Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: you wrote an elevator this morning. It's true, I did.
Speaker 1: You wrote two elevators, two banks of elevators. Do explain
Speaker 1: because I only road one. Well, see, you're coming in
Speaker 1: off of Marta, and so you're coming in UM at
Speaker 1: the ground level, so you only take one bank. But
Speaker 1: if you drive into our office building, you have to
Speaker 1: take two different sets of elevators. I had twice, twice
Speaker 1: the fun twice. H See, I took an escalator up
Speaker 1: from Marta and then the elevator up in our building.
Speaker 1: I could have taken the Marta elevator, though I think
Speaker 1: it doubles as a bathroom, so I tried to avoid it.
Speaker 1: I was about to say, it's it's part of our
Speaker 1: public transportation system, right Marta, and I will confirm that
Speaker 1: it does smell like you're in the elevator banks. Now,
Speaker 1: in this episode, of course, we're going to talk about elevators,
Speaker 1: and it's not just gonna be uh, We're not just
Speaker 1: gonna focus on the mechanics and all that. Though the
Speaker 1: mechanics are pretty fascinating when you break them down. We're
Speaker 1: going to get into the psychology of the culture of
Speaker 1: the elevators of the past are possible elevators of the
Speaker 1: future a little bit. But to kick things off here,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, and then I'm gonna ask
Speaker 1: myself the same question. Name me a fictional elevator or
Speaker 1: an elevator scene that particularly um excited you, and a
Speaker 1: real life elevator that you loved and or feared. Mm okay,
Speaker 1: all right. So I debated about this thing. Because I
Speaker 1: was thinking about this, I thought, well, I think that
Speaker 1: the one that made the most impact on me is
Speaker 1: probably the elevators from the Shining because blood gushes out
Speaker 1: of them. But you don't really spend much time in
Speaker 1: the elevators, so but it's just the idea that blood
Speaker 1: would come gushing them. And then that that thought me too.
Speaker 1: That that got me to thinking about how in a
Speaker 1: lot of UM movies, at least, elevators are are the
Speaker 1: scene for awful things happening? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: usually some sort of I know, heist going on or
Speaker 1: in sil lambs. Yeah yeah, there's that, Remember there's the
Speaker 1: blood dripping down from the hatch. I totally forgot about
Speaker 1: that elevator scene. But that is that is a great sequence, terrifying, awful, awful.
Speaker 1: So I started to think about how that really feeds
Speaker 1: into sometimes our phobia is about elevators, because really, mean,
Speaker 1: what is it but a little metal canister that you
Speaker 1: seal yourself into. Um, which leads to again fears because
Speaker 1: I was thinking about a building called the West and
Speaker 1: Peach Tree in Atlanta, and it's a very tall tone
Speaker 1: guess the West And this is the one that looks
Speaker 1: like a big paper towel rolly, a glass paper towel
Speaker 1: roll has a revolving restaurant at the top, the Sun
Speaker 1: Died restaurant Us Atlanteans take out of town. Guess yeah,
Speaker 1: because like we look at us, we're moving around as
Speaker 1: we eat um. But the terrifying thing is that their
Speaker 1: elevator is glass, and it's you're going up on the
Speaker 1: side and you see um. If you if you're from
Speaker 1: like me who has a fear of heights, then obviously
Speaker 1: you began to see the landscape unfold in front of you,
Speaker 1: and you began to in chup more towards the door. Yea,
Speaker 1: those are some some interesting elevators for sure. Um they're
Speaker 1: the ones at the Weston. I tend to really enjoy
Speaker 1: the ride, but my wife she uh, she just kind
Speaker 1: of looks at the door and try because she and
Speaker 1: she's not crazy about the glass, I think. And also
Speaker 1: she's a little bit claustrophobic and an elevators sometimes so
Speaker 1: um so. But we'll discuss the the psychology of of
Speaker 1: elevators a little more as we continue. For my own part,
Speaker 1: the real world elevator that I often think about, I
Speaker 1: have to go back to my college days in Knoxville, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: the University of Tennessee. There is a dorm there called
Speaker 1: mel Rose Hall, and I think mel Rose Hall is
Speaker 1: still there. I don't know if it's still a dorm
Speaker 1: or if it's been incorporated into something else. But when
Speaker 1: I went there, it was it was really cool because
Speaker 1: it was the It was a door arm exclusively for
Speaker 1: international students and socially introverted people like myself who you know,
Speaker 1: upperclassmen who weren't leaving campus to find exciting apartment living,
Speaker 1: but but did a room to themselves in a dorm.
Speaker 1: When you got off the elevator banks. Did it say that?
Speaker 1: Did it say Melrose Hall for the International students essentially introverted,
Speaker 1: but it was they updated it in recent years because
Speaker 1: when I went there, the beds were all really short,
Speaker 1: like left over from World War two, so I had
Speaker 1: to I had to like sleep with the mattress in
Speaker 1: early weird position because it had a footboard and I'm
Speaker 1: I'm fairly tall and uh and there was no air conditioning,
Speaker 1: so during the summer you just had to sweat it
Speaker 1: out or live exclusively at night, or go down and
Speaker 1: sleep and like the one or two refrigerator and regreated
Speaker 1: basically refrigerated um wreck rooms, and it had this ancient
Speaker 1: elevator that this dorm was not that tall. I think
Speaker 1: it was three two or three floors above ground. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that made it awesome was that
Speaker 1: there were two basements. There was a basement where there
Speaker 1: was just a lot of their offices and dorms. Some
Speaker 1: people actually lived in the basement, and then there was
Speaker 1: a sub basement. And to this day I wish I
Speaker 1: had found a way talk to somebody and found a
Speaker 1: way to visit the sub basement, because I love the
Speaker 1: idea the idea of of there being an extra subworld
Speaker 1: down there, and like, what does it consist of? There
Speaker 1: are no dorms down there or are there what kind
Speaker 1: of strange creatures uh lived down there in the sub
Speaker 1: basement of Melrose Hall. I don't know. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: also had a little gate, the old school gate you
Speaker 1: had to pull across, and the clunky buttons that they
Speaker 1: look like they're they're part of a furnace or something.
Speaker 1: So I I loved that elevator. I have no idea
Speaker 1: if they still have it. Maybe they replaced it. Sure
Speaker 1: they upgraded it probably took out the great it was.
Speaker 1: It was indeed great. Though in the g R E
Speaker 1: A t since fictional elevators, I always come back to
Speaker 1: one of my favorite movies, John Carpenter's Big Trouble in
Speaker 1: a Little China. In this particular movie, you keep encountering
Speaker 1: elevators that only go down, and I'm all, I've always
Speaker 1: been inspired and uh and fascinated by by sub worlds
Speaker 1: and UH and underground spaces and in dis sense and
Speaker 1: so uh, these elevators that that only go down are
Speaker 1: always just really fascinating to me. UM and Big trom
Speaker 1: a little China. There's a scene where they they're taking
Speaker 1: it down, ends up, the elevator goes into water and
Speaker 1: they have to escape and swim out through this kind
Speaker 1: of watery dungeon hell environment. And then there's another elevator
Speaker 1: they take straight down, which is plush and it looks
Speaker 1: like a really fancy Chinese restaurant on the inside. And
Speaker 1: there's a wonderful scene where all the heroes are packed
Speaker 1: into this little elevator, and you have sort of a
Speaker 1: cliche elevator scene where you know, people are just standing
Speaker 1: there doing nothing, kind of awkwardly. But then there there's
Speaker 1: this they're also having all this magic potion that they
Speaker 1: just consumed. It's kicking in and so they're beginning to
Speaker 1: feel kind of magical and invincible. It's it's a wonderful scene.
Speaker 1: But it you mentioned all the scenes that take place
Speaker 1: in movies involving elevators, and and when you do think
Speaker 1: about them, the elevator becomes this interesting space from just
Speaker 1: a storytelling because it is that it is a space
Speaker 1: between is a space where you can encapsulate your characters
Speaker 1: and force them to have a little small talk and
Speaker 1: maybe you know, push the plot a little a little forward. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a great way to transition between one set and another. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you get into all the high jinks of
Speaker 1: climbing out of elevators, climbing on top of them, becoming
Speaker 1: stuck in an elevator. Classic, um, classic way to do
Speaker 1: a very limited episode of a TV show. I wonder
Speaker 1: how And it's always like a woman giving birth and
Speaker 1: an elevator. That's a That's another big one that's always
Speaker 1: happening on TV. So it is, Yeah, I miss that one.
Speaker 1: I feel like there's a super cut online on YouTube
Speaker 1: somewhere of just scenes of women who are pregnant in elevators,
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to check that out. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: as we're discussing this, this actually reminds me of the
Speaker 1: movie Inception, which we bring up every once in a while.
Speaker 1: It there is a great narrative technique now that I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about it, of his psyche being in line with
Speaker 1: an elevator. So when he plunges into his dream world
Speaker 1: Leonardo DiCaprio's character, then he descends in the elevator, particularly
Speaker 1: when when he has like a very tragic memories that
Speaker 1: he's rebusiting. So yeah, I mean it turns out that
Speaker 1: the elevator is is a great metaphor for as you say,
Speaker 1: that in between spaces and life, and it's something that
Speaker 1: we do take for granted, but it is so fascinating
Speaker 1: to me because really you're talking about I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe a twenty to thirty second ride on an elevator,
Speaker 1: and yet it can sometimes be the most awkward ride.
Speaker 1: And it is one of these great things is it's
Speaker 1: a microcosm for really how we act in social situations. Um,
Speaker 1: there's so much going on and just that little span
Speaker 1: of time and when you really think about it, I mean,
Speaker 1: what is an elevator, But it's really a box suspended
Speaker 1: by ropes and a counterweight. And remember that, you know,
Speaker 1: for us it's not a big deal. But if you
Speaker 1: were in the early twentieth century and you are an
Speaker 1: office worker in one of the beautiful, beautiful, new sparkling skyscrapers,
Speaker 1: this would be a really weird experience for you. And
Speaker 1: you know you wouldn't you'd have to deal with getting
Speaker 1: into this this metal box that's going to go up
Speaker 1: this narrow little shaft and what that meant to you psychologically.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to point out that This is about
Speaker 1: the time, at least in the forties when skyscrapers really
Speaker 1: became prevalent. Yet you began to see musaic or music
Speaker 1: being piped into elevators because what they're trying to do
Speaker 1: there is psychologically set you up for this feeling that
Speaker 1: everything is okay, and they give you the most bland,
Speaker 1: vanilla music to pipe in. Uh So, you know, again,
Speaker 1: we take that stuff for granted, but if you are
Speaker 1: someone in that time period forties, this would be kind
Speaker 1: of a weird thing. And by the way, the music
Speaker 1: playing in the background there it was was tracked two
Speaker 1: from the nineteen seventy four music LP known to collectors
Speaker 1: as the Blue Album. So, yeah, you don't see music anymore,
Speaker 1: or at least I have an encountered music and forever
Speaker 1: on on board and l elevator. Now they try different
Speaker 1: tactics to try and make you, um think about something
Speaker 1: other than the tiny suspended box and a shaft that
Speaker 1: that is your environment. Yeah. I read somewhere that the
Speaker 1: music became so associated with elevator rides that they go
Speaker 1: out rid of it because it was just reminding people
Speaker 1: that they were in an elevator. Yeah, I mean, you
Speaker 1: still see it in movies. I think people still reference
Speaker 1: that the idea that you know, it kind of drives
Speaker 1: home the awkwardness of an environment where it's like you're
Speaker 1: standing right next to a total stranger and there's funky
Speaker 1: music playing like this but not but not real funky music,
Speaker 1: but like music acts, which is kind of the uncanny
Speaker 1: valley of music. Anyway, this driving home the awkwardness and
Speaker 1: artificiality of your setting. I love that. And now I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about a robot just staring back at me, vehicing
Speaker 1: in in in the form of music, which really that
Speaker 1: is what the old music was like. Um okay, So
Speaker 1: before we go and give you guys a little bit
Speaker 1: of history, um of elevators and get then go into
Speaker 1: the psychology, we did want to cover something really important,
Speaker 1: and that is the door closed button. Yes, the door
Speaker 1: closed button, which I think we've all hit it at
Speaker 1: least once, probably ten twenty times in a row. You
Speaker 1: know that that feeling where you did I get when
Speaker 1: I've I've I've arrived on the train, I hurry up
Speaker 1: the escalator. I walked in through the front door of
Speaker 1: the building and then there's an elevator already arrived on
Speaker 1: the on the ground floor just waiting for me. So
Speaker 1: I get inside and I'm the first person in there.
Speaker 1: Now at this point, I want those doors to shut
Speaker 1: because if they don't, like eight people are going to
Speaker 1: show up and they're all going to like different floors,
Speaker 1: and we're on the floor. We on the tenth uh
Speaker 1: somewhere up there. Yeah, well, I don't know why I
Speaker 1: can't remember that I pushed this button. Every day I've
Speaker 1: been reminded that we were on the fifteenth floor, technically
Speaker 1: the fourteenth because you know, they skipped, because that would
Speaker 1: be unlucky. Yeah, So anyway, Um, you know, I rushed
Speaker 1: onto the elevator and I start pushing that door closed
Speaker 1: button and it seems to take forever, and I always
Speaker 1: think it's in the past. I was just thought, well,
Speaker 1: they don't. You don't want it to be a situation
Speaker 1: where you just push that button and it slams shut
Speaker 1: like a like guillotines, twin guillotines. You know, that would
Speaker 1: be dangerous. You would need some sort of delay. But
Speaker 1: it never really occurred to me that the button does
Speaker 1: not work at all, or at least probably does not
Speaker 1: work at all. Yeah, it probably doesn't because it turns
Speaker 1: out that buildings that were built, particularly from the nineties
Speaker 1: and onward, they are not usually keyed so that the
Speaker 1: door button works. Usually there they are just in case
Speaker 1: of an emergency. So the door closed button is really
Speaker 1: only going to work if you have a key for
Speaker 1: the elevator. So I just won't want everybody to know that,
Speaker 1: because if you've ever been frustrated and said, why won't
Speaker 1: the door close? And also it felt a little bit
Speaker 1: of a fool and a jerk because you know, there
Speaker 1: was a huge amount of people that were stampeding towards
Speaker 1: you as you were pushing the door close, and it's
Speaker 1: all for not yeah, And then sometimes I mean really,
Speaker 1: but occasionally it will be someone I know out there.
Speaker 1: And also I'll go to push the door open button
Speaker 1: and it won't work or something, and then I feel
Speaker 1: like a jerk because they're thinking I was frantically pushing
Speaker 1: their clothes button to leave them on the bottom floor.
Speaker 1: And people get kind of been out of shape about
Speaker 1: their their elevator situation. Um has pointed out in some
Speaker 1: of the resources we were looking at, including the fabulous
Speaker 1: article Up and then Down the Lines of Elevators by
Speaker 1: Nick Palm, Garden a two thousand and eight New Yorker article,
Speaker 1: which is about a thousand pages long course since the
Speaker 1: New Yorker article, but it's excellent. It's like a it's
Speaker 1: like a mini novel about the history of the elevator,
Speaker 1: the culture of the elevator, and one particularly harrowing example
Speaker 1: of someone trapped in an elevator for I believe, forty
Speaker 1: one hours. Yeah, well we'll we'll mention him in a moment.
Speaker 1: But it's a you're right, it's set up really great
Speaker 1: because they take this guy, Nick White, the guy that
Speaker 1: was trapped, and they use that as a reference point. Right.
Speaker 1: But one of the points that the Palm Garden keeps
Speaker 1: coming back to is that in some of the people
Speaker 1: interviews keep discussing, is that we hold elevator to this
Speaker 1: different standard, uh than we do anything else. Like I
Speaker 1: take the train to work, and if I have to
Speaker 1: wait twenty minutes on a train, it's it's just kind
Speaker 1: of part of it. It's smarta so I just you know, whatever,
Speaker 1: it's just gonna be a slow ride. And then oh
Speaker 1: I'm next to somebody that's that's either a stranger or
Speaker 1: kind of awful. That's just public transportation, No big deal
Speaker 1: if there's a delay, all right, this is part of
Speaker 1: the experience on an elevator. I expect to wait no
Speaker 1: more than thirty seconds. I expect to ascend and pretty
Speaker 1: hopefully directly to my floor, which I'm told again is
Speaker 1: the fifteenth floor. And and I don't technically, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: if any of these things get messed up, I get
Speaker 1: a little bit out of shape about it. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: and that's what it's so interesting when you look at
Speaker 1: trying to actually engineer a decent set of elevators. And
Speaker 1: we'll get more into that, but let's talk about the
Speaker 1: Otis Elevator Company, because this really is the gold standard
Speaker 1: in the industry. Yeah, you've all been seeing the word
Speaker 1: Otis inside your elevators all your live and uh. And
Speaker 1: I never really thought about it beyond and just making
Speaker 1: a quick reference in my mind to old Andy Griffith's episodes,
Speaker 1: you know where you had to Ovis the Drunk, and
Speaker 1: I imagine him on an elevator. And that's kind of
Speaker 1: the end of it. But they are the elevator company
Speaker 1: in the United States and one of the major players globally. Uh.
Speaker 1: Most of their work these days isn't even in the
Speaker 1: United States. They're they're going to uh to Asia and
Speaker 1: the Middle East, and they're they're advising and installing elevator
Speaker 1: systems in these magnificent high rises that that everyone you know,
Speaker 1: freaks out about. On the internet, everyone's you know, always
Speaker 1: sharing a picture of either the newest skyscraper under under
Speaker 1: construction or the plans for this elaborate skyscraper that they're
Speaker 1: gonna build in the desert somewhere. And uh, of course,
Speaker 1: any time you're designing a building like that, anytime you're
Speaker 1: looking to create to create something like that, elevators are
Speaker 1: an essential part of it. I mean, without elevators, we
Speaker 1: would not have skyscrapers because you need a way for
Speaker 1: um able bodied people to reach any floor in pretty
Speaker 1: uh you know, pretty been a pretty a short amount
Speaker 1: of time. And then you also need um disabled individuals,
Speaker 1: individuals who are not up to multiple So just for
Speaker 1: it to make sense at all, you have to have
Speaker 1: an elevator system. And it's a particularly an interesting vision
Speaker 1: business now with the skyscrapers and the tallness of them,
Speaker 1: because you know, basic physics will tell you that if
Speaker 1: you reach beyond a thousand feet up in cabling for
Speaker 1: an elevator system, that's about the top of what you
Speaker 1: can get there, because otherwise your cables will snap. So
Speaker 1: you've got a bunch of engineers working on the spots
Speaker 1: because a lot of these buildings are much higher than that,
Speaker 1: especially if you look at something like the Burge. So
Speaker 1: there's some really good media problems to work on for
Speaker 1: engineers and mathematicians. Um. But before we start looking more
Speaker 1: at the modern systems, let's talk about Alicia Graves Otis.
Speaker 1: He founded the company Otis Elevators in eighteen fifty three
Speaker 1: when he figured out an operating system that could prevent
Speaker 1: free falls and passenger elevators, which is always nice because
Speaker 1: the bay it's the idea of an elevator is pretty ancient.
Speaker 1: The basics of hauling a box up, I mean that
Speaker 1: dates back to you know, to the ancient Greeks. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it read something to you about the first century BC.
Speaker 1: Romans would operate lifts using pulleys with humans, animal and
Speaker 1: water power. So yeah, it is a very simple process
Speaker 1: if you think about it. But yeah, it wasn't until
Speaker 1: we really had the safety features in mind that we
Speaker 1: could and also the the ability to build multiple skyscrapers
Speaker 1: that it really became a thing. Yeah, and then in
Speaker 1: Otis introduced the automatic elevator system, and that eliminated the
Speaker 1: need for operators. So no longer did you get into
Speaker 1: the elevator, at least in most office buildings, and was
Speaker 1: there an attendant there. Now, that did introduce an element
Speaker 1: of randomness, because before this you had someone in the
Speaker 1: elevator who knew where you were going and knew sort
Speaker 1: of the traffic patterns of people and would call that
Speaker 1: out to the operators. So it was easy to anticipate traffic.
Speaker 1: But when they moved to the automated system, it was
Speaker 1: a little bit more of of um, okay, well nobody
Speaker 1: knows really what the traffic patterns are anymore, and people
Speaker 1: had to wait a little bit more. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: apparently in the nineties we obviously saw that shift from
Speaker 1: elevator operators to operator less elevators, which instantly makes me
Speaker 1: think of Madman. Um, yeah, I can't remember do you
Speaker 1: watch mad Man? I've caught it before, I haven't seen
Speaker 1: all the season's will they make a lot of use
Speaker 1: of the elevators because they work in a high rise,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of room for scenes where individuals
Speaker 1: encounter each other awkwardly or well generally awkwardly in the elevator,
Speaker 1: but then also some excellent scenes. There's one in particular
Speaker 1: where Draper goes to take the elevator down and the
Speaker 1: doors open to just an empty shaft, and it has
Speaker 1: a lot to do with I mean, it's a thematically
Speaker 1: with what's going on in the show at that point.
Speaker 1: But but but it's it's a fascinating scene. And likewise,
Speaker 1: there's generally, i think, at least up until now, in
Speaker 1: the show, there's always an elevator operator. So I'm kind
Speaker 1: of looking forward to the point when the elevator operator
Speaker 1: is no longer present because I guess it's kind of
Speaker 1: an old fashioned building, uh that they're they're hanging onto
Speaker 1: that tradition, and I kind of want to see Draper's
Speaker 1: face when that goes away. That's kind of interesting to
Speaker 1: you how that the tails with the changing social ways
Speaker 1: at that time, because you can kind of think of
Speaker 1: the attendant as the chaperone, and uh, you know that's
Speaker 1: sort of because you could say, very um controlled relationship
Speaker 1: is flying away during that time, right the sixties, and
Speaker 1: people are beginning to be freer. So again, here here's
Speaker 1: the elevators, a microcosm of society in which you know,
Speaker 1: no longer as a chaperone there and anything can happen
Speaker 1: in an elevator, right, and now, as we'll discuss a
Speaker 1: little later, where in an age where we see that
Speaker 1: amount of freedom vanishing more and more in the elevator,
Speaker 1: we see technology taking over to the point to where
Speaker 1: we feel just like, where at the whim of whatever
Speaker 1: mysterious mechanical force is controlling this magic box? Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so in there you go with the door closed button, right,
Speaker 1: that's just an illusion of free will, right right. One
Speaker 1: of my favorite things that I stumbled upon when we
Speaker 1: were researching this is an old clip from a Candid
Speaker 1: Camera show. You remember that show? Yeah, This is where
Speaker 1: they would you know, kind of a forerunner of reality shows. Um,
Speaker 1: kind of like what was the show Punked? I think
Speaker 1: with the MTV things several years Yeah, yeah, where they
Speaker 1: would prank people. You know, it's just a prank show
Speaker 1: they do, and some of it bordered on what we
Speaker 1: would now call almost performance art or theater everywhere kind
Speaker 1: of shenanigans where you're creating something weird in a public space.
Speaker 1: And then seeing how people react to it. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: I mean, actually, and its purest format, it really is
Speaker 1: kind of a social experiment because nobody was doing them
Speaker 1: before that. And so you had this candid camera crew
Speaker 1: set up basically basically confederates, and we've talked about confederates before.
Speaker 1: These are people who are in on an experiment or
Speaker 1: a joke. And what they did is they filmed an elevator,
Speaker 1: a bank of elevators. They had I don't know, like
Speaker 1: five different confederates go into an elevator and then a
Speaker 1: person who's not in on it and go in and
Speaker 1: observe what's going on. And quickly you could see that
Speaker 1: people would react accordingly, like they would feel the pressure
Speaker 1: of those around them to do the right thing socially.
Speaker 1: So what I mean is that if five Confederates went
Speaker 1: in and they all turned around and faced the wall,
Speaker 1: which is an unusual thing to do in an elevator,
Speaker 1: the person will look around and then join them, right
Speaker 1: And some of these they would sort of hold out
Speaker 1: at first, but then they would succumb to the group
Speaker 1: think and look at the walls. And it's it's fascinating, yeah,
Speaker 1: because there's this sense of you know, conformity and wanting
Speaker 1: to to look like you know what's going on. Like
Speaker 1: I've been in We've all probably been in elevators before.
Speaker 1: We have a door on both sides. I particularly seem
Speaker 1: to to encounter these in hospitals for some reason. I
Speaker 1: just just because some of the weird floor layouts that
Speaker 1: are involved, and there is this kind of confusion that
Speaker 1: takes all which door is going to open. Not only
Speaker 1: do I need to know which way I'm going, and
Speaker 1: there's that sort of basic directional survival instinct in your mind,
Speaker 1: but you also don't want to look like you don't
Speaker 1: know which doors though you know you want to look
Speaker 1: you want to appear in control. You want to feel
Speaker 1: in control in this thing. You don't want to look
Speaker 1: like a rube. And that's what's so funny about this
Speaker 1: candid camera clip, because the Confederates continue to turn, will
Speaker 1: turn to the right, and then the guy turns to
Speaker 1: the right, and then they turn, you know, to the opposite,
Speaker 1: to the left, and so on and so forth. Or
Speaker 1: they they all are wearing hats and they take their
Speaker 1: hats off and he takes his hat off. So again
Speaker 1: microcosm of what's going on socially and the pressures that
Speaker 1: we feel to conform. And it was just a really
Speaker 1: elegant little social experiment that was conducted by candid camera
Speaker 1: of all people. We're talking about the psychology of elevators
Speaker 1: at this point. So there are a few different factors
Speaker 1: that are mandatory and discussing our mindset inside of this
Speaker 1: magic box. The first of which, of course, is we
Speaker 1: left on earlier wait times. How long is this ride
Speaker 1: going to take? Because even if you're in there alone,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be there too long, and and
Speaker 1: and and this is actually the sort of thing that
Speaker 1: elevator strategists and elevator designers are are very key to understand,
Speaker 1: and it varies from culture to culture. But in the
Speaker 1: United States, thirty seconds, like that's as long as anyone
Speaker 1: is tolerant being on an elevator, And this is really important.
Speaker 1: It sounds kind of random, right, thirty seconds, so what's
Speaker 1: the big deal? But it turns out that UM office
Speaker 1: space is far more desirable if they can deliver people
Speaker 1: in that thirty seconds or less timeframe. So you want
Speaker 1: to have a good office space that that can deliver
Speaker 1: this UM. And what's interesting about this is that when
Speaker 1: you get out of an office situation and morans to say,
Speaker 1: like an apartment building situation, people are much more forgiving,
Speaker 1: so you can add another ten or fifteen seconds onto
Speaker 1: that in an apartment building. In an apartment building, yeah,
Speaker 1: because people they have their their their personal effects. There,
Speaker 1: it's more about life going on and less this is
Speaker 1: a job. I need to get where I'm going. I
Speaker 1: don't have time for your job. It reminds me though.
Speaker 1: Another another college elevator thing was another dorm and I
Speaker 1: was in was one called North Carrick In in the
Speaker 1: University of Tennessee, and this one was I think I
Speaker 1: was on the tenth floor of this particular dorm and
Speaker 1: it was awful because we had two elevators serving the
Speaker 1: entire building. And the white times were just colossal unless
Speaker 1: you were like you're gonna be you know, it was
Speaker 1: the middle of the night or something or some weird time,
Speaker 1: but the morning hours, afternoon hours, like key traffic times
Speaker 1: of the day, it was just a colossal weight. The
Speaker 1: door would open and it would already be packed, and
Speaker 1: you end up just taking ten flights of stairs, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in the summer and just totally exhausting yourself
Speaker 1: and sweating all over the place just because the elevators
Speaker 1: were that bad, and like nobody wants to encounter that
Speaker 1: like that just made this's just we have no tolerance
Speaker 1: for it. Well, you know, and every once in a
Speaker 1: while you will encounter an elevator bank like that, right,
Speaker 1: And what it's doing is that it's it's a it's
Speaker 1: not cross referencing any of the data that we'll talk
Speaker 1: about later, it's not very sophistic caated. It's basically just
Speaker 1: saying I'm going to stop at every stop that's going up,
Speaker 1: load people up, and then I'm gonna go back down,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna stop at every single floor. So it's
Speaker 1: just sort of a single function elevator. Yeah. In the
Speaker 1: New Yorker article that we were looking at, he interviews
Speaker 1: a man by the James Fortune, who's pretty much the
Speaker 1: the top class elevator advisor strategist designer. Gets into all
Speaker 1: of all of these questions of you know, how are
Speaker 1: we gonna lay this out from maximum affecient efficiency and uh,
Speaker 1: and some of the things they discussed where things that
Speaker 1: I had never really thought of, like, for instance, you
Speaker 1: want to cut down as much as possible on Florida
Speaker 1: floor um travel, you know, because that the idea is
Speaker 1: something like, even in our building, where I know that
Speaker 1: you cannot travel between floors via the staircase because of
Speaker 1: the lock system. It's set up so that if you
Speaker 1: want to take the stairs, you better be going to
Speaker 1: the ground floor. There's no using it to go in
Speaker 1: between floors. It's just part of the safety system here.
Speaker 1: So I'll see individuals who work for a business that
Speaker 1: occupies two different floors in this building. I'll see them
Speaker 1: go from one floor to the other, and even though
Speaker 1: I rationally know that they have no choice but to
Speaker 1: do that, I still have this really judgmental voice in
Speaker 1: my head. It's like, come on, lazy, take the stairs.
Speaker 1: That's the matter with you. I guess it's a holdout
Speaker 1: from from my college days and that awful dorm. It's
Speaker 1: funny in that New Yorker article, uh, I think that
Speaker 1: the author talks about how that's really infuriating as well,
Speaker 1: and I believe that his perspective is like, Okay, you're
Speaker 1: gonna go get on the StairMaster for an hour after work,
Speaker 1: but you won't take the stairs. Now. Of course, not everybody,
Speaker 1: can you know, has that luxury for the next with
Speaker 1: a bunch of files or some coffee right right, or
Speaker 1: maybe you have something physically going on that prevents you
Speaker 1: from doing that. But you're right, mathematicians cannot stand it.
Speaker 1: They hate that because that is an X factor that
Speaker 1: they can't account for because they have all these probability um,
Speaker 1: you know, scales that they can rely on. But that's
Speaker 1: the one thing that will throw them off, because how
Speaker 1: can you can account how can you account for that? Yes,
Speaker 1: some of the other real city he goes into. For instance,
Speaker 1: if you have a hotel and you have a cafeteria,
Speaker 1: or you have a check in on a second floor,
Speaker 1: that floor better be accessible via an escalator or likewise,
Speaker 1: for a high traffic um subfloor. For instance, when we
Speaker 1: were in Minneapolis for the educational talk we gave, I
Speaker 1: noticed that the like the bottom three floors were all
Speaker 1: connected via escalators and uh, and I realized now that
Speaker 1: is because they didn't want traffic, high traffic between those
Speaker 1: three floors monopolizing the elevator banks, that's right. And they
Speaker 1: only because they had a very small amount of elevator banks, right,
Speaker 1: it was a pretty small amount for a tall building.
Speaker 1: And that's another thing. Architects don't want to seed a
Speaker 1: lot of square footage two elevators because that's going to
Speaker 1: decrease the profits on the amount of office space for
Speaker 1: hotail space that they can rent out. So they have
Speaker 1: to make it as small of space and as efficient
Speaker 1: as possible. And they also have to take into account
Speaker 1: personal space, which is tied into culture. We'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about that. How close am I willing
Speaker 1: to get the person in the elevator with? Yeah. Edward Hall,
Speaker 1: who pioneered the study of proxymix, called the smallest range
Speaker 1: less than eighteen inches between people intimate distance. Now, this
Speaker 1: is then the point at which you can sense another
Speaker 1: person's odor and temperature. And the thing is that Americans
Speaker 1: typically like to be at least two point three feet
Speaker 1: away from from one another, so they don't want to
Speaker 1: get to the point where they can smell you or
Speaker 1: feel your body temperature. Yeah. I mean, even in the
Speaker 1: United States, you see a certain breakdown between say New
Speaker 1: York City and everywhere else. You know, like if you're dining,
Speaker 1: say in a in a New York restaurant versus elsewhere,
Speaker 1: like like you're in Atlanta, you go to a restaurant
Speaker 1: you expect to have a certain amount of space between
Speaker 1: you and the other diners. You expect the table to
Speaker 1: be at the fair, you know, the fair distance across.
Speaker 1: But like you go into a lot of New York
Speaker 1: eateries and you are going to be they're gonna be
Speaker 1: elbows bumping, You're gonna be looking down the shirt of
Speaker 1: the person the right way in front of you. It's
Speaker 1: just there's just a different proxy many rule in New
Speaker 1: York City. Uh, then there isn't in the rest of
Speaker 1: the country. Yeah, And it turns out that in uh,
Speaker 1: the United States, at least, you can sort of infringe
Speaker 1: on the two point three feet. You can go about
Speaker 1: two feet in with Americans and and still be okay
Speaker 1: with it. You can jam that elevator and as long
Speaker 1: as everybody has two feet, they're okay with it. But
Speaker 1: as you say, like you know, there are different rules
Speaker 1: in different places, and in Asia, you could double pack
Speaker 1: that elevator and people would be fine because they don't
Speaker 1: have that much of a need for distance. Right. And
Speaker 1: you see that, you see that you know elsewhere like
Speaker 1: public transportation, Um, you see that in the difference between
Speaker 1: the Japanese subway system and then public transportation here in
Speaker 1: the States. How comfortable are people willing to pack? Now,
Speaker 1: I've certainly been on some Martyat trains before where it's
Speaker 1: just like sardines in there, but everyone is is visibly
Speaker 1: upset by the situation. Yeah, yeah, especially in the summertime
Speaker 1: when the cars air conditioning isn't working. Um So again
Speaker 1: this is pointing more toward cultural nor rooms, right, what
Speaker 1: is what works out for each culture? And there's a
Speaker 1: really great article in the Wall Street Journal and they
Speaker 1: have profiled in Otis elevator mathematician Teresa Christie, and she
Speaker 1: tries to account for all the different cultural aspects as
Speaker 1: well as as everything else that's involved in getting an
Speaker 1: elevator to run smoothly. And so she was saying that
Speaker 1: in the hotel in say Mecca in Saudi Arabia, she
Speaker 1: now has to account for the fact that people are
Speaker 1: getting ready to pray at least five times a day,
Speaker 1: so she has to make sure that those elevator banks
Speaker 1: can respond to those high traffic times. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: certain that's certainly a factor that is going to be
Speaker 1: involved in any of these Middle Eastern high rises that
Speaker 1: are always, you know, making the news. Neither in construction
Speaker 1: or in planning, and then she was saying that in Japan, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a psychological element to waiting, so, um, they want
Speaker 1: to know when their elevator is coming. So in Japan,
Speaker 1: the light over your perspective elevator lights up even if
Speaker 1: it's not there yet. And the author of the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal likened it to a nod of acknowledgment from
Speaker 1: a busy bartender, which I thought was great because if
Speaker 1: you've ever gone up to the bar and it's completely
Speaker 1: slammed and you feel that frustration until you get noticed
Speaker 1: I hear, am I do? I am? I not classy
Speaker 1: enough looking and it's because of me, And yeah, you
Speaker 1: can get a little stressed out about it. So I can.
Speaker 1: I can imagine that you you get to the elevator banks,
Speaker 1: you want to know an elevator is coming, and so
Speaker 1: they're set up to deal with that. Yeah. So those
Speaker 1: are just some of the cultural aspects of it. Um. No,
Speaker 1: we probably should mention Nick White real quick. This is
Speaker 1: the guy that was trapped in the elevator in hours, Yes,
Speaker 1: and his his story is covered in various articles across
Speaker 1: the net, uh, and it serves as kind of the
Speaker 1: the narrative backbone of Palm Gardens two tho eight article,
Speaker 1: which again either recommend everyone read because it's it's brilliant.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he what he he worked at a business
Speaker 1: week I think it was. Yeah, and uh and the
Speaker 1: elevator system there was a little archaic. I think they
Speaker 1: had four elevators, or at least they were there were
Speaker 1: four on the video camera. Yeah, so he's he's at
Speaker 1: work and he I think he goes down for smoke
Speaker 1: and then he's coming back up. It's like a Friday evening,
Speaker 1: let's say five o'clock or something a minutes later in
Speaker 1: the evening. Yeah, so he's going down for the smoke,
Speaker 1: and what happens, Well, you know, I think that he
Speaker 1: was traveling up to the forty third floor and he
Speaker 1: must have made it up to well, he definitely made
Speaker 1: it up to the thirteen floor, because I believe that's
Speaker 1: where it stopped. And so he doesn't freak out right away.
Speaker 1: He starts calling the emergency button. Yeah, why why you
Speaker 1: do again? There's a button there for the emergency, so
Speaker 1: you push it. No one, no one, nothing zero. So
Speaker 1: the video camera, sorry, the security system that you see
Speaker 1: the video footage from this is pretty fascinating because they
Speaker 1: speeded up over that forty one hours and you see
Speaker 1: him pacing, you see him lying down, you see him
Speaker 1: fiddling with his cigarettes because at first he wants to
Speaker 1: be the model employee and not smoke in the elevator,
Speaker 1: you know, even though he's definitely feeling pretty stressed out
Speaker 1: at this point because hours are going by, and then
Speaker 1: he begins to have aural hallucinations, right, because he's hearing things.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're talking about we talked before of this
Speaker 1: on the on on the podcast. You have a limited environment.
Speaker 1: Our brains need more stimulation than that. So they start
Speaker 1: over analyzing everything and eventually they start interpreting data that
Speaker 1: isn't actually there, right, and you know, twenty hours past,
Speaker 1: thirty hours past, you know, he's getting dehydrated, he hasn't
Speaker 1: eaten um, and of course this hallucinations are coming on,
Speaker 1: and he begins to think that this is a tomb,
Speaker 1: that this is that he's going to die. This they're
Speaker 1: going to open the doors, because yeah, he's he's tried
Speaker 1: pushing the button, nothing's happened. He's pride open the doors
Speaker 1: and it's just a solid wall. And I think he
Speaker 1: sees thirteen scrawled there in, which is also pretty ominous.
Speaker 1: That doesn't help. And uh, and of course he's seen
Speaker 1: enough movies to know that he should try to open
Speaker 1: that little hatch in the ceiling, but he can't because
Speaker 1: in real life, surprise surprise, climbing on top of an
Speaker 1: elevator is incredibly dangerous, so they do not want you
Speaker 1: to do it. It's bolted from the outside. That's so
Speaker 1: that if someone needs to get in and help you out,
Speaker 1: they can, But it prohibits people from potentially killing themselves
Speaker 1: by climbing on the roofe well, because apparently, and it's
Speaker 1: not gonna surprising me, righty. At some point in history,
Speaker 1: elevator elevator writing became a thing and people day like
Speaker 1: elevator surfing. Yeah, yeah, elevator surfing. And you've got those
Speaker 1: counterweights going by, which can decapitate you. So has for
Speaker 1: good reason the lock those It is only for emergency situations,
Speaker 1: and he's in an emergency situation. He still can't do
Speaker 1: anything about it. But yeah, I feel just bad for
Speaker 1: this guy because the elevator kind of broke him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: forty one hours passes, he gets out. He asked for
Speaker 1: a beer he's disoriented. Yeah, he didn't know what day
Speaker 1: it is. He doesn't really know how long he's been
Speaker 1: in there totally, and and it it kind of ruins
Speaker 1: his life. Yeah. Yeah, there's this job of fifteen years
Speaker 1: that he held he's let go from. He's obsessed and
Speaker 1: angry about it. He doesn't know why people didn't come
Speaker 1: and find him. Why because here's someone who's he just
Speaker 1: went out for a cigarette break and he went just
Speaker 1: there like somebody was setting there walking by and just
Speaker 1: did not notice that there was only ever one individual
Speaker 1: inside of that car. And it's sometimes they were laying
Speaker 1: down for hours at a time. So, yeah, you totally
Speaker 1: sympathized with this man's breakdown because it was really dealt
Speaker 1: a foul card on this one. Yeah, and it's a
Speaker 1: it's funny. I believe it's in the that up and
Speaker 1: down article, um or one of the articles that we
Speaker 1: read at least um it may be another one, but
Speaker 1: in one of those articles they talked to him about
Speaker 1: He's like, well, of course I still have to use elevators,
Speaker 1: and yes, I just still tried to distract myself. But
Speaker 1: I thought about that, you know, when I go into
Speaker 1: my own elevator bank. You know, you've got the Captivate
Speaker 1: At least in our office, we've got the Captivate screen
Speaker 1: that is trying to distract you from the fact that
Speaker 1: you're an elevator, which is brilliant because you, yeah, you
Speaker 1: get in there and there's no music, but there's this
Speaker 1: little TV screen that gives your quick tidbits about the weather,
Speaker 1: quick headlines, that sort of thing, and it can be
Speaker 1: a lifesaver if you're stuck on there, not with a
Speaker 1: complete stranger, but sort of a pseudo work stranger, like
Speaker 1: something you really don't know that well, but you feel
Speaker 1: obligated to speak to them. And then all you have
Speaker 1: to do is look at at Captivate and then it'll
Speaker 1: give you the weather and you'd be like, whoa, look
Speaker 1: it's raining Saturday. How about that? Or look at that
Speaker 1: Olympic headline. You know, install you have some sort of
Speaker 1: nugget that you can probably discuss awkwardly for thirty seconds
Speaker 1: or last. Yeah, because I mean that that again, is
Speaker 1: the thing about the elevator is psychologically you're going to
Speaker 1: want to have the again, the most vanilla conversation because
Speaker 1: on a very primal level, what's happening is that you're
Speaker 1: all stuffed into this elevator. You have no control, and
Speaker 1: so what the human thing to do here is to
Speaker 1: try to go to the spot where you feel non threatened.
Speaker 1: And really that's what we're talking about here, is I mean,
Speaker 1: in the day, we're all a bunch of animals anyway,
Speaker 1: so we're all stuck in this elevator trying to make
Speaker 1: sure that in that twenty seconds nothing bad is going
Speaker 1: to happen. Therefore, the weather is fine. You can talk
Speaker 1: about that if you must talk. And then we go
Speaker 1: home in the evening and watch movies and TV shows
Speaker 1: about bad things happening in elevators because we can't help it. Upset.
Speaker 1: We have to find that release in our fiction where
Speaker 1: somebody's having to have a baby in an elevator, somebody's
Speaker 1: having to crawl on the roof of an elevator, or
Speaker 1: your elevator is descending into the Chinese hell where people
Speaker 1: are drowned alive. So you know, on that note, we
Speaker 1: should probably take a break. Yes, we are going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break I guess for like thirty seconds,
Speaker 1: and then when we when we come back, we will
Speaker 1: continue with elevators and to the planning that goes into them,
Speaker 1: the uh and and and also the future of the elevator.
Speaker 1: What what might that look like? All right, we're back. Uh.
Speaker 1: The elevator doors have opened and we have arrived on
Speaker 1: the floor for our second to second half of this
Speaker 1: episode on elevators. That's right. And in order for us
Speaker 1: to start talking more about the mathematical puzzle in earnest,
Speaker 1: we have to talk a little bit more about how
Speaker 1: our modern elevator system works. So one of the first
Speaker 1: things to know is that when you get into an elevator,
Speaker 1: it is automatically outfitted with loads sensors in the floor
Speaker 1: and that manages the amount of weight that's in the car.
Speaker 1: So if you've ever been in an overcrowded elevator and
Speaker 1: you hear the door is danging, it's because the sensor
Speaker 1: is saying, hey man, someone's got to get off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's why elevator sensors and also hotel personnel can
Speaker 1: and will get visibly upset if people are jumping up
Speaker 1: and down an elevator. Now, most elevator systems have a
Speaker 1: computer that logs a bunch of things, a bunch of
Speaker 1: I will say a request, Um, these things that they
Speaker 1: lost is where a person wants to go, where each
Speaker 1: floor is, and where the elevator car is in that
Speaker 1: time and space. So if you press a button for
Speaker 1: the floor you want to go to, the computer logs
Speaker 1: the request, and then the computer notes where a car
Speaker 1: is by either a magnetic sensor or a light sensor,
Speaker 1: and it's feeding all that information to itself an algorithm.
Speaker 1: More advanced programs will take passenger traffic patterns into account. Uh,
Speaker 1: they know which floors have the highest demand and at
Speaker 1: what time of the day, and they direct the elevator
Speaker 1: cars accordingly. If you're lucky, if you're in the office
Speaker 1: building right north Carrick Hall, a U t K did
Speaker 1: not have advances. It did not. In a multiple car system,
Speaker 1: the elevator will direct individual cars based on the location
Speaker 1: of other cars. So all of that is going on
Speaker 1: in the background as soon as you press a button.
Speaker 1: So it all leads to this big mathematical puzzle. It's,
Speaker 1: you know, how do you get from point A to
Speaker 1: point B? How do you get the cargo, the human cargo,
Speaker 1: from point A to point B with the least amount
Speaker 1: of issue without just totally clogging up the whole system.
Speaker 1: Without angering the people that are working there, but then
Speaker 1: but also getting by with really maybe not the minimum,
Speaker 1: but a minimum amount of elevators, because elevators take up
Speaker 1: a lot of space. You need the shafts, you need
Speaker 1: the the equipment rooms for them. And granted, uh, certain
Speaker 1: technological advancements have cut down on the amount of equipment
Speaker 1: needed to run it, but for the most part, you're
Speaker 1: talking about a lot of space in a building, and
Speaker 1: space is is valuable. Space is pricy. Remember that's why
Speaker 1: we're building skyscrapers to begin with, because we want to
Speaker 1: maximize the amount of office that we can fit on
Speaker 1: a single piece of land. And if we end up
Speaker 1: filling up most of that with elevators, that kind of
Speaker 1: defeats the purpose. And it also kind of depends on
Speaker 1: the function of that building. That's something that a lot
Speaker 1: of engineers and mathematicians have to take into account. So
Speaker 1: if you look at something like the Bronx Family Court system,
Speaker 1: the building that that's housed in, and you look and
Speaker 1: back in two thousand and seven, and you'll see that
Speaker 1: that whole court system was completely messed up. It was
Speaker 1: an absolute disarray because the elevators at its courthouse kept
Speaker 1: breaking down and they couldn't use the stairs. It's not
Speaker 1: and it wasn't like in our situation where the stairs
Speaker 1: are only for fire exits. So it's it's just not
Speaker 1: they're not accessible. They shut off the stairs because they
Speaker 1: were a safety risk. They were just like an escape
Speaker 1: from New York hell hole if you try to take
Speaker 1: the stairs down to the Bronx. Yeah, so if you
Speaker 1: had to go to the court, uh the courthouse in
Speaker 1: the Bronx in two thousand and seven, you were screwed
Speaker 1: because this led to our long waits, which led to
Speaker 1: miss court dates, which led to needless arrest warrants, and
Speaker 1: of course just the general messing up of people's lives. Now,
Speaker 1: this is something that mathematicians and engineers really want to
Speaker 1: try to avoid if they can. So they start to
Speaker 1: look at various probabilities. Right, They've got um probability tables
Speaker 1: that they rely on when they start to try to
Speaker 1: figure out this puzzle of elevator systems. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: if there are ten people in an elevator that serves
Speaker 1: ten floors, it will likely make six point five stops.
Speaker 1: You've got ten people, thirty floors, then you've got nine
Speaker 1: point five stops. This is somewhere they can start, just
Speaker 1: the odds of traffic. Now, there are two basic elevator metrics.
Speaker 1: One is handling capacity, so that's carrying a certain percentage
Speaker 1: of the building's population in five minutes, and by the way,
Speaker 1: is ideal. So if you have I don't know, five
Speaker 1: thousand people in a building, then percent of those five
Speaker 1: thousand people should be serviced by your elevator system. The
Speaker 1: other metric is the interval or the frequency of service.
Speaker 1: So the average round trip time of one elevator divided
Speaker 1: by the number of elevators. Okay, so now think of
Speaker 1: all the other factors like door open and closed time,
Speaker 1: loading and unloading time. You guys out there who are
Speaker 1: looking at your smartphones or your blackberries when you should
Speaker 1: be disembarking. You know who the last second you were
Speaker 1: supposed to get off, So then you make a dark
Speaker 1: everything else, that's right, you're increasing the unlearning time. Or
Speaker 1: you know the situation where the thing is packed and
Speaker 1: and who needs to get off the elevator. The little
Speaker 1: old lady in the back of the car, you know,
Speaker 1: so everyone has to sort of disembark and they're a
Speaker 1: little they're a little wigged out because they're having to
Speaker 1: do this, and oh what if they get stranded on
Speaker 1: the on the elevator, because that's that's kind of a
Speaker 1: mild fear. If you get off on the wrong floor,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to take the elevator again to maybe
Speaker 1: to the bottom, depending on the system, and it's going
Speaker 1: to be a whole headache. And you also have acceleration
Speaker 1: rate and deceleration rate, so when the elevator is stopping,
Speaker 1: and of course what we talked about before, inter floor traffic,
Speaker 1: which is the thing that's sort of the wrench that
Speaker 1: that you throw in that just kind of messes everything up.
Speaker 1: And then to say nothing of phantom button pushers, that
Speaker 1: is always the worst. When it opens and the nobody
Speaker 1: there where did they go? I guess in reality there
Speaker 1: might have been another elevator coming up and someone got
Speaker 1: off on that floor and then they just hitched a
Speaker 1: ride on that one since it was there. But then
Speaker 1: my elevator arrives and it opens, and you're just like,
Speaker 1: I guess it's the little girl from the Shining again
Speaker 1: or the phantom farter the phantom is that an that
Speaker 1: is a thing. I think the phantom farter push the
Speaker 1: phantom floor m because that is another unfortunate reality of
Speaker 1: of elevators. Two people in an elevator, nobody is allowed
Speaker 1: to pass gas because it will be known who did it.
Speaker 1: But three or more people just feel like they have
Speaker 1: just an open license to just let it rip. And
Speaker 1: it's just an enclosed environment. So well, and there's some
Speaker 1: people who do it on purpose, people like I know
Speaker 1: someone in my family, and I'm not going to mention
Speaker 1: I told you I have a very scatological family who
Speaker 1: they do this on purpose. Um, it's good to know. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that is not fortunately a factor that mathematicians have to
Speaker 1: figure out the actual parting capacity. But I did want
Speaker 1: to mention again. The otis elevator mathematician Theresa Christie because
Speaker 1: she developed algorithms using a computer simulation program and that
Speaker 1: replays elevator decision making, so she gets to see it
Speaker 1: in real time. And in that Wall Street Journal article
Speaker 1: called the Ups and Downs of Making Elevators Go, she says,
Speaker 1: I feel like I get paid to play video games.
Speaker 1: I watched the simulation and I see what happens, and
Speaker 1: I try to improve the score I'm getting, which is
Speaker 1: so cool. I love that that that's part of her process.
Speaker 1: She's thinking about it that way, and she recently worked
Speaker 1: on the Empire State Building and was able to decrease
Speaker 1: the amount of time, but I think ten seconds um
Speaker 1: the time that they're actually in the elevator. The history
Speaker 1: you could, based on some of the material we're looking at,
Speaker 1: you could basically write a book just about the history
Speaker 1: of elevators in the Empire State Building, because you have
Speaker 1: you haven't, they've been around for so long. You have
Speaker 1: some really catastrophic things happening from in the fens which
Speaker 1: when the uh the aircraft crashed into the Empire State
Speaker 1: Building and it and the impact severed the cables in one,
Speaker 1: perhaps two of the elevators, and at this time you
Speaker 1: still had elevator operators. So they plummeted with those elevator
Speaker 1: operators on board, and I believe no, no, I believe
Speaker 1: one operator was on board and one was not. And
Speaker 1: the one woman aboard the elevator ended up living, as
Speaker 1: I recall, because the cables were coiling up at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the elevator shaft as a plummeted, because they
Speaker 1: had to fall quite quite a distance, and by the
Speaker 1: time that it hit the bottom and had a sort
Speaker 1: of cushion going, so she was really she was badly injured,
Speaker 1: but she did survive, and she was crouched in the
Speaker 1: corner right so that when the impact came at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the elevator too and kind of crumpled the middle,
Speaker 1: she wasn't affected by that part. Um So of course
Speaker 1: we should say that elevators are really really safe. I mean,
Speaker 1: the statistics on how safe they are we will make
Speaker 1: you feel much better. OTIS will typically show you statistics
Speaker 1: that argue that they are safer that safer than esk lators,
Speaker 1: because you know, they are more elevators than escalators. The
Speaker 1: percentage of accidents is apparently higher with escalators. Um Likewise,
Speaker 1: most of the individuals who are injured or killed aboard
Speaker 1: elevators are people who are working on them, so they're
Speaker 1: in a heightened state of danger because they're on top
Speaker 1: of them, or they're repairing broken elevators, etcetera. Now, again,
Speaker 1: this is something that someone like Teresa Christie has to
Speaker 1: keep in mind when she's developing algorithms UM and when
Speaker 1: she programs an elevator system. She also uses different weights
Speaker 1: for the average person by region. So for instance, the
Speaker 1: average American is twenty two pounds heavier than the average
Speaker 1: Chinese um, and she has to account for the way
Speaker 1: that people arrange themselves in an elevator, which turns out
Speaker 1: is across cultures. It turns out that people will arrange
Speaker 1: themselves into various geometric patterns each time a new passenger
Speaker 1: gets on an elevator. So it's pretty it seems very instinctive.
Speaker 1: So if you have two strangers on an elevator, they
Speaker 1: will gravitate to the back corners. A third person will
Speaker 1: stand by the door, creating Isoceles triangle until fourth person
Speaker 1: comes in, and then they'll spread out through all four corners,
Speaker 1: and then so on and so forth as people board. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I believe that the article we're looking at they had
Speaker 1: they used a dice as an example. The position of
Speaker 1: the dots on any given side of a dice more
Speaker 1: or less illustrates how people a position themselves on a
Speaker 1: crowded or less crowded elevator. And it's, you know, similar
Speaker 1: to a lot of the rules that govern the bank
Speaker 1: of urinals. In a men's room, Where are where where
Speaker 1: is a man going to stand? If there's if there's
Speaker 1: no one at the urinals, Where will the second person
Speaker 1: to arrive stand, where will the third, etcetera. Because no
Speaker 1: one wants to be too close to the you know,
Speaker 1: awkwardly close to the other individual who's taking a week.
Speaker 1: Ye always wondered about that. For you guys, that's gonna
Speaker 1: be very bizarre when just like if you're in there
Speaker 1: by yourself, as someone just cruises up right next to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if it's a long bank, like if it's a bank
Speaker 1: of like a rest stop bank of like six urinals,
Speaker 1: it's a little weird of somebody stands right next to you.
Speaker 1: Now Here at work, we just have two urinals, So
Speaker 1: it's you know, you're gonna stand next to somebody and
Speaker 1: hopefully they won't talk to you. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: is there a chit chat? Um? Depends on the individual.
Speaker 1: Some people seem like they get a little nervous and
Speaker 1: they have to start talking and it's weird. But most
Speaker 1: people seem to be governed by the no talking while
Speaker 1: you're inating. I think that should be like the same
Speaker 1: set of rules for the elevator, right, don't stand too
Speaker 1: close and and and don't chit chat? Really all right? Um?
Speaker 1: Teresa Christie, the she is one of the premier engineers
Speaker 1: for for otis and mathematicians. She has created about fourteen patents,
Speaker 1: and one of the patents I really loved called the
Speaker 1: surfboard feature. Yes, and I want the codes. This is
Speaker 1: something I wish that I was a great hacker, because
Speaker 1: I would I would hack in just to get the
Speaker 1: codes to elevators, because this feature allows you to essentially
Speaker 1: turn any elevator into an express elevator. Because the situation
Speaker 1: here is that, know, Waii, you have individuals who are
Speaker 1: taking the elevator, but they have a surfboard with them,
Speaker 1: So if they're on board with a surfboard, there's not
Speaker 1: room for anyone else really to get on board but them.
Speaker 1: They so they really need a direct line from from
Speaker 1: their floor to the ground floor. And you know, this
Speaker 1: has a lot in common with there are express elevators
Speaker 1: out there, for instance, really tall buildings. We we mentioned
Speaker 1: the limits of elevators earlier. They can only you can
Speaker 1: only build an elevator shaft so high, and then the
Speaker 1: physics get involved and they prohibit anything else. So you'll
Speaker 1: have what you'll have is you'll have a landing platform
Speaker 1: halfway up the skyscraper and you take an express elevator
Speaker 1: to that and then you wait on an elevator to
Speaker 1: serve elevators to service the higher floors. So the idea
Speaker 1: of an express elevator isn't new, but what this is
Speaker 1: doing is creating a custom express elevator for privileged UM,
Speaker 1: good guest for surfers. Yeah, and you know what, this
Speaker 1: is one little odd tidbit that I wanted to throw
Speaker 1: out there, uh, that we did not talk about. And
Speaker 1: it's a type of elevator system called the destination dispatch,
Speaker 1: in which you key your floor number into a pad
Speaker 1: in the lobby and the computer then tracks where the
Speaker 1: cars are and assigned you an elevator bank number, so
Speaker 1: at least are the ones you go in. Then there
Speaker 1: are no buttons, no buttons whatsoever. So the illusion is
Speaker 1: just shattered. You have no control. You're in an elevator
Speaker 1: that you cannot manipulate in any way. I believe Palm
Speaker 1: Garden was the one who who compared those elevators to
Speaker 1: um like an elevator in a Bond villain's mansion or something.
Speaker 1: You know, you're on board, You're like, who's in charge?
Speaker 1: This is going to open up? You know, on the
Speaker 1: into the like the into a pit of sharks or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm totally out of control. And and
Speaker 1: again it comes back to the idea that our technology,
Speaker 1: the technology narrative of the elevators, is giving us power
Speaker 1: and then sort and then steadily taking it away. It's
Speaker 1: it's interesting to behold how it deve tells with whatever
Speaker 1: else is going on in the world of technology. UM.
Speaker 1: I wanted to point out that that jumping just before impact,
Speaker 1: this is something that you hear about sometimes, like, oh,
Speaker 1: if an elevator crashes, you can jump just before impact
Speaker 1: and you'll be fine. That's a myth. That's a myth.
Speaker 1: I want to close it out with that, because there's
Speaker 1: never any reason to jump on an never right as
Speaker 1: you say, that will mess up the weight sensors. And
Speaker 1: there's two problems with that scenario. You can't jump fast
Speaker 1: enough to counteract the speed of falling, that's the first problem,
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't really know when to jump, right. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I believe James Fortune when asked about this in the
Speaker 1: Palm Garden's article, he just said, well, dead is dad.
Speaker 1: He's he's kind of a grim individual. He've been in
Speaker 1: the elevator uses a long time, had a very very
Speaker 1: straightforward outlook on He's been in so many elevators he
Speaker 1: have been thinking about being entombed for a while. I suppose.
Speaker 1: So the future of elevators, UM, this is a course
Speaker 1: of fascet We we have to end up getting here,
Speaker 1: and we end up getting here. In most of our podcast,
Speaker 1: what does this mean for the future? How will this
Speaker 1: change in the future, And a number of these technologs
Speaker 1: we've talked about. I mean that is the future, the
Speaker 1: idea that we're going to see more and more elevators
Speaker 1: where we have less and less control. It's all in
Speaker 1: the computers. There are no buttons. Maybe they have some buttons,
Speaker 1: but it's just about giving us a false sense of power. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: smaller engines, better cables, sort of a technological increases in
Speaker 1: small areas that improve and sort of whittle down and
Speaker 1: and perfect the existing product. But as far as rapid changes,
Speaker 1: as far as like really game changing changes, it's less
Speaker 1: certain in that area because instantly, when you think of
Speaker 1: high tech, crazy fantastic elevators, you probably think of two things.
Speaker 1: You probably think of the elevators and the starships and
Speaker 1: the and star Trek which show which can move just
Speaker 1: about anywhere inside the ship horizontal vertically. Um likewise, I
Speaker 1: think you see those in the recent Total Recall movie.
Speaker 1: Their elevator boxes that move up and down and sideways,
Speaker 1: and of course the wont evator that can go sideways
Speaker 1: in diagonal ways and just can and can fly and
Speaker 1: it's glass and it's the most marvelous thing ever now there.
Speaker 1: Otis did have a design uh and UH they were
Speaker 1: working on in the late nineties, and it was called
Speaker 1: the Odyssey and this and they had a prototype for
Speaker 1: this as well, and this is essentially an elevator that
Speaker 1: can travel horizontally in vertically. So instead of instead of
Speaker 1: having to take that express elevator up and then and
Speaker 1: then get off and then board some more elevators, you
Speaker 1: would have an elevator that could climb halfway up the building,
Speaker 1: then move horizontally into another elevator shaft and then climb
Speaker 1: that one. So it was a really I mean everyone
Speaker 1: there was really excited about it, and then it was
Speaker 1: gonna be huge, But in Asian financial crisis hit, uh
Speaker 1: there was a rising cost of electricity and it basically
Speaker 1: the idea was scrapped or at least put on the
Speaker 1: backshelf to maybe be picked up later on. But his
Speaker 1: Palm Garden points out in his article one of the
Speaker 1: things is that the elevator, essentially in most people's mind,
Speaker 1: is already perfect. I mean, it's it's not perfect there,
Speaker 1: you know. We we want things this, we want the
Speaker 1: thirty seconds or less, and the faster it gets obviously
Speaker 1: the better. But for the most part, nobody is demanding
Speaker 1: these crazy changes. Well yeah, necessity being the mother of inventions.
Speaker 1: So until buildings really start to get more I guess
Speaker 1: uh horizontal and vertically oriented, we probably won't see elevators
Speaker 1: change that much now I would. I do want to add, though,
Speaker 1: that there are pressurized elevators now in UH and at
Speaker 1: least one of the high rises in um in Dubai,
Speaker 1: I believe. So you are seeing that technological change take place,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of futuristic, the idea that the elevator
Speaker 1: is pressurized like a spaceship. But but for the most part,
Speaker 1: don't expect the walcovator to be available in your area
Speaker 1: just yet. That's right now. UM. If you are a
Speaker 1: gear head and you wanna have a bit of a
Speaker 1: deeper dive into more elevator specifics, including hydraulic systems versus
Speaker 1: a roped systems. Check out How Elevators Work by Tom Harris.
Speaker 1: That's on how Stuffworks dot com. It's a great article
Speaker 1: that will take you through every different aspect mechanically of elevators.
Speaker 1: And I have a little quote to take us out.
Speaker 1: All right, and if the elevator tries to bring you down,
Speaker 1: go crazy, punch a higher floor, ding ding ding ding,
Speaker 1: Prince Rogers Nelson. Oh, I don't know that song song.
Speaker 1: And then if the elevator tries to bring it down
Speaker 1: crazy all right, I'm sure many listeners will know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about. So that's good. I like the quote,
Speaker 1: I like the idea. Yeah, so hey, we're gonna skip
Speaker 1: our listener mail since we're went a bit long on
Speaker 1: this one. And and goodness, we could have probably kept
Speaker 1: going there because we ended up getting so many cool
Speaker 1: facts about elevators. We didn't even get into some of
Speaker 1: the crazy things people do on elevators. The the ice
Speaker 1: cream story that I think you've shared before. Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: your father was on an elevator with an ice cream
Speaker 1: com Yeah, it was in his office building and the
Speaker 1: woman next him and said that that looks really good,
Speaker 1: and he said it is, and she leaned over and
Speaker 1: took a big bite out of it, and then the
Speaker 1: doors opened as she got off. And then you said
Speaker 1: that you yourself have at times danced on elevators, Dan,
Speaker 1: I've done, I've I've done a lot of singing. Let's
Speaker 1: we probably shouldn't talk about that. Well, we would love
Speaker 1: to hear our listeners talk about that. So if if
Speaker 1: you have some insight into elevators, elevator culture, elevator design,
Speaker 1: we would love to hear about it. Particularly, what's the
Speaker 1: craziest elevator you've ever been on? Be it super high
Speaker 1: tech or crazy archaic? Um? What's your favorite scene with
Speaker 1: an elevator from a movie or TV show? Um? Be
Speaker 1: it something realistic or just completely unrealistic? And uh, and
Speaker 1: what do you think about your interactions on an elevator?
Speaker 1: Has someone ever taken a bite of your ice cream?
Speaker 1: Do you dance or seen? How do you interact with
Speaker 1: strangers or pseudo work strangers on when you're a board
Speaker 1: and now vat we'd love to hear from everyone about this. Uh,
Speaker 1: these about these questions so you can find us on Facebook.
Speaker 1: You can find us on tumbler. We are Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind on both of those, and we're also
Speaker 1: on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind. And
Speaker 1: if you are the ice Cream Bandit and you want
Speaker 1: to confess, you can write us at below the Mind
Speaker 1: at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com