JOLLY DAYS

Elevator Going Up

I once read a 100 page New Yorker article about the growing, processing and canning of Le Sueur peas. Well, it felt like a 100 page article. But I read the whole thing. Something hypnotic about the magic-realism, anal, detailed prose I guess. It is a form of escape into minutiae. Like watching TV. Or reading the text on cereal boxes. Or parsing political strategies. Or…

Anyway, here is another article, very long, very New Yorker, very good, about elevators in high rises, interlaced with one man's horrendous experience being stuck in a high rise elevator for long enough for it to ruin his life.

Traction elevators—the ones hanging from ropes, as opposed to dumbwaiters, or mining elevators, or those lifted by hydraulic pumps—are typically borne aloft by six or eight hoist cables, each of which, according to the national elevator-safety code (and the code determines all), is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus twenty-five per cent more weight. Another line, the governor cable, is connected to a device that detects if the elevator car is descending at a rate twenty-five per cent faster than its maximum designed speed. If that happens, the device trips the safeties, bronze shoes that run along vertical rails in the shaft. These brakes are designed to stop the car quickly, but not so abruptly as to cause injury. They work. This is why free falling, at least, is so rare.