Industry History | Otis — Three Hundred Dollars at 488 Broadway
· 1857-3
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Industry History | Otis — Three Hundred Dollars at 488 Broadway
kevin
People treat Otis as a Farmington campus that always moved office towers.
The first passenger machine stood in a cast-iron shop.
Elisha Graves Otis, born in Halifax, Vermont, in 1811, came to Yonkers in 1852 to install machinery for a bedstead factory.
He fitted the hoist with a wagon-spring safety that locked the platform if the rope broke, and sold his first freight machine on 20 September 1853.
Orders stayed thin until May 1854, when he rode a platform at the New York Crystal Palace and had the hoisting rope cut in public.
The car held.
On 23 March 1857 his shop shipped a steam-powered passenger lift to E. V. Haughwout and Company at 488-492 Broadway, at Broome Street.
Installation finished on 6 April 1857.
The car cost $300 in 1857 dollars and rose at two-thirds of a foot per second, driven by a basement steam engine.
The five-storey store did not need an elevator for height. Haughwout wanted the novelty to pull customers toward imported glass, silver and painted china.
The building, designed by John P. Gaynor with a Daniel Badger cast-iron front, still stands and is a New York City landmark.
The original car is gone.
Otis died in 1861. His sons Charles and Norton continued the Yonkers works as Otis Brothers and, from 1898, the Otis Elevator Company.
United Technologies bought the firm in 1976 and spun it out in 2020 as Otis Worldwide.
The mechanism that survived is the one the Crystal Palace cut proved: a broken rope is not a fall if the safety bites the rails.
Photo: Tony Hisgett, the Haughwout Building at Broadway and Broome, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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