Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (28 page)

I called the USPTO to inquire about the gap and was told that, indeed, almost ten thousand patents had been issued during that period.

“Where’d they all go?” I asked.

Turns out, funny story. All applications and prototypes were
almost
lost in August 1814 when Washington was invaded by the British, who gleefully ran amok and incinerated the Capitol, Supreme Court, the White House (then called the President’s Mansion) and every other federal building in sight except one—the Patent Office. Dr. William Thornton, the agency’s recently appointed superintendent, implored British troops to spare the building because the records inside benefited all mankind, not just Americans. Torch-wielding mobs aren’t known for making calm, rational decisions midriot, but the Brits found the argument persuasive and rampaged elsewhere. So far, so good. Then, on December 15, 1836, Patent Office employees were dumping fireplace ashes near stacks of kindling when a wayward spark ignited a blaze that swept through the building. Despite having averted catastrophe years earlier, staff members accidentally burned the whole place down all by themselves.

Reluctant to give up on Hopkins entirely—perhaps, I thought, he’d created another contraption later in life that had more pizzazz—I looped back to my original source on him (a general history of Vermont) to see if I’d missed anything.

I had, but what I’d overlooked wasn’t about Hopkins. Mentioned elsewhere in the book were fellow Vermont inventors Thomas Davenport, Isaac Fischer, and Elisha Otis.

Otis.

I’d seen that name before and even had a mental image of its distinct lettering. Of course: I stepped over it several times a day going in and out of my apartment building’s elevator. Up until that point I’d never thought about the person behind the company or, frankly, the history of elevators. They were a nifty convenience, like automatic
doors and escalators, but little more. Otis, I learned, hadn’t invented the elevator per se. References to various hoists date back to the first century
B.C.
, and the Roman Colosseum had a lift for animals and gladiators around
A.D
. 80. Some European castles and monasteries atop steep mountains utilized pulleys and large rope-drawn baskets big enough to hold a person, and in the 1600s a similar contraption, called “the flying chair,” was used by the French, who also employed dumbwaiters. Henry Waterman constructed an elevator-like mechanism in 1850, but its intended passengers were barrels and other bulky goods. What I later discovered, however, is that Elisha Otis came along and did more than just improve on the design. He transformed the world.

Otis hailed from Halifax, Vermont, right above the border with Massachusetts. Laura Sumner, the town clerk since 1967, sent me a map with a circle around the property where Otis was born and confirmed for me that it was unmarked. She also promised to wrangle up a volunteer who could take me out to the site if she wasn’t available when I came to visit.

After flying into Boston’s Logan Airport several weeks later, I drive up to Halifax and find five people waiting for me inside Laura’s office, all of them hovering around a long work table and plotting what looks like a military incursion. They’ve unearthed early land deeds, grantee maps, Elisha’s birth announcement, and nineteenth-century reminiscences about Halifax itself. Laura introduces me to our fellow enthusiasts: Douglas Parkhurst, president of the Halifax Historical Society; Constance (“Connie”) Lancaster, a local historian; Stephen Sanders, who lives in what some believe is the oldest house in Halifax and has been a resident for “only” twenty-five years (which, in New England terms, still makes him a newcomer); and Bernice Barnett, a freelance writer in her seventies whose ancestry traces back to the town’s founding.

“Bernice is a direct descendant of Sally Pratt, the first female birth in Halifax,” Connie says.

Stephen catches me leafing through his copy of
Born in Controversy: History of Halifax, Vermont
to see what’s written on Elisha Otis (surprisingly, just a few lines), and I ask if there’s a bookstore where I can
buy a copy. “This is hard to find,” he says. “You can have this one.” I protest, but he insists.

“I appreciate that,” I say, genuinely touched.

Looking over the book’s cover, I inquire what the “controversy” regarding Halifax was. I’m imagining some juicy, long-forgotten scandal, but Stephen tells me it merely concerned the tug-of-war between New York and New Hampshire over the land that became Vermont.

Laura informs me that the area circled on the map she had given me is incorrect. “For all these years we had the home in the wrong place. But Connie researched the land records extensively, found more reliable information, and now we know where it is.”

Bernice opts out of the hike, and the rest of us pile into Laura’s minivan. From the parking lot we turn left onto Branch Road and then take a right onto Brook Road, which dead-ends after about two miles. We go right onto Green River and head four miles until we hit Perry Road and park. This is as far as we can drive.

“It’s about a three-quarter-mile walk through a trail in the woods,” Connie says.

I’m advised that there’s poison ivy along the path, and while looking down, I notice weirdly shaped animal tracks.

“Those are moose prints,” Laura tells me, “and they’re fresh.”

“I’ve never seen a moose before. I’m guessing they’re pretty harmless?”

“They’ll attack if they’re in rut.”

“In a rut? You mean, like, depressed?”

“In rut. It means they’re looking to mate.”

Connie is up ahead and yells back to say that the Otis property will be on the right-hand side.

Huge maples canopy the sky, and Laura cautions me: “Careful of the widow makers,” referring to the large broken limbs dangling precariously above us.

As I’m simultaneously watching my step for poison ivy, remaining on the lookout for moose in heat, and staying alert for falling branches, I see Connie stop for a moment and check her map.

“Found it!” she calls out, and those of us lagging behind trot up to join her. From where we’re standing, I can see a long, squat stone wall about forty feet away. We wade through a dense patch of ferns that my wildly arachnophobic imagination is convinced harbors entire spider colonies, and I shamelessly let the others go in front of me. Stone steps lead up to what would have been an entrance to the old house, and there’s a hearth and central chimney with a root cellar several feet below. Laura notices shards of pottery and mocha ware (most likely
not
owned by Otis and his family but by residents who lived there after them), and I walk around to search for any other evidence of domesticity.

The youngest of six children, Elisha Graves Otis was born here on August 3, 1811. He mastered woodworking and engineering skills on the family farm and at nineteen started bouncing back and forth between New York and Vermont, dabbling in carpentry, operating his own gristmill, running a freight-hauling business, and manufacturing high-end carriages. In 1845 he settled in New York with his second wife (his first had died in 1842) and two young sons, Charles and Norton, and was eventually hired by a bedstead-manufacturing company to oversee the installation of all machinery in its new factory. To raise heavy equipment and lumber from floor to floor, Otis erected a Waterman-like hoist. Nothing fancy or unique at first. But he knew these lifts were inherently dangerous—ropes could break, sending workers plummeting to their deaths—so he jerry-built vertical safety brakes not unlike the horizontal ones he’d been developing for railcars. In 1852 his employer, Benjamin Newhouse, came to him for help after a lift holding two men dropped, with horrific consequences, at one of Newhouse’s other factories. Otis built him two “safety hoisters,” and a third for a neighboring company impressed by the concept.

When Newhouse announced that he’d be closing the bedstead operation, Otis incorporated the E. G. Otis Company to design and build safety hoists for lifting not only goods and supplies but people.

There were, alas, no takers, and by the end of 1853 he had a total
inventory of $122.71, including two oil cans, a secondhand lathe, and the accounting ledger that recorded his measly earnings. Doubtful he could overcome the public’s fear and distrust of the notoriously accident-prone mechanisms, Otis considered heading west to capitalize on the Gold Rush.

Enter P. T. Barnum, who was enthralled by Otis’s innovation. In 1854, Barnum paid Otis $100 to stand on an elevator platform suspended by a single rope high above gathering onlookers inside the Crystal Palace, first constructed for the 1853 World’s Fair in New York. Barnum’s showmanship was infectious; the normally unpretentious Otis doffed a top hat and, after a short pause to ensure that he had the crowd’s rapt attention, ordered an axe-wielding assistant to cut the rope. When it snapped, the platform plunged—about two feet. Spring-released brakes automatically locked into place, and Otis calmly assured the relieved spectators, “All safe, gentlemen. All safe.”

At last he was in business. After fulfilling orders for about three dozen freight lifts during 1855 and ’56, Otis installed the world’s first safe passenger elevator on March 23, 1857, inside E. V. Haughwout & Company’s chinaware and glass emporium at 488 Broadway (now a registered landmark) in Manhattan. Demand grew and Otis was finally seeing years of hard work come to fruition.

Then on April 8, 1861, forty-nine-year-old Elisha Otis died of diphtheria, leaving the company in the hands of his two sons. Fortunately they proved to be even more capable businessmen than their father. Charles and Norton weathered the economic slump during the Civil War and oversaw exponential growth in its aftermath.

Before the 1850s, buildings were no more than three or four stories tall, but within a decade they began shooting up two or three times that height with the installation of Otis’s safety elevators. Tribute should also be paid to architects such as William Le Baron Jenney and George Fuller, who launched the mass construction of “skyscrapers” using steel skeletons instead of load-bearing masonry, and British engineer Henry Bessemer, who (with a little help from American William
Kelly) revolutionized steel production. But regardless of their design or material, nobody was going to hike up and down buildings more than four or five stories tall.

“Those who remember the Broadway of twenty years ago can hardly walk the street now without incessant wonder and surprise,”
Harper’s
magazine observed soon after Otis died. “For although the transformation is gradually wrought, it is always going on before the eye. Twenty years ago it was a street of three-story red-brick houses. Now it is a highway of stone, and iron.”

By 1872 there were two thousand Otis Brothers & Co. elevators in service. It was the brand of choice in finer hotels, office complexes, high-rise apartments, and stores nationwide, although it did have competitors. One company believed that creating an airtight shaft would prevent an elevator from crashing more effectively than a braking system. Theoretically, the falling car would eventually slow to a halt on a cushion of air. Theoretically. When, during an early demonstration, the test car came screaming down to ground level carrying eight brave passengers, it blew out the first-floor doors, injuring—but thankfully not killing—everyone inside. The company quickly went out of business.

Otis expanded abroad, and an early assignment included the Eiffel Tower, scheduled to open before 1889 in celebration of the French Revolution’s centenary. Otis was selected over European engineers because it could best solve the challenge of installing elevators within the tower’s curved legs.

One by one other prestigious landmarks followed: the Empire State Building, the Kremlin, the Vatican, the United Nations, the World Trade Center, Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue, the Kennedy Space Center, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and Burj Dubai (currently the tallest building in the world). Steam and hydraulic-powered motors have given way to electric and computerized systems, and time- and life-saving features have appeared incrementally. In 1950, Dallas’s Atlantic Refining Building featured the “do-it-yourself” autotronic
elevator, which replaced attendants with buttons; and automatic reopening doors came soon after, to prevent passengers trying to dash in between them from getting squashed.

Fatal accidents happen, but very rarely. On average, twenty-six people are killed by elevators each year (car crashes account for the same number every seven hours), and repairmen are the most likely victims. When something does go wrong, however, it goes
hideously
wrong, as any online search using the keywords “elevator decapitation” will attest.

Laura starts rallying everyone back to her car so that I don’t miss my flight from Boston tonight. I thank all of them for their help, and we discuss the need to get a marker placed somewhere in the vicinity of Otis’s birthplace—maybe closer to Perry Road than way out in the woods where no one would see it.

With exactly two hours to make the two-hour trip, I race to the airport.

Having lived in Massachusetts as a kid, I’ve seen the Boston skyline countless times flying in and out of Logan, and I gradually lost that sense of awe when a plane rises over a city, especially after sunset. Not tonight. With my forehead pressed against the window, I’m newly transfixed by the expanding grid of blinking multicolored lights below and think of other favorite skylines—Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami—I’ve seen on previous journeys. All of them, and hundreds more around the world, sprouted up because of Elisha Otis. A subsidiary of United Technologies since 1976, the Otis Elevator Company remains unmatched in size and reach, carrying the equivalent of the world’s population every four days on 2.3 million products in two hundred countries and territories. No other form of public transportation comes close.

Embarrassed that I initially perceived his idea as a mere convenience, I take some comfort in knowing that Elisha Otis himself underestimated how drastically his work would reshape the global
landscape; he didn’t patent his innovation for
seven years
, an eternity in patent registration. (Lawsuits have been won and lost over whether an application was submitted days or even hours before a similar design was filed.) And Otis, having already received numerous other patents for railcar brakes, a steam plow, and a bake oven, wasn’t ignorant of the process. But he was lucky. During those seven years, none of his competitors thought his automatic safety elevator idea was worth stealing, replicating, or patenting either.