Chapter 21: A Self-Moving Staircase

At the American Exhibition, held in the Crystal Palace in 1902, there was shown a staircase which, on payment of a penny, transported any sufficiently daring person from the ground-floor to the gallery above. All that the experimenters had to do was to step boldly on, take hold of the balustrade, which moved at an equal pace with the stairs, and step off when the upper level was reached.

The “escalator” (Latin scalae = flight of stairs) hails from the United States, where it is proving a serious rival to the elevator. In principle, it is a continuously working lift, the slow travel of which is more than compensated by the fact that it is always available. The ordinary elevator is very useful in a large business or commercial house, where it saves the legs of people who, if they had to tramp up flight after flight of stairs, would probably not spend so much money as they would be ready to part with if their vertical travel from one floor to another was entirely free of effort. But the ordinary lift is, like a railway, intermittent. We all know what it means to stand at the grille and watch the cage slide downwards on its journey of, perhaps, four floors, when we want to go to a floor higher up. Rather than face the delay we use our legs.

Theoretically, therefore, a large emporium should contain at least two lifts. If the number be further increased, the would-be passenger will have a still better chance of getting off at once. Thus at the station of the Central London Railway we have to wait but a very few seconds before a grille is thrown back and an attendant invites us to “Hurry up there, please!”

Yet there is delay while the cage is being filled. The actual journey occupies but a small fraction of the time which elapses between the moment when the first passenger enters the lift at the one end of the trip and the moment when the last person leaves it at the other end. In a building where the lift stops every fifteen feet or so to take people on or put them off, the waste of time is still more accentuated.

The escalator is always ready. You step on and are transported one stage. A second staircase takes you on at once if you desire it. There is no delay. Furthermore, the room occupied by a single escalator is much less than that occupied by the number of lifts required to give anything like an equally efficient service.

In large American stores, then, it is coming into favour, and also on the Manhattan Elevated Railway of New York. When once the little nervousness accompanying the first use has worn off, it eclipses the lift. A writer in Cassier’s Magazine says: “In one large retail store during the holiday season more than 6,000 persons per hour have been carried upon the escalator for five hours of the day, and the aggregate for an entire day is believed to be 50,000. In the same store on an ordinary day the passengers alighting at the second floor from the eight large lifts, which run from the basement to the fifth floor, were counted, likewise the number at the escalator. This latter was found to be 859 per cent. of the number delivered by the eight lifts. In another establishment, in a very busy hour, the number taken from the first floor by the escalator was four times the number taken from the first floor by the fourteen lifts, which were running at their maximum capacity. To the merchant this spells opportunity for business.

“The experience at the Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue station of the Manhattan Elevated Railway in New York, during a recent shut-down of the escalator, which has been in service for some time, is interesting as showing the attitude of the public, of which many millions have been carried by the installation during the several years of its operation. The daily traffic receipts of this station for a period beginning several weeks before the shut-down and extending as many after, for the years 1903 and 1902, and receipts of the adjacent stations for the same period were carefully plotted ... and the loss area during the period of shut-down was determined. The loss area was found to embrace 64,645 fares. It was, furthermore, daily a matter of observation that numbers of people, finding that the escalator was not running, refused to climb the stairs, and turned away from the station.

“In the case of a great store, the escalator may be constructed as one continuous machine, with landings at each floor, and so arranged that steps which carry passengers up may perform a like service in carrying others down; or separate machines may be installed in various locations affording the best opportunity for displaying merchandise to the customer who may be proceeding from the lower to the upper floor. In the case of a six-storey building so equipped with escalator service in both directions, or in all ten escalator flights, it is obvious that the facilities are equal to an impossible number of elevators; and as facility of access has a direct bearing upon opportunities for business, it may well be argued that the relative value, measured by rent, of the main and upper floors is greatly changed.”