Nick Paumgarten’s piece on “the lives of elevators” starts and ends with the tragic tale of Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator back in 1999. But the story is really about the science of vertical people-movers, which enable the high-rise and thus urban architecture itself - “two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator.”

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays

The essay covers the safety features and record of elevators, their basic construction, their efficiency of design and energy. Their role in media, even the dearth of elevator poetry, are mentioned (along with a perfectly appropriate use of ‘vertiginous’), with the observation that as a plot device, it serves:

“…to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life.”

We learn of the elevator variant of claustrophobia and behavioral elevator therapy. We meet vertical transportation consultants like James Fortune, who engineer a building’s ‘elevatoring’ - its handling of ‘human traffic.’ The science of elevator planning is built on physics of space and psychology of time, plus the probabilities of human behavior. The elevatoring plan of a building must keep wait times at a minimum, while allowing for cultural constraints on human proximity (measured by calculations such as the average ‘body ellipse,’ which vary between Western and Eastern even as they do between urban and rural notions of ‘personal space’) and using as little room as possible to impact the building’s overall architecture. New innovations such as ‘destination dispatch’ pre-program floor routing based on rider pools, but at the cost of the illusion of user control over elevator movement. Meanwhile, fundamental limits such as cable length - any climb higher than 1700 feet and the hoist rope will snap under its own weight - require innovations like sky lobbies to act as transfer points midway up towers that can now scale a mile high.

Outside of the article, Paumgarten also recently appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation where it’s mentioned that his ongoing assignment is to cover ‘journeys’ which at least explains how traveling up and down got coverage.

For my part, the only operator-run elevator still in service I can recall using is at the San Francisco Rasputin’s music store, where the upper floors are only accessible by rattletrap conveyance operated by precisely the kind of adjunct indie clerk you’d expect to work in a SF music store. So instead of only feeling defensive when you check out, you also have to weigh checking out another floor’s genre against the calculated disapproval you may detect in the implicit scoff of their pressing the button.

As for the science, elevatoring has already made a notable appearance in two games - the original SimTower (scheduled for re-release on Nintendo DS!) and its sequel, Yoot Tower. Many of the stated tips for good vertical building design - keeping cafeterias at ground level, adroit use of stairways and escalators - factored into gameplay, and key to success was sufficient elevatoring. Too few, and lines would grow at each floor’s chokepoint, and your sims would rapidly turn red; or your maids wouldn’t be able to clean all the hotel rooms and turn them before the next check-in; or, heaven forfend, your fire escape plan would fall short. Too many ‘vators and you blew your budget for that top floor cathedral. Perhaps all those hours I spent trying to ferry customers from a 40th floor cinema to the 3rd floor gift shops without affecting the hotel clientele has a practical outlet after all.

[Somewhat apropos, I just had a track by concept band Towering Inferno - not to be confused with The Towering Inferno - play while writing this.]