Gizmodo
Earlier today we posted on a New Yorker piece about a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. But the real gem of the article was the mountain of "Did you know..." facts laced throughout. Like that Door Close button you're always pushing? Yeah, it doesn't work. Here's the full list:
- As mentioned above, the Door Close button is there mostly to give passengers the illusion of control. In elevators built since the early '90s. The button is only enabled in emergency situations with a key held by an authority.
- The only known occurence of an elevator car free falling due to a snapped cable (barring fire or structural collapse), was in 1945. A B25 Bomber crashed into the Empire State Building, severing the cables of two elevators. The elevator car on the 75th floor had a woman on it, but she survived due to the 1000 feet of coiled cable of fallen cable below, which lessened the impact.
- Elevators are twenty times safer than escalators. There are twenty times more elevators than escalators, but only 1/3 more accidents.
- Elevators are also safer than cars. An average of 26 people die in elevators each year in the U.S. There are 26 car deaths every five hours.
- Most people who die in elevators are elevator technicians.
- The Otis Elevator Company carries the equivalent of the world's population in their elevators every five days.
- The New York Marriott was the first to introduce a smart elevator system that assigned passengers to elevators depending on what floor they were heading to.
- Elevators used to require a two-man dispatcher/operator team to function. The advent of navigational buttons rendered those jobs obsolete.
- The area required for personal space is 2.3 feet. The average amount on elevators is generally 2 feet.
- Elevator hatches are generally bolted shut for safety reasons. In times of elevator crisis, the safest place is inside the elevator.
- The myth about jumping just before impact in a falling elevator is just that — myth. You can't jump fast enough to counteract the speed of falling. And you wouldn't know when to jump.
- Due to the laws of physics, elevators can't be any taller than 1700 feet. Hoist ropes become too heavy after that, snapping at 3200 feet.
And as an interesting closing note, Nicholas White, the man trapped in the elevator, received a low six-figure settlement after filing a $25 million lawsuit against the building. But in the process, he lost his job, his money and his apartment. He is now unemployed. [The New Yorker]
Comments
Cool.
He went crazy after being John Malkovich for 41 hours.
I think I can safely say that this is significantly more information than I had planned on learning about elevators today. Kudos, Gizmodo. Kudos.
Also, if there's less than 75% of the max capacity in the car, there's a greater chance of it falling up than down.
Why can't I UN-select an elevator button? Where's the love for the drunk and or obesely fat-fingered people of the world?
I wouldn't say that ALL door close buttons do not function.
In one elevator in a parking garage I used every day for a year, it definitely closed sooner than if you just let it sit there without pressing the door close button.
Nice bit of info there. Only thing though, the close button does work.
My parents apartment is a good example. The door always takes the same amount of time to close, but press the button, and it closes right away.
Me: 1
The New Yorker: 0
@whiter3: Ahmen on the unselect.
I've also noticed that the close door button didn't work. That was until I moved to Boston and started taking ancient elevators. In a lot of these gems the button actually works. It's amazing.
@photophile: Depends on the elevator. According to the Nrw Yorker article, that applies to MOST elevatorst built since the 1990's. The close door button DOES work in my work building; and it truly sucks to see people obviously pressing it, while watching you walk towards the elevator door. Bastards....
ha! fuck that guy, trying to sue for $25 MILLION. what does he think his time is worth? (and if anyone does the math to figure that out, i will slap them, like, virtually)
as far as elevators being safer than cars - not nearly as many people spend as much time in elevators as they do cars. it's like saying skydiving is safer than cars because thousands die in cars but only a few people die skydiving.
safety (or lack thereof) is not exclusivey a quantitative quality - it's a function of danger, randomness and time. enumerating the number of deaths from a given activity is useless compared to giving the number of deaths per manhour.
I read somewhere a couple of months ago, a posting on Elevator Hacks... How about a re-posting Giz? Seems timely....
@whiter3: Some elevators will clear every selection if you press every floor button. Of course, if you have an elevator that doesn't, you look like a colossal tool.
In fact the best way to survive a falling lift is to lay atop a fatter person. Or something that absorbs a lot of kinetic energy.
(If you cannot understand the above, then please replace the word lift with the word elevator.)
@nutbastard: 609,756.10/hr... yea i was bored
I'd be pretty annoyed at the kids who choose to be morons and unselect the floor I was supposed to stop off at (or if it's a crowded elevator, someone sitting right next to it, and I wouldn't even be able to see him unselect it)
@Mandatory_Field: Oh you mean like how when you press the door close button and the floor you want to go to at the same time and hold them both for a few seconds, then the elevator goes directly to your floor and skips all the other ones? Tried it in a Marriott a few times during a big expo in Indianapolis, it worked every time.
I laughed at the hundreds of people in the lobby and those behind me in the elevator as I got to my bed in a timely manner while they still couldn't figure out why it skipped all of their floors.
I was beaming with Win.
Wow Adrian... congrats on reading the whole article.
I tried to, but ultimately gave up after 1/3rd... proceeded reading only Mr White's story, skipping everything else.
Felt like a book on elevator's statistics. Not very exciting...
@Mandatory_Field: Dude, just search for it. Are you THAT lazy?
@photophile:Same here. I used to work for the college I attended and routinely used the elevator and if you didnt push the button it would wait about 15 seconds, bing, and then 5 seconds later the door would close.
If you pushed it the bing came immediately and then it took about 5 seconds to close the door.
@whiter3: unselecters rejoice!
+ Watch video
Sure, they're the largest elevator manufacturer in the world, but I don't trust Otis elevators. Especially after reading about the guy who was decapitated by an Otis elevator in 2003!
At the same time that story came out I was in college, and our dorm had Otis Elevators that were seemingly possessed by Lucifer. About once a week someone got trapped in an elevator in our building, to which we had to pry the doors open to get them out. On one occasion, my friends and I got on the Death Box to go downstairs, the doors shut, and we sat there for 30 seconds, motionless. The doors opened again, so we started filing out to take the stairs instead, but as I walked out the doors closed on me, trapped my leg, and would not let go! I pried myself out with all my limbs intact, but that was the last time I took the elevator in that building.
"Elevator hatches are generally bolted shut for safety reasons. In times of elevator crisis, the safest places is inside the elevator."
Are you shitting me?
So when there is a fire and the elevator stops between floors, you won't be able to climb up out of that hatch to escape because they've bolted it shut? Because people would climb up there all the time, right? Not.
Lawsuit waiting to happen.
At least SOME of the door close buttons are real. The ones in my building are, but they only have an effect if you have them held about two seconds before the doors open and if you're on the main floor where there's a considerable delay.
Another interesting fact I heard, elevators are required to be able to hold seven times that "maximum weight" number that is posted inside the elevator.
I promise you all that the CLOSE DOOR BUTTON WORKS in the elevators in my university, and they are recent.
They actually enabled the close-door button in the elevators in my college apartment building. Apparently because of people trying to hold the doors open too long using the motion sensors, the elevators would go into panic mode and shut down. This resulted in a lot of bitching and long lines from tenants. To fix this problem, the building manager enabled the button (why, I don't know...) and disabled the panic mode. It's kind of scary how much control we have of the elevators now. I almost chopped of the hand of some idiot that took forever to get on. If they disabled the motions sensors, THAT would be a mess.
@Elliuotatar: Like the article says, you're safer inside the elevator. It's not going to come to a grinding halt the moment the fire alarms go off. If anything, it'll dump you out at the nearest floor.
Also, it strikes me that there's many more potential law suits if you start letting people out into the elevator shaft. What happens if the elevator suddenly comes back on as you're wandering around on the roof? Or up an access ladder?
@LastVigilante: Damn! I used to be a resident! Lucky to survive, evidently.
@LastVigilante: that wasnt a good article to read before goin to bed... pretty nasty.
Hey, the "door close" button works on the elevators at my work. Gotta push it all the frigging time, else the doors don't close.
And sometimes the hampsters run out of food on the wheel that runs the elevator pulleys.
FLINTSTONE!!!!!
@nutbastard: "as far as elevators being safer than cars - not nearly as many people spend as much time in elevators as they do cars. it's like saying skydiving is safer than cars because thousands die in cars but only a few people die skydiving."
You're over-exaggerating in the other direction.
The statistic in the story is "An average of 26 people die in elevators each year in the U.S. There are 26 car deaths every five hours."
But people in the U.S. spend far more time in elevators in a year than the number of people driving during a 5 hour period. If you adjust for car vs. elevator manhours, many more people still die in cars than elevators by an order of magnitude.
This reads a little like some "50 ways beer is better than women" email. A quick Google search reveals there are elevators in S African mines that are over 3000m deep. And how can elevators be 20x safer than escalators if there are 20x as many elevators and 33% more accidents? I'm not a statistician, but that seems wrong. Right?
And here's another elevator freefall accident -- in 2003: [www.projo.com]
They forgot to write when an elevator malfunctions, they usually go upward instead of freefalling because of the weights used to counterbalance the elevators.
You cant jump in a free falling elevator , not because you cant jump "fast enough" but because you'd no longer be standing on the floor. You'd be floating above it.
@bailey_ca: That, and the fact that you shouldn't take the elevator during a fire. The stairway is always more advisable.
@gibbative: Yikes, that's a wierd story considering the guy only fell 2 stories!
And we used to shake and break the elevator in my college dorm room as a prank. In 2 years, I probably spent around 40 hours in there if not more. 'Course, each stay was only around 30 minutes.
New elevator in my apartment building. The Close Door button definitely makes the door close faster, especially if you hit it right when it opens (it closes almost immediately if nobody enters).
I recall one office elevator I used to use that would clear all selections if you pressed three floors at the same time. Sort of like CTRL-ALT-DEL.
@VaccaFoeda: Only if the elevator was falling at a consistent 9.8m/s^2. Since there will always be some friction, the elevator won't accelerate that fast, and so gravity will still pull you to the floor. Should the elevator hit some terminal velocity, you'd even be pulled down with your full weight. Of course, jumping still won't help you.
how do people get accidents on a escalator?
@icelight - even if you're not floating off the floor, you wont be able to bend your knees to jump, because that would require pushing your body down towards the floor which is falling away from you. The amount of slowing due to friction would surely be negligible.
@icelight:
right, this myth needs some rest. If you're traveling downward at 32 feet per second squared for say, 5 seconds (something like 150 feet per second), and you manage to 'jump' up at a rate of 6 feet per second you're still traveling down at 144 feet per second.
@whiter3:
mitsubishi elevators have the cancelling feature by double tapping the lit floor number.
The real question is, "Do the buttons on crosswalks actually do anything?".
YES! IT'S REVOLUTIONARY! I can't believe it has taken so long to figure this one out? How have the engineers never selected the wrong floor and gone..."huh, that sucks, wish I didn't hit that button."
@klew:
@Petezah: Nor should you take an elevator during a biohazard containment issue.
+ Watch video
@photophile: i agree with everyone who said the door close button works, i've gone to the wrong floor and hit the button to close the door (it closed them immediately).
lol @ everyone using math to prove that you cant jump to save your life...
even if it WAS possible (which it isn't) who the hell would think "its falling i should jump when its about to hit"
@nutbastard: @frigg:
There are a lot of ways to die that are more rare, and yet we spend so much more money to prevent. Most of it is psychological. We've spent hundreds of billions on a war that had little to no chance of impacting us (because NO WMD's, no Al Queda link, etc.). If we used that money for cancer research, heart disease, automotive safety, etc. we could have saved thousands, if not millions (possibly even more than the fake "mushroom cloud" they feared).
the close door buttons defiantly work in some elevators, i know of one elevator where the door wont close unless you press it, and lots of others where it closes right when you press it... but i bet there are some out there that do nothing