Coventina's History Thread: Otis Elevators - The Conclusion of this series [View all]

Otis elevators continued to make enhancements: push-button controls, and speed.

Cities constantly changed their elevator "speed limits" - from a leisurely 40 feet per minute for Elisha Otis' original safety lists, to a speedy 1200 feet per minute in the 1930s, to today's 2000 feet per minute. "That's probably as much vertical speed as most people can tolerate," says an Otis engineer.

Along the way, the elevator industry quashed early fears that speedy lifts were bad for people. In the 1890s, Scientific American wrote that the body parts of elevator passengers came to a halt at different rates, triggering mysterious ailments.

Like the earlier notion that fast trains would choke passengers by pushing oxygen away from their mouths, that theory has since been debunked.

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