The history of the elevator

As early as 236 BC, as the Roman architect Vitrucius tells us, there were several similar systems in royal palaces. Going back to the history of the ancient Romans we can see that they were the first to build special platforms, which climbed high enough with the help of ropes. If we leave Rome and go to Tibet or our country we will notice the first elevators, which have the form of baskets, which lift, as e.g. in the heights of Meteora, people and goods.

In ancient Greece, Archimedes invented a lifting mechanism that operated with ropes and pulleys and in which the lifting ropes were wrapped around a winding drum through a "worker" and levers. By the 18th century the elevator had evolved and the power of the machine had been applied. In 1743 Louis XI ordered a personal lift with a counterweight to his personal apartments in Versailles. In 1833 in the Harz Mountains in Germany they used a system of reciprocal bars to raise and lower miners in the mines.

In 1835 a belt-mounted elevator (the "teagle") was installed in an English factory. The first hydraulic industrial elevator (water) driven by pressure appeared in 1846. As the engineering improved, other lifting mechanisms quickly followed. These primitive means of vertical transport had a significant disadvantage. In case the rope broke, the passengers fell without a chance of salvation. These rudimentary elevators led man to think of building safer elevators. As early as the second half of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution, which began in England, made new materials, such as iron and glass, more affordable. The real upheaval in building materials, however, came in the 19th century with the spread of iron and in 1853, Elisha Otis introduced the first elevator equipped with a safety system.

In America, E.G.OTIS (Picture 1) in front of the frightened eyes of the observers, cut the ropes of the platform on which he was standing. The platform started to fall and suddenly stopped instantly. The grabber had worked. Since then the technology in the field of elevators has made huge leaps.

• In 1857 the first elevator for public use is installed in New York. It started with a locomotive, which burned coal.
• In 1870 the first hydraulic elevators were opened in New York.
• In 1889 the first electric elevator operated in the DEMAREST building in New York.
• In 1894, the first elevator with dial buttons and without a driver operated in New York.
• In 1900 the first escalator was presented at the Paris International Exhibition.
• In 1903 the first elevator operated with a friction pulley (not a drum) and a counterweight, ie in a form as we know it today

In 1915 the so-called automatic equalization was introduced and in addition, the doors became electric. As buildings grew taller, elevator speeds increased to 365 meters per minute in express facilities, such as those on the top floors of the Empire State Building (1931), and reached 549 meters per minute at the John Hancock Center in Chicago in 1970 and 61 meters per minute at the Liakada 60 building in Tokyo in 1978. Today the two fastest elevators in the world operate in the tallest building - Taipei 101 - in Taipei. It is a building with 101 floors and a height of 508 meters. These lifts run a distance of 382 meters in 39 seconds at a speed of 1010 meters per minute.

The impressive thing is that they have a system for regulating the atmospheric pressure inside the chamber. The last part of the story, which has not yet been completed, is written daily following the huge leaps of the technological revolution.

A typical example is the Elevator for space. A revolutionary way to go from Earth to space already planned by NASA. It is a space elevator, which includes a wire made of carbon nanotubes with one end firmly connected to a naval platform in the Pacific Ocean, at the height of the equator and the other end above the modern geostationary orbit ( at an altitude of 35.800km).As incredible as it sounds, NASA is attempting to build a space elevator by building a giant space tower. They claim that they can build a device where a long electrodynamic wire will connect two objects in orbit and allow energy to be transferred from one body to another in order to move a spacecraft without fuel.