Today, a magic stairway carries us into a new way
of life. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Escalators were rare when I
was young. In the 1930s it was heady adventure for
a five-year-old to visit the one department store
downtown that had one. Yet the idea wasn't new. An
escalator that had most of the features of the
modern ones was patented in 1859. It even had that
comblike structure to let the steps emerge out of
the floor and vanish back into it.
What we didn't have until the 1880s were electric
motors to drive escalators. Steam-driven elevators
were around in 1859, but who would install a whole
steam engine just to drive a stair way! Besides,
escalators make sense only when you want to move a
lot of people. Mid-19th-century buildings weren't
more than seven stories high. It's only when
buildings are very high that you have to move a lot
of people in the lower stories.
So escalators lay fallow until the 1890s. Then a
spate of electric-powered moving stairways
appeared. The first one was built in 1896 when
Jesse Reno made a little 6-foot stairway that
lifted people on to the Coney Island pier. Then,
just four years later, the 1900 Paris Exhibition
displayed four different kinds of escalators --
including Reno's. Escalators were catchy, but they
were still a fairground ride, not a functional
necessity.
The Coney Island success made Reno into America's
leading escalator designer. From Coney Island his
machines went into New York department stores and
then into the Boston subways. The Otis Elevator
Company bought Reno out; but the whole enterprise
didn't reach much beyond novelty. By 1920 no
escalator company operated more than 200 units.
Finally the Otis company sorted through the
features of competing systems. They sifted out the
best ones and made what's been the standard
escalator ever since -- a machine that can carry
8000 people an hour up a 30x slope. Only then did
escalators start to become commonplace. Only then
did escalators show us their real role in our
lives. They aren't so much labor savers as they are
space savers. They keep people moving in crowded
public places -- like subway stations and the lower
floors of high-rise buildings.
Yet the old Reno escalator was a solid piece of
equipment, and many are still in use. You can spot
them in the Boston and London subway systems. They
have a characteristic structure of wooden slats
that make up their treads and risers.
When I was five, being swept up the stairs was high
adventure. I didn't know I was seeing a convergence
of techniques that was taking us into modern,
high-density city life.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
