Harry Potter elevators are coming … but so what?

When Elisha Graves Otis presented his improved safety elevator to the public at New York’s Crystal Palace in 1854, he didn’t know what he had on his hands. He still saw the elevator as a way to haul freight up and down industrial lofts safely enough for workers to ride along. It was years before he sold a passenger elevator, and there’s no evidence he considered the modern elevator’s most important contributions to society: buildings taller than people are willing to walk and cities with great height and population density.

Late last year the German multinational corporation ThyssenKrupp unveiled Multi, a new elevator design, which the company promised represents as big a paradigm shift in vertical transportation as Otis’ safety elevator did.

Since the announcement, Multi has received scattered press, none of which examines ThyssenKrupp’s historical claims. It calls Multi “the world’s first rope-free elevator system.” This is off by at least 155 years: In the elevator he designed for the 1859 Fifth Avenue Hotel, engineer Otis Tufts ran a giant screw up the center of a circular elevator car, which was supported and locked in place by its engagement with the threads of the screw; the screw turned to make the car descend and rise. There was no cable.

Multi’s promotional video also claims that ThyssenKrupp was the first to put two cars in an elevator shaft in 2003 and that no one has ever put more than two in a shaft until now. But double-decker cars have been around since at least the 1930s — Patrick Carrajat, director of the Elevator Historical Society in New York City, says the first was installed in the Cities Service Building there, and shafts with multiple cars date back even farther.

ThyssenKrupp doesn’t mention that the elevator industry has been toying with Multi’s concept since the 1960s. Hitachi has long been working on a similar technology, and in 1996, Otis experimented with a model called the Odyssey, which also could shift from vertical to horizontal and include multiple cars in a shaft.

Most glaringly, ThyssenKrupp failed to mention to the public Multi’s debt to the paternoster, a kind of elevator popular in continental Europe in the early 20th century. In a paternoster — the name refers to the large beads on a rosary, on which the Our Father is said — a series of elevator cars on a cable moves continuously in a loop, up one shaft and down another. The paternoster does not stop; there are no doors on the compartments or shafts, and passengers leap on and off. (Check out paternosters in the restored version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis,” the February issue of Elevator World magazine or on YouTube.) 

Why misuse history when you can use it? The ThyssenKrupp press release could have started with an honest pedigree: Multi is a paternoster with maglev technology and doors on the cars and shafts, the latest in a line of experiments stretching back decades in the elevator industry. Drawing from that history, it could have then speculated on the truly transformative possibilities of maglev elevators: Multi could blur the lines between vertical and horizontal transportation, not just in a single building but for an entire metropolis. Maglev elevators could move people the way pneumatic tubes once transported small objects up, down and across cities. Building Multi systems that are larger than a single building sounds daunting, but imagine independent systems using a standard technology that eventually connect to one another and grow organically. Ultimately, the distinctions we make among elevators, subways and light rail could become obsolete.

Multi elevators could, of course, also make our public transportation systems less public. When individual cars can be removed from and returned to the general stream of traffic, they can be reserved like the private train cars of industrial magnates a century ago or, more recently, the exclusive Google buses in San Francisco. Destination dispatch elevators in offices and hotels have already begun this trend, with people punching in their destinations before the elevators arrive and being sorted according to floor, decreasing interaction among populations of different floors.

In the future, perhaps, business executives will step out of their offices and into elevator cars that take them through a system of tunnels to small landing platforms attached to their apartments, creating a daily commute completely devoid of human interaction. Perhaps the elevator car will become the office and we will all be in constant motion throughout the day, catching up on paperwork as we shuttle to our meetings. This new system could displace cars — and if so, it would no doubt be safer, less damaging to our ecology and probably faster than driving. But how boring and alienating and sad.

Multi? Maybe. It’s more likely that ThyssenKrupp’s new model will be the next glass elevator — a gimmick for fancy hotels and malls — not one of the technologies that fundamentally transform architecture and urban life, as masonry, plumbing, structural steel and the elevators of Tufts and Otis have. Maybe that’s for the best.