How the Elevator Shaped Our World
Build For Tomorrow
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Elijah Otis' Frustration Over the Elevator
The first elevators were used in mine shafts and had an awful reputation for sending miners plummeting to their deaths. But everything seemed to change, very famously, when a man named Elijah Otis held a publicity stunt in 1854. Pull the rope and the platform rises. Then Otis would yell three words that have become famous in elevator history: Cut the rope.
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