When was passenger elevator installed first? What were the later innovations?
The first ELEVATOR (passenger) was installed in King Louis XV’s private apartments in the Petite Cour du Roy at the Palace of Versailles in 1743. The King had provided a suite on the second floor for his mistress, Mme de Chateauroux, and the elevator was designed to give him access to her from his own apartment on the foot below. It was on the outside of the building, though within the privacy of a courtyard, and was entered by the King via his balcony. The mechanism consisted of a carefully balanced arrangement of weights inside one of the chimneys, so that the ‘Flying Chair’, as it was known, could be raised or lowered by hand with the minimum of effort.
In UK, the first passenger elevator for public use was installed at the Coliseum, a panorama building designed by Decimus Burton, and erected in Regent’s Park, London for a successful showman called William George Homer in 1829.
The first PASSENGER ELEVATOR INSTALLED IN A DEPARTMENT STORE was supplied by Elisha Graves Otis for the five-storey building of E.V. Haughwout & Co., Broadway, New York on 23 March 1857. Otis was the first manufacturer of passenger elevators, having previously engaged in the production of fright hoists at his Yonkers, N.Y. elevator plant. The price quoted for the E.V. Haughwout elevator was $ 300.
The first HOTEL ELEVATOR was a vertical screw-operated model installed at the six-storey Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York by O. Tuft of Boston on 23 August 1859.
The first OFFICE BLOCK EQUIPPED WITH A PASSENGER ELEVATOR was the Equitable Life Assurance Society Building, New York in 1868.
The first GROUP OF HIGH-SPEED PASSENGER ELEVATORS was installed at the Boreel Building, New York City by the Otis Elevator Co. in September 1879 and consisted of four units designed to be operated simultaneously. The introduction of high-speed passenger elevators had a profound effect on town-planning in the USA and ultimately in most other industrialized nations, as it meant that cities could grow upwards rather than simply outwards. The building of skyscrapers, which would have been technically feasible many years earlier, was necessarily delayed until elevators could replace stairways.
