In 1852 Elisha Otis invented the safety elevator. From 1852 to 1855 he sold around 10 elevators.Otis died in 1861. In 1875 installed the inclined elevator for Eiffel tower. In 1878 installed the hydraulic elevator that works on water instead of steam.
In 1880 OTIS installed a steam powered elevator at Washington monument which carry 30 people to 50 story height in 12 minutes. As they reached 1883 the started their business at mexico.
The first electrical elevator was installed in New York IN 1889. In 1893 OTIS installed their first lift in Russia. First moving stairway was installed in 1895. In 1898 OTIS has become a public traded company. The first public escalator born in 1900.Otis delivered the first gearless traction elevators in 1903 to New York City’s Beaver Building and Chicago’s Majestic Building. The Beaver Building machines used a complicated roping arrangement that was never used again. The Majestic Building machines used just one set of ropes. Otis can’t take total credit for the invention, however. A German engineer worked on the concept as early as 1877, and an Austrian named Anton Freissler experimented with it in the late 1890s. But Otis, which later merged with Austria’s Freissler company (becoming Freissler Otis and later Otis Austria), clearly brought this machine into popular use.
The first telephone was installed in one of the Otis elevators built for the Singer Building (currently the site of One Liberty Plaza, New York City) in 1908. Eventually all 16 elevators had telephones, linked to all 42 floors.Otis began offering regular elevator inspection service by the mid-1880s, gradually broadening the scope of the service until on April 1, 1921, in Springfield, Ill., Otis first arranged to take complete care of elevators for a flat monthly charge and to keep them in their original operating condition forever, if need be. The idea of a partnership between elevator user and manufacturer has grown steadily, and today Otis Maintenance is a worldwide service.
Otis’ double-deck elevator was designed to save valuable, rentable building space and move more passengers at once. Joined one atop the other in the same hoistway, one car serves even number floors and the other, odd. Passengers board at two levels (for example, subway level and street level), depending on which floor they want to reach.
The first Otis double-deck elevator was installed in 1931 in the 67-story Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street in New York City, but was never operated. By 1935, Otis had “officially” unveiled the double-deck, an appealing innovation for tall buildings with heavy traffic flows at specific times of day.
Today, for buildings like Citicorp in New York, First Canadian Place in Toronto or the Treasury Building in Singapore, the double-deck elevator is an efficient and practical solution.
Otis’ annual reports began commenting on the performance of Maintenance in 1932, the year the value of service bookings first outstripped the value of escalator and elevator sales combined. The company continued to earn more from its Service Department than from new sales until 1946.In 1936, Otis published a company-sponsored book titled, The Maintaineer. It codified service practices and launched a sales initiative for service contracts that boomed in the 1940s. A 1947 advertisement states: “There is no other maintenance service like Otis Maintenance—anywhere. It can be obtained by ’phoning your local Otis office.”
Otis introduced the first illuminated escalator in 1946. The balustrades glowed with a soft, translucent light, an effect designed by Eleanor Le Maire. Understanding the merchandising value, Rike-Kumler Department Store in Dayton, Ohio, was the first to have these escalators installed to transport shoppers easily from the basement to the sixth floor. The company was so pleased it upped its original order from 12 to 14 to lure customers to shop on the seventh floor.
Symbols of a building’s prestige, uniformed operators, often women, routinely served elevators in apartment houses, high-end department stores and elegant office towers. In the 1930s, however, operators began to be displaced by rudimentary automation and push buttons. Passengers didn’t embrace the clunky and unsophisticated systems as enthusiastically as building owners, who enjoyed saving the expense of an operator.
By 1948, Otis had introduced the Autotronic elevator, one that was not only operatorless, but capable of launching itself to wherever it was likely to be needed, based on time of day and anticipated traffic patterns.
Autotronic elevators proved hugely successful, both as money-savers for building owners and time-savers for occupants and visitors. The first such system operated in the Atlantic Refining building in Dallas, Texas, in 1950. In a letter to Otis, the building’s chief engineer said the new elevators allowed the 130,000-square-foot (12,077 meters) building to be emptied in less than 10 minutes.
Elevators could travel unattended with the invention of the Otis Autotronic elevators in 1948. An advertisement in the 1950s highlights an additional feature: the electronic elevator door. When a person is detected, says the ad, the doors “politely reverse” before touching the passenger.
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