How Elevators Built the Modern World | Lee Gray

Today’s guest is Lee Gray, an architectural historian whose career took an unexpected turn when a graduate school research paper sparked a lifelong fascination with elevators. More than forty years later, he has become one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of vertical transportation. His research has been featured by National Geographic, CBS Sunday Morning, and the History Channel, and today he joins us to explore how elevators transformed cities, real estate, and everyday transportation.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro
• 1:19 Lee’s Journey to Becoming an Elevator Historian
• 6:15 Impact on Life and Career
• 8:25 The Impact of Elevators on Urban Development
• 10:05 The Relationship Between Skyscrapers and the Modern Elevator
• 13:55 The Economic Shift in Real Estate
• 17:39 The Importance of Safety Devices in Elevators
• 23:00 Evolution of Elevator Safety Systems
• 26:27 Innovations in Elevator Technology
• 28:45 Global Elevator Revolution
• 33:02 Cultural Perspectives on Elevator Design
• 35:28 The Shift in Elevator Industry Leadership
• 39:00 The Success of Early Elevator Pioneers
• 40:03 Today’s Societal Issues with Elevators
• 41:39 Essential Takeaways from Early Elevators
• 44:27 Outro

Transcript:

Lee Gray (00:00.535)
as far as full-time academic doing this kind of thing globally,

Lee Gray (00:08.055)
I’m the only one.

Matt Allred (00:08.222)
Yeah, wow. OK.

Lee Gray (00:11.357)
And my other friends who are architectural historians are really glad I’m doing this because they don’t have to.

Lee Gray (00:15.964)
I have no idea why I like elevators as much, I haven’t got a clue

Lee Gray (00:19.796)
why they fascinate me the way they do from a historical perspective, except perhaps they are the only piece of building related technology that I know of that has such a profound cultural footprint. Elevators are everywhere.

Matt Allred (00:39.034)
Hello and welcome to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the Allred Group. I am your host, Matt Allred.

Matt Allred (00:48.85)
Does your workforce need a lift? At the Allred Group, we are committed to connecting your company with top talent that matches your need. Give us a call at 404-890-0445.

Matt Allred (01:03.656)
Today’s guest is Lee Gray, an architectural historian whose career took an unexpected turn when a graduate school research paper sparked a lifelong fascination with elevators. More than 40 years later, he has become one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of vertical transportation. His research has been featured by National Geographic, CBS Sunday Morning, The History Channel, and Elevator World magazine. Today he joins us to explore how elevators transform cities, real estate, and everyday transportation.

Matt Allred (01:34.29)
Lee, welcome to the show.

Lee Gray (01:34.789)
Are you welcome

Lee Gray (01:35.37)
to us. thank you.

Matt Allred (01:38.142)
Good to have you today. I’m grateful that you’re here and I’m excited to talk a little bit about your expertise and I guess, vertical transportation is what you call it.

Lee Gray (01:39.045)
Thank you.

Lee Gray (01:50.245)

Lee Gray (01:53.132)
Yeah, history of vertical transportation and I was delighted to get your invitation and I’m looking forward to this.

Matt Allred (01:59.582)
Thank you. Thank you. I’m curious, how did you end up becoming an expert on historical vertical transportation?

Lee Gray (02:07.653)
Well, it began, well, it’s spring, I think it was 1982.

Lee Gray (02:19.461)
was graduate student at University of Virginia pursuing a master’s in architecture history. Graduate students take seminar courses, had a seminar course in the history of building technology, and of course had to write a paper. I had no idea what I was going to write my paper on.

Lee Gray (02:34.287)
And I sort of looked around and I thought,

Lee Gray (02:37.147)
And I don’t know why. I really don’t know why. thought, wow, elevators. Let me see if there’s, you know, I’ll do that. Why not? And I quickly found, other than some histories that Otis had published, and corporate histories are always interesting because they, you know, we know who the hero is going to be if it’s a corporate history. And understandably, it’s all good. That’s all I found. There wasn’t.

Matt Allred (02:40.352)
You

Matt Allred (02:56.83)

Lee Gray (03:02.075)
something out there. So I wrote my paper on that and then as a graduate student, of course, I had to do a thesis and I thought, well, since there’s nothing there, I’ll do my thesis on elevators, the history of elevators. So I did that,

Lee Gray (03:13.551)
that, completed that in 1983, taught for a while, then did my PhD at Cornell and my dissertation was early skyscrapers, which had elevators, which made me happy. And then left Cornell and got my

Matt Allred (03:25.824)
for sure.

Lee Gray (03:31.58)
my first, and as it turned out, only university teaching job at UNC Charlotte. And as a tenure track faculty member in order to earn tenure as a historian, you have to write a book, is a kind of daunting prospect. And my approach was, well, if I’m going to have to write a book, it’s going to have to be fun.

Matt Allred (03:44.159)

Matt Allred (03:47.637)
Yeah.

Lee Gray (03:54.235)
And I had, I looked back, I had my thesis on elevators. And by the way, in moving several moves after leaving University of Virginia, I’d lost all my notes and all my photocopies. I mean, I had my thesis document, but I’d lost all my stuff. And of course I had my dissertation on early skyscrapers. And I thought, well, elevators, skyscrapers.

Matt Allred (04:06.324)

Lee Gray (04:18.189)
I don’t know why I made this decision, but I thought, well, elevator sounds like it’s the most fun. And I hadn’t stopped thinking about elevators after leaving Virginia. They would pop up in my mind once in a while. the

Lee Gray (04:33.665)
the answer that I usually give, because this is the one that most closely defines, on the one hand, I have no idea why I like elevators as much, I haven’t got a clue

Lee Gray (04:45.151)
why they fascinate me the way they do from a historical perspective, except perhaps as they are the only piece of building related technology that I know of that has such a profound cultural footprint. Elevators are everywhere. They’re in songs, they’re in poems, they’re in plays, they’re in television programs, they’re in movies, they’re in children’s books, they’re in mystery novels.

Lee Gray (05:13.979)
Almost not everyone, but almost everyone has an elevator story of one kind or another. and and then there’s the technology, which is fascinating. And the more I have done in my investigations, there’s also the industry itself. The men and women who install elevators, the engineers who invent elevators, the companies that market them.

Lee Gray (05:40.147)
All of that added together is is an incredibly rich mosaic of historical information that’s all interwoven and connected. the end of the day, there are just incredibly wonderful stories that go with it. So,

Lee Gray (05:56.92)
why does it still fascinate me after however many years, 30-some years? Not a clue, but it still does. And I still think about elevators a lot more than I should.

Lee Gray (06:09.787)
Although I’ve got a nice distraction now. My current book, Project to the History of the Escalator. So I get to think about escalators more than I should, in addition to elevators. But anyway, that’s sort of an end. And as it turned out, because I’ve spent all this time and energy doing this, I’ve had wonderful opportunities.

Matt Allred (06:15.648)
Right on.

Lee Gray (06:30.247)
But it’s also ended up I’m, as far as full-time academic doing this kind of thing globally,

Lee Gray (06:40.407)
I’m the only one. Send. And my other friends who are architectural historians are really glad I’m doing this because they don’t have to.

Matt Allred (06:40.574)
Yeah, wow. OK.

Matt Allred (06:48.672)
I love it. Love it. mean, and you’re right. There’s such a rich, you mentioned a footprint, right? But there’s not only there things written about it, as we’ll get into in this conversation, elevators have made a huge impact in people’s lives, in cities, in design, in architecture. And so, yeah, we’ll get into that in a minute. how has this decision affected your life, your career?

Lee Gray (07:00.283)
Peace.

Matt Allred (07:17.121)
kind of being that one unicorn in Haystack, as it were.

Lee Gray (07:21.211)

Lee Gray (07:23.052)
Well, it’s presented a number of variety of interesting opportunities, speaking opportunities. For example, I’ve been to several elecons and have had the great pleasure of speaking there.

Lee Gray (07:38.952)
two or three years ago, I was at the United Convention in Atlantic City.

Matt Allred (07:42.553)
Yep.

Lee Gray (07:44.225)
and

Lee Gray (07:45.006)
was very graciously asked to be, I wish Jill can say I was the lunchtime entertainment. I was a keynote speaker after lunch, which was very, very enjoyable. I mean, I’m always, engineering conferences, you know, I’m the only non-engineer there and the only historian and it’s an interesting thing to be, but I’ve had those opportunities, but also,

Lee Gray (08:10.773)
there’s been an interesting pattern to my life for at least the last 20 years, about every three to six months, I am contacted by someone in the media or associated with television program or doing something elevator related and they find me.

Lee Gray (08:28.397)
and you know, always gracious and asking for my expertise. I’ve, over the course of the years then, I’ve been on programs on the History Channel, actually National Geographic, which I know sounds weird. There’s a program that was done for Canadian television. I was on CBS Sunday morning, which was…

Lee Gray (08:50.017)
great fun several years ago. So I’ve had lots of those kinds of opportunities and I’m always delighted do those things. And they’re fascinating and interesting from a technological point of view to learn how this stuff works. When you’re participating in a television program, you see all the stuff that you don’t see as a viewer.

Lee Gray (09:11.072)
when you’re participating. it’s sort of like a podcast here. see your headphones and the very handsome looking microphone there. I like the design that you don’t see and don’t experience. It’s been great fun.

Matt Allred (09:26.152)
That’s awesome. No, I mean, it’s like you said early on, right? If I’m going to do this, it’s got to be fun. It sounds like that is, that theme has

Matt Allred (09:32.045)
carried forward throughout your career and even the books you’re writing. And, you know, it’s awesome that you’ve been able to find something you love and then just run with it.

Lee Gray (09:35.689)
Awesome.

Lee Gray (09:43.303)
I am incredibly fortunate. Yes.

Matt Allred (09:46.375)
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. let’s start with this question, right? We talked a little bit about how, you know, the impact, the footprint. And so I’m curious, if elevators had never been invented, what would our cities look like today?

Lee Gray (10:01.237)
That’s a great question. So one, would be low-rise cities.

Lee Gray (10:07.841)
No more than five, maybe six stories tall for the average building height.

Lee Gray (10:12.783)
But now we have to think about how our current cities are configured, what their footprint is with all those tall buildings. So take New York and spread it out over an area probably 30 times its current size. What that would be like.

Matt Allred (10:20.583)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Allred (10:26.399)
wow.

Lee Gray (10:30.049)
so one of the things that that would cause is not only would the city be sprawled across the landscape, but there would be an exponential increase in the infrastructure required to support the city from roads, mechanical systems, you know, and that’s something that we often think about.

Matt Allred (10:42.811)
Hmm. Sure.

Lee Gray (10:51.249)
as you sprawl horizontally, all of that infrastructure has to go with you, which is one reason that I believe it’s now the Council on Vertical Urbanism. It used to be the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats. Council on Vertical Urbanism actually promotes the idea that all future cities should be vertical and concentrated on a smaller area.

Matt Allred (10:57.159)
for

Lee Gray (11:15.266)
because you don’t have that sprawling infrastructure. You have the infrastructure going up, but that’s different than it going horizontal. So it really would be in a very different kind of world. and I know very little about what I’m about to say, but if you look at the sprawling cities of someplace like India,

Matt Allred (11:20.071)
for sure.

Matt Allred (11:36.487)

Lee Gray (11:38.261)
that’s a very, very different kind of urban environment that would be similar

Lee Gray (11:43.689)
to what we would have here. So yeah, it would would be a very strange world.

Matt Allred (11:47.951)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So did elevators create the skyscraper

Matt Allred (11:54.79)
or was it the other way

Lee Gray (11:56.385)
What does it

Matt Allred (11:56.444)
around?

Lee Gray (11:56.785)
mean for the program? Like most sort of historical puzzles, the answer is unsatisfying, both. And part of it, of course, we have to remember, one comes from desire.

Lee Gray (12:11.622)
desire. You have to want to have a really tall building. And that’s a human impulse. And it’s one that becomes a very initially for a

Lee Gray (12:20.745)
the first half of the skyscraper’s history, a very American impulse to want to build tall commercial buildings. That’s an important point. Now, apartment buildings come later, but tall commercial buildings as a symbol of a company’s commercial power, their place within given industry, whether be newspapers or otherwise. So first you have to have the desire to build tall.

Lee Gray (12:49.247)
And one of most interesting things to me about that story and its connection to elevators is the desire to build tall comes very early at the beginning. The first office building in New York to have a passenger elevator is completed in 1870. And at that point in time, elevator technology is steam powered and a steam engine turning a winding drum where the Roper cable is on, and as it, you know,

Lee Gray (13:14.413)
winds and unwinds, the car goes up and down. And that’s the sort of first generation of skyscrapers in the 1870s.

Lee Gray (13:21.465)
But steam powered drum machines can only go so high. It’s limited technology. And then beginning in the late 70s, 1880s, is when this sort

Matt Allred (13:27.527)
Sir.

Lee Gray (13:32.09)
sort of interesting dynamic begins to occur in which a desire to build higher buildings becomes evident.

Lee Gray (13:41.884)
And then the industry kind of asks, well, we want to go taller. What do you got? technology, the steam power doesn’t work. So then roped hydraulic elevators are developed, and they allow buildings up to 25, 30 stories tall through most of the rest of the 19th century. And then again, we get the, well, these are fine, but how about going taller?

Matt Allred (13:48.465)

Lee Gray (14:07.708)
And that question coincides with the perfection of the electric motor, which leads to the traction elevator, which we still have today. And that allows the next huge wave of tall buildings leading to things like the Empire State Building. So it’s both desiring what to build, but then the industry saying, well, OK, here’s our answer.

Matt Allred (14:16.732)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Gray (14:30.994)
And it’s fine until the next big question comes along. And so can we have skyscrapers without elevators? Well, let me say this differently. Can we have the modern skyscraper without the elevator? No.

Lee Gray (14:43.775)
Would we have the modern elevator without the skyscraper? No. So there’s this interesting, not quite symbiotic relationship, but close.

Matt Allred (14:51.985)
Yeah, and I can see that, right? The demand shows up and is

Matt Allred (14:55.329)
knocking on the door and saying, hey, we want more. And there could also be the supply where the engineer in the back room is like, hey, I’ve got this new model, this new style, and it’ll go higher. And so the two have to meet, in other words, to be able to get it there.

Lee Gray (14:58.826)
Thank

Lee Gray (15:10.995)
Yeah. Well, and there’s also one of the changes there as So we think a steam powered elevator. That means I have a steam engine running in the basement of my building all the time to have that power available.

Matt Allred (15:25.755)
Right. Right.

Lee Gray (15:29.323)
Steam engines aren’t very safe. Bad things can happen.

Lee Gray (15:33.227)
Now, interestingly, none ever did. No steam engine ever exploded in a building connected with an elevator. Never happened. But they’re also expensive, right? So I’ve got to have coal, you know, more load on the boiler, all that good stuff. Hydraulic elevators don’t have all those problems. So that was one of the reasons they were invented. But as soon as they came along, roped hydraulic, it was immediately recognized, these go much taller.

Matt Allred (15:38.843)
Wow, okay, wow.

Matt Allred (15:58.437)
Yeah, yeah, that’s fascinating. So, you you’ve said that before elevators, the top floor was actually the least valuable rental space in the building. And I’m just curious, you know, how, when did elevators kind of flip the economics of that real estate?

Lee Gray (16:03.24)
You said a.

Lee Gray (16:16.544)
Well, as I said, the first office building with an elevator is 1870. It takes about a decade before that change to really take place, in part because it’s not as if suddenly all buildings had elevators. They didn’t.

Matt Allred (16:25.713)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Allred (16:32.849)
Sure, sure.

Lee Gray (16:34.261)
Only the newest buildings had elevators and gradually

Lee Gray (16:41.792)
Older buildings were retrofitted with elevators. That was actually one of the intriguing things that happened when electric elevators were first invented because the small electric motor, it made placing elevators in existing buildings easier than upfitting them with hydraulics. But it took about 10 years. mean, there was immediate recognition that this is beneficial. And one of the primary ways it was beneficial was, and

Matt Allred (16:56.624)
OK.

Lee Gray (17:11.455)
So if I’m in 19th century New York, my primary means of hauling goods around New York City before things are electrified,

Lee Gray (17:24.888)
things, is horses. New York had thousands and thousands and thousands of horses doing what horses do in the city streets all the time. The streets were incredibly unpleasant, smelly.

Matt Allred (17:26.523)
Yeah.

Matt Allred (17:30.12)
Ha

Matt Allred (17:32.796)
yeah. Right.

Lee Gray (17:40.704)
And then you had, you know, all the people and everything down there. And so getting above that

Lee Gray (17:48.69)
was pretty enticing and also getting above the noise. Now, there were a lot of activities that remained on the street banks, businesses that rely on foot traffic. They all remained on the lower floors of the building.

Lee Gray (18:03.552)
New York’s really interesting because in many of the buildings you can still see evidence of this. If you stood in a New York sidewalk, you went half a flight down to a space or half a flight up, then you had another floor. Those three levels were very, sought after for many commercial purposes and got really high rents.

Matt Allred (18:16.411)
Okay.

Lee Gray (18:27.412)
But then the elevator then took the rest of the building and flipped it because if I could get above the noise and the smell and cleaner air and all of that kind of thing. But it took a good 10 years for that change to occur because until you have a sufficient number of buildings with elevators to make it clear that that real estate economic dynamic really worked.

Lee Gray (18:49.72)
worked. And it did.

Matt Allred (18:50.555)
Well, sure. Well, and it sounds like it happened building by building, right? Because if you don’t have an elevator,

Matt Allred (18:55.479)
you’re still not renting the top floor for high dollars because nobody wants to hike all the stairs. mean, it sounds like, that’s a lot of stairs to be hiking when you’re, you know, maybe you work on the top floor or they were probably very fit.

Lee Gray (18:57.726)
Right. Sounds that’s a lot of stairs behind me. at the top.

Lee Gray (19:12.887)
Well, that issue of climbing stairs in the 1870s actually became an interesting point of contention in buildings that had some of the first elevators because

Lee Gray (19:26.514)
At the end of the business day, they would close the elevator to the elevator operator would go home. And so imagine that you realized, my gosh, I forgot something or I need to go back to my office building and I go back and it’s 730 and yes, I can get into my building and I’m on the sixth floor, but the elevator is not working because the operator is not there. People complain bitterly about this. And finally, the response was night elevator service where some

Matt Allred (19:36.827)
Mmm.

Lee Gray (19:54.941)
poor person would be hired. And typically they had other jobs in the building, but they would be there at night just in case someone came back and needed to use the elevator to get up to their office because, you know, we’re not going to climb six flights of stairs. Not anymore. Right. Right. Yeah.

Matt Allred (20:10.215)
Not anymore, right? Not now that we have an elevator. We would have 10 years ago, but no.

Matt Allred (20:18.471)
That is fascinating. So how important was Elisha Otis’s safety device?

Lee Gray (20:24.463)
So that is another really good question. course, Elijah demonstrates a safety device in 1854 at the New York Crystal Palace.

Lee Gray (20:35.863)
It gets one mention in a New York newspaper, New York Tribune, and one mention in Scientific American.

Lee Gray (20:46.047)
at the illustration his safety device, the illustration of Scientific American was probably driven by the fact that Otis was working with the Scientific American Patent Agency to try to get his elevator patented, which didn’t happen in 1854. Didn’t in fact happen until 1861. So that would seem to indicate, well, you know, not much happened.

Lee Gray (21:15.668)
Further investigation though reveals that his invention received, these are small notices, but they’re there and I think they may be important in a sense. It noticed by an English engineering journal

Lee Gray (21:30.421)
and it was noticed by a German engineering journal. They sort of picked up their heads and thought, this is sort of interesting what this American has done. So

Lee Gray (21:39.161)
So it’s sort of there.

Lee Gray (21:42.175)
There’s no question that it forms the basis for Otis’s initial elevator company that is in business through most of the 1850s and he sells a decent number of freight elevators no passenger freight elevators during that time and His safety worked. I mean it was very simple as design, but it was very effective. It worked

Lee Gray (22:05.023)
When you look at the patent record, you realize that, and in part because Otis didn’t finally getting around to patent it until 1861, but even after that point, it inspired countless imitators, people who thought, okay, well, I can, I’ll devise something similar. and.

Lee Gray (22:25.279)
It continued an active life in in Otis elevators after Otis’s death in 1861 and his son’s continuous business. It was active actively used in elevators throughout the 1870s into the early 1880s because it was a very effective device. So it wasn’t this moment that suddenly the entire world changed in 1854. It didn’t. But it laid the groundwork for what was to follow because it

Lee Gray (22:55.269)

Lee Gray (22:56.401)
in many ways proved that elevators can be safe because prior to that, and again we’re only talking about freight elevators here, passenger elevators didn’t exist at that time, they were dangerous and always solved that problem and inspired a host of others.

Matt Allred (23:13.348)
I was gonna ask you, yeah, what was that like for the danger zone between the time that it first started happening between when we actually came up with his device.

Lee Gray (23:28.415)
this.

Lee Gray (23:33.553)
are happening.

Lee Gray (23:39.568)
Yeah, so the first mechanized freight hoist appeared in an English textile mill in the early 1800s, about 1807, something like that. Now, it was part of the mill’s operation hauling bales of cloth or thread or whatever connecting between connecting floors.

Lee Gray (24:00.808)
And then gradually it spread to a variety of industrial settings from factories to warehouses to

Lee Gray (24:08.625)
all kinds of industrial things. And I mean, it is interesting that you actually don’t, it’s not like there was an accident every day and someone was killed every day. There were accidents mostly related to a hoisting rope, breaking, most of them, breaking rather, most of them employed hemp ropes. Sometimes they use chains, steel ropes don’t.

Lee Gray (24:31.911)
come into play until late 1870s or 1870s. And so, I

Lee Gray (24:38.33)
I mean, there were enough accidents that it was a known issue. And so, you know, and there were other attempts to solve the problem, but Otis was, because it was so simple it worked, you he was the first to get there.

Matt Allred (24:54.599)
Sure.

Matt Allred (24:56.54)
Yeah, no, that’s fascinating. mean, I would have some real concerns about hemp ropes myself, right? If I lived in those days, that’s…

Lee Gray (24:58.655)
Yeah,

Lee Gray (25:04.898)
yeah, but I mean, I mean, they did not have scientific ways of sort of determining rope strength, but they had a good idea from other uses of rope, whether it be sailing ships or other things that a rope of a certain size was capable of. now I’m speculating a little bit because I’ve not done a deep dive into all those early accidents.

Lee Gray (25:28.259)
Often a rope breaking would have to do with either the rope had been used for way longer than it should have been used or just making this up. An elevator that should easily carry a ton and a half is suddenly loaded with three tons of material. Then we can’t be surprised that the rope can’t. mean, on occasion, we people aren’t very smart.

Matt Allred (25:52.783)
Well, and maybe they didn’t have good ways of even measuring, you how heavy is that? Well, we don’t know.

Lee Gray (25:56.35)
That’s

Lee Gray (25:57.934)
also true. Yeah, that’s also true. Although in most industrial settings, you have a sense of how much.

Lee Gray (26:04.066)
something weighed in terms of freight and barrels and things like that. But you’re right, I mean, depending on who’s working and who’s loading, if there’s room on the elevator, you know, we load more. We still do that today in some settings. If I think of dormitories on college campuses where young men, and it’s always the young men, will pile many, many more people in an elevator than they probably should.

Matt Allred (26:22.887)
You

Matt Allred (26:27.289)
Yep, yep, agree. Yeah. So in addition to protecting against rope failure, how pivotal was the introduction of safety systems in creating vertical transportation as an industry?

Lee Gray (26:35.994)
See you.

Lee Gray (26:42.054)
So, the development of safety systems, mean, beyond the, beyond Otis. mean, Otis is the obvious one. You know, if the hoisting rope or chain or cable breaks, you know, the car or platform is going to fall down the shaft, bad things going to happen. So, that’s the obvious problem to solve.

Matt Allred (26:51.345)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Gray (27:03.588)
Once we have passenger elevators, and the reason I say that in that context, freight elevators were an open platform elevator. They had no car. It was a platform and then the framework that the hoisting rope was attached to. So the only safety thing that went with platform elevators is

Matt Allred (27:13.955)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Gray (27:28.221)
They and it was gradual, surprisingly gradual. They realized that, rather than just having a hole in the floor that the elevator passed through,

Lee Gray (27:35.721)
through, we ought to put something around the hole in the floor so nobody falls through it. And it took a while to figure that out, but they did. But once we get to passenger elevators,

Matt Allred (27:42.087)
That’s a good idea.

Lee Gray (27:51.28)
I would say all the safety systems that follow have to do with us learning how the technology actually works as new things are added in. A good example are doors.

Lee Gray (28:04.382)
They realized that with a passenger elevator, having a door to the elevator shaft in a hallway was probably a good thing so that nobody accidentally fell down the shaft. Okay, logical thought. The next thing was recognizing that the door should have a lock on it.

Lee Gray (28:23.646)
because there were accidents that happened with people opening the door, sticking their head in the shaft going, I wonder where the elevator is. Yeah, I’m not even going to finish. I’m not going to finish that thought. Yes. And so the idea of an interlock system came up because we realized that, well, we need a door.

Matt Allred (28:30.563)
stepping stepping through right yeah

Lee Gray (28:40.875)
door. There should probably also be a door on the car. And these are great operational solutions. But now there’s a safety issue.

Lee Gray (28:52.696)
Otis’s safety was predicated on rope breaking and then the safety would activate. Well, there were instances where a car over sped going down, but the rope didn’t break and the car crashed. Well, OK, so now I need an overspeed brake so that if the car goes too fast, something will kick in, slow it down and prevent it.

Lee Gray (29:21.381)
after a lot longer than you would think, there was a recognition that, cars can actually also overspeed going up. I need that safety device. another simple example is when we went from operator-controlled doors, where an operator would stand there and open close the door, to automatically opening and closing doors.

Lee Gray (29:50.52)
and the first time somebody got their arm caught in a door,

Lee Gray (29:54.172)
there was a recognition that, okay, now we need to think about elevator doors and the amount of force that they use when they close. And also, if they interact with something like a person’s arm, that they don’t close it. So, a lot of the safeties then are direct responses to operational characteristics of elevators, some of it having to do with human behavior and others having to do with just

Lee Gray (30:20.359)
as we gained an operational understanding of what can go wrong and what we can try to prevent.

Matt Allred (30:27.355)
Right, right. Now it makes sense. Like, hey, we need a door. now we need to make sure it doesn’t shut too hard or that responds when somebody is coming late and diving through. And there’s been lot of iterations of that just even in my lifetime.

Lee Gray (30:28.496)
Exactly.

Lee Gray (30:37.005)
I’m doing this room.

Matt Allred (30:42.366)
Hey there listeners, it’s Matt and I would love to know what you want to hear more of on the podcast. If you have a topic in mind or a guest you’d like to hear from, head over to ElevatorCareers.net and drop a suggestion in the box or you can email podcast at ElevatorCareers.net. The link will also be in the description below. Thank you so much for being part of this conversation. Now back to the show.

Matt Allred (31:05.103)
other safety devices that researched that have kind of come about in that way?

Lee Gray (31:05.842)
to either

Lee Gray (31:12.264)
those are most of them. One that we don’t think about today is

Lee Gray (31:21.579)
so this is an issue when it sort of isn’t a safety device. We did not have automatic leveling of elevators until the mid-1920s. Prior to that, it was dependent on the skill of the elevator operator to stop a car level-ish with the landing.

Matt Allred (31:41.005)
Okay.

Lee Gray (31:41.512)
Basic

Lee Gray (31:41.972)
rule of thumb was if I was within half an inch of level, I’m golden. I’m good. Because the reason I wouldn’t try to get perfectly level is inching the car up took a lot of extra time. And I didn’t have that extra time. People don’t want to wait on that. was a development as a response to that of elevator threshold lights. So there would be panel in the hallway.

Matt Allred (31:46.884)
Okay.

Matt Allred (31:56.6)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Allred (31:59.664)
Right.

Lee Gray (32:11.175)
With with light bulbs in it and and it would light up

Lee Gray (32:14.718)
up when the car showed up so highlighting that threshold and that possible tripping hazard getting in and out and I didn’t last very long because then we got automatically leveling cars and then actually, you know, it was both For convenience, but it also had a safety factor to it

Matt Allred (32:32.017)
For sure, for sure. What comes to mind is

Matt Allred (32:34.279)
if you ride the trains in the UK and London, mind the gap, right? So there might be a gap when you go to step on there.

Lee Gray (32:37.703)
Mind the gap. Yes. And

Lee Gray (32:43.906)
that gap today, if I understand this correctly with elevators, is not so much safety, but it has to do with elevators that are used in some industrial settings where you have all these little robots running around.

Lee Gray (32:56.645)
so that they can easily get in and out of the elevator. The gap’s too big, wheels catching that, it’s now kind of different kind of thing. But yes, that’s a really good analogy to sort of mind the gap issue.

Matt Allred (32:56.838)
Hmm.

Matt Allred (33:08.879)
Yeah,

Matt Allred (33:09.91)
I’m seeing more and more little robots running around, whether they’re serving food or taking room service or, you know, becoming more and more.

Lee Gray (33:14.663)
Yeah.

Matt Allred (33:24.655)
Yeah. did

Matt Allred (33:31.18)
the elevator revolution kind of happen globally at the same time? Did the US lead the way? What did that look like as, obviously this device comes out, you mentioned, England Germany and some people kind of catching on to that. What was kind of the rollout there?

Lee Gray (33:32.103)
You’re about to see.

Lee Gray (33:35.599)
is obviously this five seconds.

Lee Gray (33:46.568)
So, the passenger elevator, I freight elevators are typically in England’s first because England’s really the first country to industrialize in a significant way and everybody else follows in the rise of the modern factory kind of thing.

Lee Gray (34:02.891)
thing. Passenger elevators all seem to begin at about the same point in time right around 1860 in the United States and in England.

Matt Allred (34:03.014)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Gray (34:15.097)
And France isn’t too far behind. They all begin in the same building type, the large urban hotels. Because in the middle of the 19th century, the large urban hotel, it was, well, was this sort of, if you went to one of those, it was like going to this sort of modern.

Matt Allred (34:25.393)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Gray (34:37.607)
place where you have everything taken care of because you would go to this hotel and they would have running water in your room.

Lee Gray (34:45.347)
They might have a bathroom in your room. You’d have steam heat. It was all of these things you didn’t have at home. Right. Yes.

Matt Allred (34:45.499)
Sure, sure.

Matt Allred (34:51.724)
You may not have had any of that at home and yet you show up at this luxury hotel

Matt Allred (34:57.525)
and it’s like a resort and all these fancy things are going

Lee Gray (34:59.815)

Lee Gray (35:00.735)
And the elevator was another amenity. It was this wonderful magical room that carried you upstairs. didn’t have to walk up the stairs.

Lee Gray (35:11.251)
And sort of a level-ish playing field at the beginning. So larger hotels, the United States, England, France is pretty close behind. The difference is in the United States, the elevators are driven by steam power.

Matt Allred (35:28.305)

Lee Gray (35:28.967)
In England and France, are hydraulic elevators. England is what we think of as a direct piston elevator. So they’re hydraulic technology in Europe, steam power in the United States, in part because, and this is something that I don’t know the entire detailed history of, a lot of European cities and urban areas would not have allowed a working steam engine in the basement of a hotel.

Matt Allred (35:53.892)

Lee Gray (35:55.388)
because of the dangers. I you already had a massive steam boiler, which is dangerous enough. You don’t need a steam engine added to So we begin at the sort of same point. Where that history diverges is as we go through the 1860s and the 1870s, Europe stays focused on hydraulic power and hydraulic power elevators. The United States

Lee Gray (36:23.385)
stays with steam power and then when the shift to hydraulic elevators occurs, there are roped hydraulic elevators.

Lee Gray (36:30.681)
There were some roped systems in England, but roped hydraulic elevators that were really predicated on taller building application. And once we decide that the United States is going to build tall buildings,

Matt Allred (36:39.75)
Mm.

Lee Gray (36:45.167)
that the history really diverges because

Lee Gray (36:47.378)
because our focus is different. If I’m living in London or Paris, I don’t need a high speed elevator to go 200 feet in the air. I have many buildings that big. And since I live in mostly a low rise city, there are many buildings that don’t need elevators.

Lee Gray (37:04.737)
not in the way that they did in the United States. So, it’s mostly the different urban nature in the United States that demands the use of different elevators. So, our industry focuses on different things than they would focus on Europe. Doesn’t mean innovation didn’t occur in Europe. It did. Some of it was quite interesting. The development of what we now refer to as the Paternoster elevator, where you had multiple cars linked together and kind

Lee Gray (37:34.671)
of a chain and you’d have two parallel shafts and

Lee Gray (37:37.423)
and they would go up and then go back down continuously. So like I said, jump on board.

Matt Allred (37:37.7)
Hmm. my.

Lee Gray (37:43.638)
and go up and jump off because there’s no waiting there. And there are still some active of those. So it was not like there wasn’t innovation in Europe, but the innovation in United States, it was different because the needs were different. And eventually, because of that and the need for us to develop high speed electric traction elevators, I mean, I guess you could characterize that as we took the lead in that. But we needed to.

Lee Gray (38:11.342)
didn’t they just didn’t and it was it was a very different commercial environment and urban environment.

Matt Allred (38:15.856)
Well,

Matt Allred (38:16.956)
you mentioned in one of our conversations that certainly Europe kept the shorter buildings, if you will, and I hope I’m getting the timeline right here, there was something about immigrants coming to the US and seeing these massive buildings. I don’t know if it’s

Lee Gray (38:20.646)
Thanks.

Lee Gray (38:36.454)
don’t know if it’s because something we’ve seen in this committee, but I can’t tell if it’s of church, because that is also the sound, even

Matt Allred (38:36.622)
because I know in some cities even to this day, you can’t build higher than the local church because that is the tallest building in town and we want to keep it that way.

Lee Gray (38:45.134)
that way. And I wonder if you have had some of those cultural endings that you’ve accepted.

Matt Allred (38:45.496)
And I wonder if Europe had some of those cultural understandings that, we’re just not going to build them taller

Matt Allred (38:52.252)
than the cathedral.

Lee Gray (38:56.913)
That’s a really good question. don’t know if, for instance, London and Paris, the precise origins of their building height regulations.

Lee Gray (39:05.414)
It may have had something to do not competing with St. Paul’s Cathedral in London or Notre Dame in Paris. But it also was about retaining a certain kind urban environment.

Matt Allred (39:22.074)

Lee Gray (39:22.978)
And as you go through the 19th century, and I know more about English perceptions of America than French perceptions, I mean, the English are just sort of kind bemused and puzzled about what are these Americans doing building all these crazy tall buildings? Why? Why are they doing that?

Lee Gray (39:48.046)
members of the English elevator industry would visit the United States. like, you know, what are the, why do I need to go so fast?

Lee Gray (39:53.692)
Americans would visit England. like, why, why does the elevators go so slow? Because they didn’t need to go fast. And also

Lee Gray (40:01.239)
one of the things, and this is still a thing in, you know, for many Americans who visit Europe, and you’re staying in an older building, your first thought is why is this elevator car so small?

Lee Gray (40:13.989)
I’m going to have to send my luggage up first and then walk up. they didn’t need big elevators that wasn’t what they were about. wasn’t about the speed with which Americans demanded of everything. And it wasn’t just elevators. Immigrants to the United States in the 19th century, there’s evidence of them writing back to family in Europe talking about.

Lee Gray (40:40.003)
what they referred to as the railroad pace of American life. They couldn’t believe how quickly everything had to be done,

Lee Gray (40:48.692)
how quickly everything happened. It was such a change from Europe. unfortunately, perhaps now globally, it’s no longer an American thing. Everyone’s impatient, especially waiting for an elevator.

Matt Allred (41:02.948)
Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. And yeah,

Matt Allred (41:05.809)
American culture hasn’t let go of that, race, race, race, get everything done. And it is fascinating to hear that even a hundred years ago, somebody’s coming across the boat and, my gosh, this is too fast.

Lee Gray (41:11.127)
I’m going to the slides.

Lee Gray (41:18.325)
Yeah.

Matt Allred (41:21.05)
That is fascinating for sure. you know, with the US kind of leading the way, are they still, are we still leading? Did that change? When did that change?

Lee Gray (41:23.201)

Lee Gray (41:29.061)

Lee Gray (41:32.566)
Right. So a key factor in that is, the Otis elevator company. They become by the

Lee Gray (41:45.862)
I’d say the first quarter of the 20th century, they are well established as the first international elevator company.

Lee Gray (41:52.841)
company. They have subsidiaries literally everywhere.

Lee Gray (41:57.062)
in Europe, in Australia, in Asia, in South America. They either have direct subsidiaries where they have linked with a local company or they have companies representatives there who can sell their product.

Lee Gray (42:18.103)
sort of proliferate that technology. Now, that isn’t to say that there weren’t other companies, mostly English, I think, that had international influence. In England, you’ve got the sort of massive English colonial system. So you had some firms in England who were selling their products to English colonies in India, is a good example, and elsewhere.

Lee Gray (42:47.301)
But Otis really sort of, you know, they’re the first multinational company, if you will. And we’re and still are leaders in their own way. The shift that takes place in the, really, the second half of the 20th century is when you have the rise of major European and Asian companies that suddenly become also multinational companies. And now this is

Lee Gray (43:17.731)
Maybe not the

Lee Gray (43:19.833)
best way to sort of say this is,

Lee Gray (43:21.932)
if Otis sort of colonizes the world in the first half of the 20th century, the rest of the world colonizes the United States in the second half of the 20th century today, because we’ve got German companies, Finnish companies, Japanese companies now present and very dynamic in the American vertical transportation market.

Matt Allred (43:30.724)
Hmm. Okay.

Lee Gray (43:42.274)
market. And what that means is now it really, really is a global enterprise in which it’s

Lee Gray (43:49.72)
difficult beyond maybe a few specific inventions perhaps to say that one country or even one company is clearly way out in front of everybody else because like well I was gonna say like most industries but in some ways the elevator industry I don’t say it’s unique it’s not very big right it’s a small industry in one sense and everybody knows what everybody else is doing

Matt Allred (44:10.735)
Yeah, sure.

Lee Gray (44:18.493)
And in fact, historically, that’s almost always been true because many American companies, Otis and others, when they patented something in the United States, they would also patent it in Europe. Several European companies would do, or mentors would do the same thing in the United States. It was very easy in the 19th century to have access to international patent records. Also, the 19th century was filled with engineering publications.

Lee Gray (44:46.853)
It was very easy. today, if you go to a large and old engineering college in the United States, you will find buried back in an archive probably engineering journals from Germany, France, England, all of those there. So, was very easy to keep up with what was going on globally. I mean, it took slightly longer than it does today.

Matt Allred (45:02.628)
Wow. OK.

Lee Gray (45:13.603)
you know, that journal, so travel across the Atlantic or back and forth.

Matt Allred (45:17.712)
Sure, sure.

Lee Gray (45:18.142)
But if I wanted to, I knew what was going on. And in Europe, it was actually very easy because, of course, the countries are so much closer together. So people knew what was going on and they knew where the innovation was and what was happening.

Matt Allred (45:18.142)
sure.

Matt Allred (45:32.42)
Very cool. What would you say these early pioneers got surprisingly right? And what would they maybe be shocked that we’re still dealing with today?

Lee Gray (45:44.261)
What they did really well and got right from the very beginning was a clear understanding that for the passenger elevator to be a viable thing, it has to be safe.

Lee Gray (45:58.349)
literally pervades, and it still does pervade the entire industry. And Otis led the way in this, but everybody else picked it up because everybody sold a quote, safety elevator.

Lee Gray (46:12.642)
They made sure the word safety was somewhere in there. they tried to make the safest possible product. And even in the 19th century, which is known for some pretty horrific accidents, there weren’t that many elevator accidents, not proportional to the number of elevators and the number of elevator trips that would have occurred. So the industry immediately understood this has to be safe to sell our products. But they also were committed to the idea of safety because, well, it’s the right thing to do.

Matt Allred (46:25.56)

Lee Gray (46:42.594)
you don’t want people to have a problem. So that’s been an industry focus from the very beginning. And

Lee Gray (46:50.786)
And this may be an odd take on your question about so what would they be surprised that we’re still dealing with today is that so many people think they’re unsafe. It’s like, why? Well, we deal with something that they did not. And that is modern media.

Lee Gray (47:11.702)
and modern technology. doesn’t take too long to find a television program or a streaming program or a movie or something that presents the elevator is the, my God, I’m going to die thing. then, yes. And that is also related to, and this didn’t seem to be as much an issue in the 19th century, I don’t think.

Matt Allred (47:12.091)
wow. Okay. Yeah.

Matt Allred (47:29.114)
kind of play on that primal fear, right?

Lee Gray (47:42.11)
is for the average person, and know you’re well aware of this and colleagues in the industry are as well, the elevator is inherently mysterious it’s a box and I don’t know how it works.

Lee Gray (47:56.711)
works.

Matt Allred (47:57.424)
Sure, it’s hidden. All the mechanisms can’t be seen.

Lee Gray (48:00.101)
Yeah.

Lee Gray (48:02.582)
And my only understanding of how it could work is what I’ve seen from, you know, movies in which they focus on something going really, really wrong. So I think they would probably be surprised as well. Now, obviously not everyone who gets on an elevator is terrified of it, but they might be surprised that, well, haven’t people gotten over that by now and just sort of use them? And we do. Most of us use them, except

Lee Gray (48:30.006)
know, slightly strange people like myself, or my first question is, whose elevator is this? So I’m sort of looking around trying to figure out whose machine I’m riding in and how old it is and all that kind of thing.

Matt Allred (48:41.04)
Yeah,

Matt Allred (48:42.26)
yeah, understood. what lessons from early elevator adoption should building owners, GCs, developers, still be thinking about today?

Lee Gray (48:50.369)

Lee Gray (48:53.732)

Lee Gray (49:01.016)
But that’s.

Lee Gray (49:07.81)
if you have

Lee Gray (49:08.398)

Lee Gray (49:11.396)
I would say probably the sort of overall experience of the elevator

Lee Gray (49:18.026)
and the reason I say that is and I’ll use a contemporary example and and and there’s always an adjustment to technology but you know the in the creation of modern elevator systems where I walk up and there’s no up or down button and I key in a floor on a touchpad

Lee Gray (49:40.707)
And then I stand in front of an elevator and then the doors open and I step in and I’m not required to do anything because it automatically takes me to my floor. That is incredibly unsettling the first time people experience that because there’s this huge sense of a loss of control. I am not convinced the industry actually thought about that when they did that as part of the passenger experience. And maybe they did.

Matt Allred (49:58.01)
For sure.

Lee Gray (50:09.986)
But many of the installations that occurred initially, and some of them were in hotels, which did not seem to be like a good idea because you have a constantly changing clientele. So it’s not like you have an office building where learns how they work. part of that is something that we still need to work on. The other part, and that’s actually predicated on destination dispatch and those things, is traffic control.

Matt Allred (50:19.44)
Sure, Can’t train them. Yeah.

Lee Gray (50:38.916)
How do we guarantee that in the building that everybody gets where they need to in the most efficient, effective, and energy efficient manner? And we still spend a lot of time and some ridiculously complicated mathematical formulas trying to predict human behavior, which is not very predictable.

Matt Allred (50:59.12)
Absolutely. Well, and from what I’ve heard, you know, just talking to some of the consultants as we redesign some of the uses in the building and we put the cafeteria on the second floor and put the gym, you know, it’s like, okay, what we’re expecting is no longer even the same, you know, they’re going to come, but they’re going to go down for lunch and they’re going to go down to workout and then they’re going to go back up. And so it changes the entire pattern.

Lee Gray (51:18.146)
Right. Right.

Lee Gray (51:22.098)
Yeah. And the need then, and that’s a really great example, then the need to completely redesign the traffic system and or have an elevator, a number of elevators that will facilitate the fact that, yes, in the 20th century, building uses change with frightening speed. And it’s not like I can just add or subtract the number of elevators really easily.

Matt Allred (51:47.448)
Right, right. Now there’s so much to talk about and I appreciate you being with me today and I love to keep this going and maybe we just need to do another one. We’ll dig into some other things. Yeah, well thanks again for being here. I have enjoyed it and look forward to future conversations.

Lee Gray (51:58.712)
That’d be great.

Lee Gray (52:05.986)
All right. Thank you very much.

Matt Allred (52:08.419)
Thank you for listening to the Elevator Careers Podcast sponsored by the Allred Group, a leader in elevator industry recruiting. Please visit our YouTube channel @ElevatorCareers or check us out online at elevatorcareers.net. Please like and subscribe and until next time, stay safe.