LIFT AND ESCALATOR INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION

www.leia.co.uk

I got stuck in a lift once when I used to work at the BBC. Stephen Fry wasn't stuck in the lift with me so it didn't get any media coverage. There was a heavily pregnant woman in the lift though. Beat that, Fry. Because I was standing next to the little red emergency telephone, I was given the responsibility of phoning the security guard. "Don't panic," he said, "just stay where you are". The security guard phoned the engineers and when they arrived, we could hear them outside, dropping their spanners and mumbling "oh blimey" and "I think we need to phone the fire brigade". After about three quarters of an hour, they managed to get us out. I went back to my desk. No-one had noticed I'd been missing.

45 minutes isn't too bad, especially because the reason I was in the lift in the first place was because I'd just been downstairs to get a cup of tea and a Cadbury Twirl, so I had supplies. This fantastic article from the New Yorker tells the story of Nicholas White who was stuck in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill Building in New York for forty-one hours.

This is the security footage of those forty-one hours condensed into three minutes:



He looks like a fly, buzzing around in that little box. It's horrible.

Nick Paumgarten's article in the New Yorker is an astonishing piece of writing. I especially like this section on proxemics:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

I love lifts. I don't really know why. Maybe because as a kid I used to imagine that it was the lift which stayed still and the rest of the building moved. They seem a bit magical. This little room you enter, the doors close, a few seconds later they reopen and you're somewhere else! It's amazing! Maybe I'll go to Liftex2010, "the only exhibition for manufacturers of lifts, escalators, components and service companies in the UK". It sounds amazing, but it's more than a year away, can I wait that long? The Elevator World calendar is pretty full though, so I guess I can go to one of those events instead.

Paumgarten's article doesn't mention one of the most controversial issues in the world of elevators - the issue of door dwell. Door dwell is the amount of time it takes for the doors of an elevator to close after the passengers have boarded. Door dwell is typically set at between two to five seconds - or to be needlessly specific, two to three seconds for a boarding call, and three to five seconds for a landing call (the extra time allows for the fact that people may also board during a landing call). The "door close" button on a lift is designed to cancel any remaining dwell time and close the doors (hence the name), however, some believe the door close button is nothing more than a placebo, put there just to give impatient people something to do while they wait. James Gleick, who devoted a whole chapter to elevators in his book Faster, says:

Although elevators with all their functions ready to work, the manufacturers realise that building managers often choose to disable DOOR CLOSE. Buildings fear trapped limbs and lawsuits. Thus they turn their resident populations into subjects in a Pavlovian experiment in negative feedback.

So whether or not the door close button works all depends on how paranoid and dishonest your building manager is. Apparently, in Japan, the paint on the door close buttons gets worn off really quickly, I guess because Japanese building managers are confident and honest, and Japanese people are bad tempered and impatient. Incidentally, the Japanese for "door close" is "door crose". That's not really true but it is slightly racist.

Gleick also quotes from a report called Human Behaviour and Perception in Elevators by something called Spivack Associates:

The long silences, the almost library hush, that we can observe where people wait for elevators are not only what they seem. The longer the silence the more likely one of us will become embarrassed, the more embarrassing and tense are the little interior dramas that we play out each within our own theatre of projection

The actual period of waiting that elapses before a particular group may feel that waiting has become a nearly unendurable torment will probably vary significantly with the composition of the group, the time of day, and the type of building in which they are travelling. The wait is hardly ever long, however much the subjective experience may stretch it out.

I can't find this bastard report anywhere, it sounds brilliant, like a straight version of Seinfeld. I've found Mayer Spivack, but I can't find the report itself. Why isn't everything online by now? Come on Google, sort it out.

This book looks good.

I like this website too. Though I agree with obm's comment, the site does slightly overplay the imagined disrespect of pointless multiple button pushes, well observed, obm.

How brilliant to build an elevator which can go sideways and slantways and longways and backways and squareways and frontways and any other ways that you can think of, and has a special button that when pressed, even the person who invented it doesn't know quite what will happen, except that it causes the elevator to crash through the roof of the building, "probably" resulting in the passengers being cut to ribbons.

I haven't really mentioned the LEIA much, have I?