Lifts very rarely fall down. But they sometimes shoot up
An unsettling thought for you to start your weekend.
Two quick bits of promo before we begin. On Tuesday, residents of Havering and all points east will be delighted to hear that my mate Lewis Baston, author of Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders, and I are doing a talk together at Waterstones Romford. Despite the fact this is a frankly mad 76 borders in one event – well, 75, I think we overlap once – there are still some tickets available. Come along! We’d love to see you.
Also, my first book The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything is being reprinted with some new material on 11 September. Buy an annual subscription to this newsletter using this link, and you can have a signed copy:
A £40 subscription and a £16 book, for just £38? Utter madness. You’d be a fool not to.
Anyway: for reasons relating to a book that hasn’t been published, or indeed written, yet, I’ve been learning about lifts. This went to paying subscribers in May…
Sometimes in life you come across a fact so unnerving and counterintuitive that you find you can’t stop thinking about it – or at least, not until you’ve written about it for some kind of weekly newsletter. Such is my realisation, following extensive investigation, that – despite what both good sense and action movies would tell us – people almost never die because the lift they are in suddenly plummets towards the ground. The safety features are too good. It just doesn’t happen.
But they do occasionally die when their lift suddenly shoots up.
There is, I am aware, a lot to unpack here. Bear with me.
First, a note for the benefit of any elevatophobics reading: you are fantastically unlikely to experience either scenario. It’s difficult to put exact figures on the risk: since elevator use is incredibly widespread, and elevator ownership incredibly diffuse, the group best placed to collect statistics is the global elevator industry, and for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, they don’t bother. But considering the number of people who use lifts every day, and considering that the technology is fundamentally “a metal box on a rope”, incidents in which said box suddenly drops are almost miraculously rare.
Most incidents that do fit that profile involve one of more of the following: a construction site; a mineshaft; an elevator in the middle of maintenance because it’s already known to be faulty; a location in which, at risk of cancellation, one suspects building regs are rather less strong than they are in much of the west. These are all tragedies, don’t get me wrong – but they are not quite the same as getting into the lift in your home or your office and finding yourself on a speedy and unexpected trip to the basement.
One incident that does fit that profile is the story of Betty Lou Oliver, who went to work one day and found herself plunging a terrifying 75 storeys back to ground level. Even then, though, there were three mitigating factors that mean you probably don’t need to worry about repeating her experience. For one thing, this is going back a bit, to July 1945. For another, it only happened because someone had flown a USAF B25-Mitchell bomber into the Empire State Building.
Fourteen people died from that impact (three on the plane, 11 in the building). Oliver, a 20 year old elevator attendant, suffered severe burns and bone breakages when she was thrown from the elevator she was attending to at the time. She was bandaged up, placed onto a stretcher and loaded into a second lift, whereupon – this is brilliantly, and horrifically, “Hennimore!” – the extra weight caused its cables, weakened by the crash, to snap, sending car and Betty alike plummeting down to ground level.
Even then – this is a third mitigating factor – she survived the fall. She didn’t have a good day at work, admittedly – she was conscious and screaming throughout her descent. But the compressed air in the airtight shaft and the cables which had previously supported the lift piling up underneath it combined to cushion her fall. She only died in 1999.
The reason why incidents of the sort you’d assume would be most common in lifts are so rare is simple: we only really started using them once they were safe. Elevated platforms raised by either animal power or hydraulics have been around for centuries – the Romans used something of that sort used to get wild animals into the Colosseum. But they only began appearing in buildings in significant numbers after Elisha Otis demonstrated his safety brake at the 1854 world’s fair in New York, when he climbed onto a platform, had it hauled into the air and then (this is the impressive bit) instructed his assistant to cut the cable supporting it with an axe.
In all previous lifts, this would have sent the platform crashing to the ground, and amounted to a death sentence for anyone foolish enough to be standing on it. In Otis’ system, though, it caused a spring previously held tight by the tension of the cables to snap open, and catch on the toothed ratchets on either side of the shaft. This explains both why the platform dropped by no more than an inch or so, and why there’s a fair chance the last lift you travelled in had his name on it somewhere.
Modern elevators are equipped with a descendant of Otis’ brake, not to mention a host of other features designed to minimise risk (door safety systems, overload sensors, an overspeed governor to engage brakes in the event it descends too fast). But they’re also equipped with a counterweight, to balance the load, ensure smooth rides and save energy. The counterweight is not, for the most part, equipped with the same safety features.
This is why, just occasionally, an elevator suddenly shoots up. In 2021, a girl died in China after the lift she’d been trapped in suddenly shot all the way to the 30th floor, where shaft and building alike ceased, thus causing the car to become “deformed” – not the word you want used in relation to your lift. You can even watch footage of a man in a lift in Santiago, Chile, realising something of that sort is happening to him and frantically pressing all the buttons. This doesn’t stop the lift, but does open the door, which in some ways makes things worse. (He was injured but, thankfully, survived.)
Again, I should stress: this is not likely. It is very, very unlikely. And despite one Chinese safety inspector’s claims that it was more likely an elevator would hit the roof than the floor, I’m not sure this is actually true, which is annoying, because it’s ruined my headline. Both types of incident happen so rarely – because, again, elevators are extraordinarily safe – that I’m not sure we have sufficient data to say.
All the same, though: unsettling thought, isn’t it?
A reminder of that special offer: a year’s subscription AND a signed book, for just £38. Madness:
And tickets for the Waterstones Romford event with Lewis are here.