What is the history, principles, safeguards, and future of elevators?

Elevators work on the principle of pulleys, and thanks to various safety devices, accidents are rare. In the future, new technologies will be introduced, such as elevators that travel without ropes or move horizontally.

 

If you live in a high-rise apartment building, you’ve probably experienced the inconvenience of the “elevator inspection” announcement a few times a year. That’s when we realize how important elevators are. Without the invention of the elevator, we wouldn’t have the skyscrapers that are now appearing in many countries around the world.
Elevators use the principle of pulleys. In the old days, in order to easily draw water from a well, a wheel was hung from the ceiling, a rope was attached to it, a gourd was attached to one end of the rope, and a handle was attached to the other end. If you pull on the rope with the handle, you’ll notice that the gourd attached to the other end of the rope moves up and down. This is a fixed pulley, but how does it work in an elevator? To understand this, we first need to understand the structure of an elevator.
In an elevator, the enclosed space where passengers board is called the car. The top ceiling of the elevator shaft, where the elevator travels, contains a fixed pulley and an electric motor. The fixed pulley has a steel rope attached to it, with the car at one end and a counterweight similar to the weight of the elevator without people on board at the other end. An electric motor in the ceiling winds the rope to move the car up and down. If the rope were a fixed pulley, like a gourd in a well, it would take a lot of force to wind the rope, but because the counterweight is suspended from the rope on the other side of the car, the car can move up and down with little effort.
In horror movies, we often see elevator ropes breaking and falling, or elevators malfunctioning and causing accidents. In real life, some people are afraid to ride in elevators for fear of accidents. However, the chances of this happening in real life are almost zero. This is because elevators have more than 20 different safety devices built into them.
First of all, the ropes used in elevators are made of 30 strands of steel wire, which are combined into six to eight bundles, and have the strength to withstand 12 times the weight of the elevator at full capacity. This means that unless the rope is artificially broken, there is little risk of it breaking. Even if the rope breaks due to wear and tear or corrosion, it won’t send the elevator into freefall. If the car’s descent speed accelerates and exceeds 1.3 times the design speed, the power is automatically cut off, and if it exceeds 1.4 times the design speed, the emergency stop device is activated to stop the car by biting the rails directly. However, just in case the elevator does free fall, the floor of the elevator shaft has shock absorbers to cushion the impact.
Elevators are the arteries of buildings, transporting people to each floor of a building, and they will only get better as more and more skyscrapers are built. Some of the elevators that scientists are currently working on include elevators that travel along rails without ropes, like a train moving vertically, or elevators that travel horizontally. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is also planning to build an elevator that will go all the way to space to carry spacecraft. After launching a satellite, it will install a 96,000-kilometer train track connecting it to Earth. We look forward to the day when the scene from Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Giant Glass Elevator becomes a reality.