate to the back corners. A third person will stand by the door, creating Isoceles triangle until fourth person comes in, and then they'll spread out through all four corners, and then so on and so forth as people board. Yeah, I believe that the article we're looking at they had they used a dice as an example. The position of the dots on any given side of a dice more or less illustrates how people a position themselves on a

crowded or less crowded elevator. And it's, you know, similar to a lot of the rules that govern the bank of urinals. In a men's room, Where are where where is a man going to stand? If there's if there's no one at the urinals, Where will the second person to arrive stand, where will the third, etcetera. Because no one wants to be too close to the you know, awkwardly close to the other individual who's taking a week.

Ye always wondered about that. For you guys, that's gonna be very bizarre when just like if you're in there by yourself, as someone just cruises up right next to you. Yeah, if it's a long bank, like if it's a bank of like a rest stop bank of like six urinals, it's a little weird of somebody stands right next to you. Now Here at work, we just have two urinals, So it's you know, you're gonna stand next to somebody and hopefully they won't talk to you. I was gonna say,

is there a chit chat? Um? Depends on the individual. Some people seem like they get a little nervous and they have to start talking and it's weird. But most people seem to be governed by the no talking while you're inating. I think that should be like the same set of rules for the elevator, right, don't stand too close and and and don't chit chat? Really all right? Um? Teresa Christie, the she is one of the premier engineers

for for otis and mathematicians. She has created about fourteen patents, and one of the patents I really loved called the surfboard feature. Yes, and I want the codes. This is something I wish that I was a great hacker, because I would I would hack in just to get the codes to elevators, because this feature allows you to essentially

turn any elevator into an express elevator. Because the situation here is that, know, Waii, you have individuals who are taking the elevator, but they have a surfboard with them, So if they're on board with a surfboard, there's not room for anyone else really to get on board but them. They so they really need a direct line from from their floor to the ground floor. And you know, this has a lot in common with there are express elevators

out there, for instance, really tall buildings. We we mentioned the limits of elevators earlier. They can only you can only build an elevator shaft so high, and then the physics get involved and they prohibit anything else. So you'll have what you'll have is you'll have a landing platform halfway up the skyscraper and you take an express elevator to that and then you wait on an elevator to

serve elevators to service the higher floors. So the idea of an express elevator isn't new, but what this is doing is creating a custom express elevator for privileged UM, good guest for surfers. Yeah, and you know what, this is one little odd tidbit that I wanted to throw

out there, uh, that we did not talk about. And it's a type of elevator system called the destination dispatch, in which you key your floor number into a pad in the lobby and the computer then tracks where the cars are and assigned you an elevator bank number, so at least are the ones you go in. Then there are no buttons, no buttons whatsoever. So the illusion is just shattered. You have no control. You're in an elevator

that you cannot manipulate in any way. I believe Palm Garden was the one who who compared those elevators to um like an elevator in a Bond villain's mansion or something. You know, you're on board, You're like, who's in charge? This is going to open up? You know, on the into the like the into a pit of sharks or something. I don't know. I'm totally out of control. And and again it comes back to the idea that our technology, the technology narrative of the elevators, is giving us power

and then sort and then steadily taking it away. It's it's interesting to behold how it deve tells with whatever else is going on in the world of technology. UM. I wanted to point out that that jumping just before impact, this is something that you hear about sometimes, like, oh, if an elevator crashes, you can jump just before impact and you'll be fine. That's a myth. That's a myth. I want to close it out with that, because there's never any reason to jump on an never right as

you say, that will mess up the weight sensors. And there's two problems with that scenario. You can't jump fast enough to counteract the speed of falling, that's the first problem, and you wouldn't really know when to jump, right. Yeah, exactly. I believe James Fortune when asked about this in the Palm Garden's article, he just said, well, dead is dad.

He's he's kind of a grim individual. He've been in the elevator uses a long time, had a very very straightforward outlook on He's been in so many elevators he have been thinking about being entombed for a while. I suppose. So the future of elevators, UM, this is a course of fascet We we have to end up getting here, and we end up getting here. In most of our podcast, what does this mean for the future? How will this change in the future, And a number of these technologs

we've talked about. I mean that is the future, the idea that we're going to see more and more elevators where we have less and less control. It's all in the computers. There are no buttons. Maybe they have some buttons, but it's just about giving us a false sense of power. Um. Also, smaller engines, better cables, sort of a technological increases in small areas that improve and sort of whittle down and

and perfect the existing product. But as far as rapid changes, as far as like really game changing changes, it's less certain in that area because instantly, when you think of high tech, crazy fantastic elevators, you probably think of two things. You probably think of the elevators and the starships and the and star Trek which show which can move just about anywhere inside the ship horizontal vertically. Um likewise, I think you see those in the recent Total Recall movie.

Their elevator boxes that move up and down and sideways, and of course the wont evator that can go sideways in diagonal ways and just can and can fly and it's glass and it's the most marvelous thing ever now there. Otis did have a design uh and UH they were working on in the late nineties, and it was called the Odyssey and this and they had a prototype for this as well, and this is essentially an elevator that

can travel horizontally in vertically. So instead of instead of having to take that express elevator up and then and then get off and then board some more elevators, you would have an elevator that could climb halfway up the building, then move horizontally into another elevator shaft and then climb

that one. So it was a really I mean everyone there was really excited about it, and then it was gonna be huge, But in Asian financial crisis hit, uh there was a rising cost of electricity and it basically the idea was scrapped or at least put on the backshelf to maybe be picked up later on. But his Palm Garden points out in his article one of the things is that the elevator, essentially in most people's mind, is already perfect. I mean, it's it's not perfect there,

you know. We we want things this, we want the thirty seconds or less, and the faster it gets obviously the better. But for the most part, nobody is demanding these crazy changes. Well yeah, necessity being the mother of inventions. So until buildings really start to get more I guess uh horizontal and vertically oriented, we probably won't see elevators

change that much now I would. I do want to add, though, that there are pressurized elevators now in UH and at least one of the high rises in um in Dubai, I believe. So you are seeing that technological change take place, and that's kind of futuristic, the idea that the elevator is pressurized like a spaceship. But but for the most part, don't expect the walcovator to be available in your area

just yet. That's right now. UM. If you are a gear head and you wanna have a bit of a deeper dive into more elevator specifics, including hydraulic systems versus a roped systems. Check out How Elevators Work by Tom Harris. That's on how Stuffworks dot com. It's a great article that will take you through every different aspect mechanically of elevators. And I have a little quote to take us out.

All right, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy, punch a higher floor, ding ding ding ding, Prince Rogers Nelson. Oh, I don't know that song song. And then if the elevator tries to bring it down crazy all right, I'm sure many listeners will know what you're talking about. So that's good. I like the quote, I like the idea. Yeah, so hey, we're gonna skip our listener mail since we're went a bit long on

this one. And and goodness, we could have probably kept going there because we ended up getting so many cool facts about elevators. We didn't even get into some of the crazy things people do on elevators. The the ice

cream story that I think you've shared before. Oh, yeah, your father was on an elevator with an ice cream com Yeah, it was in his office building and the woman next him and said that that looks really good, and he said it is, and she leaned over and took a big bite out of it, and then the doors opened as she got off. And then you said that you yourself have at times danced on elevators, Dan, I've done, I've I've done a lot of singing. Let's

we probably shouldn't talk about that. Well, we would love to hear our listeners talk about that. So if if you have some insight into elevators, elevator culture, elevator design, we would love to hear about it. Particularly, what's the craziest elevator you've ever been on? Be it super high tech or crazy archaic? Um? What's your favorite scene with an elevator from a movie or TV show? Um? Be

it something realistic or just completely unrealistic? And uh, and what do you think about your interactions on an elevator? Has someone ever taken a bite of your ice cream? Do you dance or seen? How do you interact with strangers or pseudo work strangers on when you're a board and now vat we'd love to hear from everyone about this. Uh, these about these questions so you can find us on Facebook. You can find us on tumbler. We are Stuff to Blow your Mind on both of those, and we're also

on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind. And if you are the ice Cream Bandit and you want to confess, you can write us at below the Mind at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com