Elisha Graves Otis

• Born: August 3, 1811
• Birthplace: Halifax, Vermont
• Died: April 8, 1861
• Place of death: Yonkers, New York

American mechanical engineer

In 1852, Otis invented the first elevator equipped with the sort of safety brake that, without human intervention, would immediately keep it from falling were its cable to break. In 1854, he founded a company to manufacture, install, and maintain elevators with such safety devices.

Primary fields: Manufacturing; mechanical engineering

Primary invention: Safety elevator

Early Life

Elisha Graves Otis was the son of Stephen and Phoebe Otis, farmers who lived in Halifax, Vermont, when Vermont was so sparsely populated that all its residents could have fit on a modern city block. Like many farm children, Elisha resisted following in his parents’ footsteps. The repetitive seasons and the monotony of the daily chores accompanying this repetitiveness bored the young Otis, who had a fertile mind and a strong imagination. He was among the thousands of young people of his era who forsook their rural birthplaces for urban centers.

Anything mechanical interested the young Elisha. When the farm machinery his parents used broke down or worked inefficiently, Elisha, even before he reached his teens, devised ways of repairing and improving such machinery. Among his favorite haunts was the local blacksmith’s shop, where he tinkered with farm implements brought in for repair or upgrading. By age nineteen, Elisha knew for sure that his future was not in farming but in some still undefined occupation where he could sharpen his mechanical skills. Finally, with his father’s consent, he left Halifax for Troy, New York, where his brother lived and where he had been offered work.

Troy was a thriving community less than one hundred miles from Halifax and slightly north of Albany, New York. It was located on the Hudson River, a waterway that provided power for the many mills along its course and that also provided a means of transporting materials south to New York City and other ports, using both the river and the Erie Canal for transport. Elisha was intrigued by Troy’s small factories and by the mechanical and technological advances that were to usher in America’s industrial age.

At that time, most manufacturing operations were small, many of them established by farmers who needed something to keep them busy and to provide extra income during the slack winter months. After he left Halifax, Elisha drifted from job to job in small factories or in other enterprises. He spent five years working in construction for his brother Chandler in Troy. After that, he spent three years hauling freight between Troy and Brattleboro, Vermont, in his own wagon.

Otis began to have family responsibilities. In 1832, he married Susan Houghton. The pair became the parents of four children. When Susan died in 1842, the care of these children fell to Otis. In 1845, he was remarried, this time to Elizabeth Boyd.

In 1838, he established a grist mill in Brattleboro, but it failed within its first year, whereupon Otis converted it into a sawmill and a shop that built wagons and carriages. By 1845, Otis had moved to Albany, where he became a mechanic in a company that made bedsteads, the frames on which a bed’s springs and mattress are placed. During this period, he invented an automatic bed turner. In 1848, he opened his own business, Hudson Manufactory, to produce and market his invention.

Life’s Work

For his first forty years, Otis seemed to have little direction. He drifted from job to job. He was honest, dependable, and capable of supporting his wife and four children, but he lacked the sort of personal drive and ambition that might have made him a captain of industry.

In 1851, when his Hudson Manufactory failed, he seriously considered joining the legions of adventurers flocking to California during the gold rush that began in 1849. Had he joined this throng, he would likely have arrived too late to be rewarded significantly for taking the risk involved in leaving the eastern United States to relocate three thousand miles across the continent to California’s gold fields. Instead, Otis followed his friend Josiah Maize to Bergen, New Jersey, where Maize opened a factory that made bed frames. In 1852, when Maize moved this factory to Yonkers, New York, Otis again toyed with the prospect of going to California but decided instead to continue his association with Maize, who valued his efficiency and dependability.

The move to Yonkers marked a turning point for Otis. Maize put him in charge of moving his factory from Bergen, a move that required the use of hoists to transport the factory’s heavy equipment without damaging it. This requirement was not easy to achieve because the hoists involved had to lift very heavy equipment. These hoists were little more than platforms lifted by thick rope cables. Most hoists then in use fell and crashed to the ground below them when the cable supporting them frayed and broke, which often happened. Such crashes destroyed expensive equipment and frequently resulted in injury or death for those operating them. Otis, a skilled inventor, set about constructing a safe hoist to move Maize’s equipment.

Before long, he had constructed a hoist that would not fall precipitously if the cable supporting it broke. Soon, news of Otis’s invention spread, and requests for his “safety hoist,” as it was initially called, trickled in. Otis began to manufacture his invention, working on it part-time in Maize’s facility in Yonkers. In 1854, after Maize went out of business, Otis stayed on and gave his full attention to manufacturing the safety hoists for which there was a growing demand.

As his business grew, Otis became a bit of a showman. He regaled audiences at the American Institute Fair in New York City’s Crystal Palace by standing on one of his safety hoists and having it elevated to more than thirty feet. Then he had an employee slash the rope cable that supported the hoist. Audiences gasped because, had the hoist plunged to earth, as many were sure it might, the fall would have killed or seriously injured Otis. Rather than plunging to his death, however, Otis felt a small jolt as the platform’s fall was brought to an immediate halt as his invention engaged automatically. These demonstrations, seen by hundreds of people, brought a flood of orders for Otis’s invention.

At this point, safety hoists were used exclusively for moving freight. In 1857, however, Otis built an enclosed platform, creating an elevator intended to transport people from floor to floor within buildings, few of which at this time rose to more than five stories. This first passenger elevator, installed in a department store in New York City, rose along toothed guide rails and had a system for stopping the elevator the moment its cable became slack.

By 1861, the year Otis succumbed to diphtheria during an epidemic, he had produced a steam-driven elevator that rose at the rate of five stories per minute, a model that became the standard when Otis’s sons, Charles and Norton, took over his corporation following his death. Although the name Otis is generally associated with elevators and gave rise to the Otis Elevator Company that has operated through three centuries, Elisha Otis contributed other inventions to a society rapidly becoming industrial and technological. Among the inventions for which he received patents were a steam plow, an advanced baking oven, and a brake for railcars.

Impact

Before Otis’s invention of the modern elevator, cities in the United States were horizontal. It was impractical to erect buildings of more than five stories because of the difficulty of moving people and equipment to greater heights. Otis’s invention has had a profound effect on modern architecture because it made possible the construction of the skyscrapers that create the dramatic skylines of most of the world’s modern cities.

Otis, almost single-handedly, changed skyscapes throughout the world from horizontal to vertical as buildings soared to new heights, limited primarily by the ability of very lofty buildings to accommodate the banks of elevators necessary to make them usable and practical.

As modern elevators became faster, the buildings that housed them soared to new heights. In some of the major cities of the world, it is possible to dine over one hundred stories above the street. In some cases, as in Chicago’s John Hancock Tower, which has 102 stories, people eating in the restaurant on the top floor can look down upon small airplanes as they fly toward the landing strip at Meigs Field. It is doubtful that Otis himself could have envisioned such a scenario.

Bibliography

Barney, G. C. Elevator Technology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1986. A systematic presentation of the growth of the elevator to the point that skyscrapers have become a fact of life in most cities throughout the world.

Gavois, Jean. Going Up: An Informal History of the Elevator from the Pyramids to the Present. New York: Otis Elevator Company, 1983. An interesting and readable overview of the history of the elevator and of Otis’s contributions to the development of the passenger elevators that made the building of skyscrapers feasible.

Goodwin, Jason. Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. An intriguing and detailed account of the life of Otis, with an excellent discussion of the implications of his invention of safe elevators. The best account of Otis’s work currently in print.

Jackson, Donald Dale. “Elevating Thoughts from Elisha Otis and Fellow Uplifters.” Smithsonian 20, no. 8 (November, 1989): 210-234. A compelling article that focuses on Otis but that also presents a capsule view of the history of the elevator in the United States.

Strakosch, George R. The Vertical Transportation Handbook. 3d ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. A useful presentation of how the elevator moved from being a hoist for freight to a means of transporting people upward at speeds that eventually exceeded 1,800 feet per minute. A strong section on the so-called paternoster elevator.