George R. Strakosch (1924–2013)

Apparently this started out, ca. 1960, as a minor rewrite of an Otis information brochure - by the time this third edition came out (since superseded by a fourth edition in 2010), Wiley were modestly describing it as "the bible of elevator and escalator design for more than three decades". And certainly, whilst it doesn't go into absolutely all the nitty-gritty of mechanical and electrical details, this must count as practically everything you didn't know about lifts and escalators and were afraid to ask...

The book seems to be aimed mostly at engineers and architects who need to work out what vertical transport systems they are going to need for people and materials in a building, and there's a lot of emphasis on what general types of technical and control solutions are available, how to estimate demand and throughput, what level of service is acceptable and when users are likely to start complaining (after 30 seconds waiting for a lift at work; after 60 seconds at home or in a hotel, apparently), how much space different systems take up and what services they will need, and similar planning questions.

All very fascinating, as it always is to look over the shoulder of someone doing a job you know very little about, and certainly a book that makes you realise how much more complicated it all is than our average daily interactions with lifts might lead us to suppose.

One thing that really struck me is how much of the planning process is to do with psychology rather than engineering. I already had an inkling of this from a colleague who used to work for a lift company and told me that in certain countries they always have to install buttons labelled "close door" - which don't actually do anything other than beep when pressed - just so that impatient users can have the feeling of being in control. But Strakosch goes a lot further than that, with detailed numbers showing - for instance - how control systems have to account for the fact that office workers going to their offices in the morning are much less likely to squeeze into a nearly-full lift than when they are leaving work in the afternoon. And how it takes them each a fraction of a second longer to pass through the lift doors in the mornings as well. I suppose we all know that subjectively, but who would have thought it would be an actual measurable effect?

Something else I never knew, and which Strakosch keeps coming back to - he's obviously had a lot of fights with architects in his time - is that for a lift system to work efficiently, there should be one and only one floor in the building where all big traffic flows originate. If a high-rise office building has an additional building exit, parking garage, cafeteria or conference room that's not on the main lobby floor, then Strakosch insists it should be linked to the lobby by a separate lift or escalator, not served by the main group of lifts. The building I worked in for twenty years rather splendidly incorporated all these "errors" at once, and that may well be why the lift system sometimes seemed to have ground to a halt altogether. But one thing Strakosch doesn't seem to take into account is how valuable an inefficient lift system can be as a meeting-place - if there was someone you needed to talk to but it wasn't quite important enough to schedule a formal meeting or go and disturb them in their office, sooner or later you knew you would run into them in the lift or waiting for it...

This book is twenty years out of date by now, probably a deal-breaker for professional use but not really a problem for those who are just curious about how lifts and escalators work. Predictably, there seem to be some new trends the book says a lot about that haven't really had all that much impact - inclined lifts, for instance, are still pretty much confined to a few special applications - and some others that it didn't see coming. Use of voice announcements in lifts never gets mentioned at all, for instance, but it's become almost ubiquitous in new installations. And Strakosch only talks about glass in lifts as something exotic for glamorous installations in fancy hotels or observation towers, whilst these days we see transparent materials used as a simple way to discourage (fear of) criminal or antisocial behaviour in places like metro stations and car parks.

Strakosch seems to have written about half the book himself, and commissioned the remainder of the chapters from experts in their own fields (escalators, goods lifts, automated handling systems and so on). Not surprisingly, given the author's background, the focus is on the USA, and there's a lot of reference to American codes and standards, but European equivalents are mentioned and differences in practice at least sketched in. Quantities in Imperial units are mostly also given in SI (unusually, the conversions are rounded off in sensible ways where exact numbers are not important, but this well-intentioned policy seems to have made it difficult to check them at proof-reading stage, so they are occasionally spectacularly wrong...).

Fascinating!… (meer)