A Short History of the Elevator, from Rope Hoists to Push Buttons

Hoists are ancient, yet the passenger elevator as we know it is barely 170 years old. What took so long? The answer is a single, unglamorous worry: a rope can break. This page follows the story from early lifting devices through the safety brake demonstrated in New York in 1854, then on to steam, hydraulic and electric power and the arrival of automatic operation. Dates in this history are not always settled, and where the sources we read disagree, we say so.

Hoisting before Otis

People have used ropes, pulleys and winches to raise loads for thousands of years. A 2022 blog post from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) says it is strongly believed that Archimedes invented the first elevator in 236 B.C., a model that used hoisting ropes wound around a drum. Treat the attribution as tradition, not settled fact; the post itself words it as belief.

Passenger lifts came much later. ANSI and the German inspection organization TÜV NORD both date one of the earliest passenger lifts to 1743, outside the king's palace at Versailles. TÜV NORD's account adds that it served Louis XV's mistress and was worked by pulling a cord attached to a counterweighted pulley. The same article credits Ivan Kulibin with a worm-gear lift in St. Petersburg's Winter Palace in 1793, and it says steam engines in the late eighteenth century increased lift performance and load capacity, while the first hydraulic lifts appeared in factories in the early nineteenth century, relatively safe but suited only to short, slow climbs.

The recurring flaw is spelled out in a Gale biography reproduced on Encyclopedia.com. Hoisting devices were far from unheard of, it says, but they were troubled by one fatal flaw: if the rope or cable snapped, the load came crashing down, sometimes killing workers. The same entry says common wisdom held that carrying people was an extremely dangerous proposition, and not many were willing to leave their safety in the hands of technology.

Elisha Otis and the safety brake

Elisha Graves Otis was born in Halifax, Vermont, in 1811, according to Britannica, and worked at a series of trades before becoming a master mechanic in a bedstead factory. The company sent him to Yonkers, New York, in 1852 to operate a new factory and install its machinery. There, Britannica says, he designed and installed what he called the "safety hoist," the first elevator equipped with an automatic safety device to prevent it from falling if the lifting chain or rope broke.

How did the device work? Encyclopedia.com quotes the authors Joseph and Suzy Fucini: a used wagon spring was attached to the top of the platform and the overhead lifting cable. While the platform's weight pulled on the cable, the spring stayed in place. If the cable broke, the spring snapped open and both ends engaged saw-toothed ratchet-bar beams installed on either side of the shaft, bringing the platform to a stop. In plain terms, a broken rope released a spring that caught the platform on toothed rails. The ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) biography describes the same idea, a spring that snapped open to grip ratchet-bar beams on the shaft walls.

The 1854 demonstration

Otis set up a small elevator shop in Yonkers and, Britannica says, sold his first elevator machine on September 20, 1853. It hauled freight. Orders were few until May 1854, when, at the Crystal Palace in New York City, he demonstrated the elevator by riding the platform high in the air and ordering the rope cut.

Accounts of the event vary in detail, so here are the points the sources share and where they differ. ASME places it at the 1854 New York World's Fair, held at the New York Crystal Palace, and says the rope was cut with an axe and the platform fell only a few inches before the safety device stopped it. Encyclopedia.com names the venue as the American Institute Fair at the Crystal Palace and says Otis rode upward several feet before an assistant cut the cable with an ax. TÜV NORD notes that historical sources disagree on whether the year was 1853 or 1854, though Britannica and ASME both give 1854.

The same Encyclopedia.com entry quotes Donald Dale Jackson in Smithsonian magazine on the showmanship, and records Otis bowing and saying, "All safe, gentlemen, all safe." Jackson calls the day "probably his first and last excursion into showmanship."

The first passenger elevators

Publicity helped, but not overnight. Encyclopedia.com reports that Otis sold only 15 elevators in 1855 and 27 in 1856. On March 23, 1857, Britannica says, he installed the first safety elevator for passenger service in the store of E.V. Haughwout and Company in New York City. TÜV NORD adds that this elevator was steam-powered and traveled at 0.2 metres per second.

Power sources kept changing. Britannica says Otis patented an independently controlled steam engine for elevator use on January 15, 1861, shortly before his death that April. His sons Charles and Norton carried the business on. Encyclopedia.com credits them with a hydraulic elevator in the 1870s that used city water pressure and replaced the winding drum with a piston. The drum had limited early buildings to about ten floors, because it could only hold so much cable.

Prestige installations followed. ASME lists the Eiffel Tower in 1889, the Washington Monument in 1890, and the 60-story Woolworth Building in New York in 1913, then the tallest building in the world. For where that story goes next, see tall buildings and modern elevator innovations.

Electric traction and automatic operation

Electricity entered the story in 1880. TÜV NORD says Werner von Siemens presented the first electric lift in Mannheim that year, and ANSI likewise credits Siemens. Motor technology then advanced quickly. ANSI writes that the gearless traction electric elevator arrived by the early 1900s, allowing taller buildings, and that multi-speed motors soon replaced single-speed ones. If you want to know how a traction machine works today, how elevators and lifts work explains ropes, sheaves and counterweights.

Operation changed too. Both ANSI and TÜV NORD credit Alexander Miles with an 1887 design for automatic opening and closing of the car and shaft doors, which the TÜV NORD article describes as a mechanism for automatic closing registered as a patent that year. ANSI also says push-button controls modernized the elevator further. The sources we opened do not agree on a date for the first push-button control, so we do not give one.

Why the safety brake mattered

The safety brake did not make elevators faster or cheaper. It made them acceptable. Encyclopedia.com's biography argues that without the elevator the skyscraper would not exist, noting that buildings of Otis's lifetime were usually no higher than four stories because people disliked climbing more. That is a historian's summary, not a measurement, but it captures the logic: the elevator needed to be trustworthy before anyone would build tall around it.

Safety rules grew alongside the machines. ANSI notes that the ASME A17.1 Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators has been in effect for almost 100 years, and that elevators have changed a great deal in the time since it was first published. Modern systems layer devices on the idea Otis made visible: a broken rope should not mean a fall. A myth persists that it still does, which elevator myths: cable snaps and free fall examines.

Today's rules, inspections and code editions vary by jurisdiction. This page is general history, and the local authority and qualified professionals have the final word on any real building.

The short version

Lifting loads by rope is ancient, but riding one was hard to trust until Elisha Otis showed a safety catch holding a platform after its rope was cut, at the Crystal Palace in 1854. Steam, hydraulic and electric power, gearless traction and automatic doors then made the modern elevator, and codes such as ASME A17.1 grew up alongside it.