For his article, Paumgarten visited the Otis testing center in Connecticut and shares the Otis claim that their elevators carry "the equivalent of the world's population every five days." Otis is the world's oldest and largest elevator manufacturer. Elisha Graves Otis installed the first safety passenger elevator (in the E.G. Haughwout Building in SoHo) in 1857 after inventing the safety brake in 1853 and demonstrating the brake at the Crystal Palace the following year. In 2003, I gave tours for the Otis company during the festivities celebrating their 150th anniversary.
One morning I helped escort guests to the Hammerstein Ballroom on 34th Street for a party/meeting. As we entered the old opera house, we encountered actors dressed in nineteenth-century costume standing on a wooden platform. "Mr. Otis" explained his new brake, which was there to catch the platform when it suddenly fell as part of the demonstration reenactment. We applauded politely--we had had 150 years to get used to this technology--and then a curtain parted on the other side of the auditorium to reveal a giant screen. Music began to play and we were all drawn towards the projection of famous buildings and structures equipped with Otis elevators. History nerd that I am, I was still surprised that tears were actually filling my eyes with the images of the Eiffel Tower, the Woolworth Building, the Cities Services Building, the Empire State and Chrysler. "Look at all the skyscrapers!" I wept with the musical accompaniment, unprepared for what was about to happen.
For this to make sense, you should understand that if you are an editor creating a video montage with photographs, you usually try to add movement, say panning across the photo or zooming into it, but if the subjects are skyscrapers and the theme is the elevator, then you're limited to vertical choices--you either tilt up or you tilt down, and if the montage is FULL of skyscrapers, you alternate. So the camera that morning went up one skyscraper and down the next one, up another and down the one after that, and somewhere in the 1970's, it started getting uncomfortable. I wasn't the only one in the audience who was reminded that the skyscraper is the ultimate phallic symbol. As we got closer and closer to the 2003 mark, this Otis-sponsored pornography increased in tempo--up and down and up and down and, faster, faster, up down up down up down, faster, faster, updownupdownupdown until the music crescendoed, the screen went to black and a giant O appeared followed by the letters TIS. During the wild applause, glances were exchanged--did that really just happen?--and then some of us went for water, others outside for a smoke.
Comments