SAVING TIME

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18190, 11 September 1933, Page 5

SAVING TIME

SPEED ELEVATOR SHOOTS UP 800 FT. IN 37.1 SEC. NEW YORK, Aug. 12. The president of the Borough of Manhattan, Mr. Samuel Levy, to-day was taken for a ride by the Rockefellers. With the speed almost of an oil gusher, they shot him straight up from his own borough streets to a point more than 800 ft. above sea level. Mr. Levy was the guest of honor at a fresh demonstration of man’s increasing conquest of gravity, lie and some others rode in the new speed elevator, No. 76, in the R.C.A. building, which gets you away from this earth faster than man ever has left it before except, perhaps in a steam-boat explosion or something. But you stop going at the sixty-fifth floor. To afford through the eyes some notion of this speed, the elevator doors were kept open while the car shot past the upper floors. Seen thus, these floors were merely a quick succession oi flashes of light, for the elevator was travelling 1400 ft. a minute, rising to 800 ft., or 65 floors, in exactly 37.1 seconds, the time announced in advance.

To-day’s demonstration was intended, according to the announcement, “as an opportunity for officials and engineers to determine whether the speed of express elevators in New York skyscrapers may bo substantially boosted, with a daily saving of hundreds of thousands of man-hours in elevator riders, but without detracting from their safety and comfort in transit.”