Five Things I Now Know About Elevators

Having read Nick Paumgarten’s entertaining and trivial profile of elevators in this week’s New Yorker, I will share with you my new knowledge on the subject.

1. In most elevators built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. “It is there mainly to make you think it works,” writes Paumgarten, who adds that firemen have keys to activate it in the event of a fire. It’s clear the door-close buttons in the elevators of my office building don’t work but impatient passengers stab at them anyway, presumably connecting the eventual closing of the doors with the fact they were pressing the button. This is similar to the way prayers and miracles work.
2. Have you heard that you can survive a freefalling elevator by jumping just before impact? Yeah, that won’t work. You’d be moving too fast to counteract elementary laws of physics. Regardless, you wouldn’t know when to jump.
3. Another element of elevators dictated by physics: “A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet.”
4. It sucks to be trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. You can even watch a video of it!
5. Despite what numerous explosion-intensive movies have led you to believe, you can’t escape through the hatch in an elevator’s ceiling. By law, it’s bolted shut from the outside. “It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out,” Paumgarten explains.