Elevator Shaft facts

While investigating facts about Elevator Shaft Dimensions and Elevator Shaft Construction, I found out little known, but curios details like:

In 1945, a B-25 bomber pilot crashed into the Empire State Building's elevator shaft, snapping the cable. By the time the carriage reached the bottom, a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it acting like a spring, which allowed the lone occupant in the car to escape injured but alive.

how to get something out of elevator shaft?

The "Grandpa Gang," a group of men the oldest being 76, committed the biggest bank robbery in English history. After climbing down an elevator shaft and drilling through a concrete wall they stole more than $200 million in cash and jewels.

What is elevator shaft?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what's at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Here are 16 of the best facts about Elevator Shaft Wall Details and Elevator Shaft Design I managed to collect.

what elevator shaft means?

1. The five-story Cooper Union Foundation Building, built in 1859, included an elevator shaft in anticipation of elevators someday being invented.

2. The recording of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer’ followed a bizarre path, including recording a snare drum in an elevator shaft, transposing parts for concertina, and syncing 2 tape recorders by ear.

3. A disaster in the town of Vaal Reefs (South Africa), an undeground locomotive fell into an elevator shaft and struck a cage with 105 gold miners returning to the surface. The elevator plunged more than 2 km to the bottom of the shaft. It's marked as the deadliest elevator accident in history.

4. Putting Two Elevators in One Shaft allows the movement of 40 percent more passengers than a conventional elevator.

5. An omindirectional maglev elevator prototype is under construction - the design reduces wait times, allows more than one car per shaft and could eventually connect people between buildings as well.

6. In 2003, a doctor was decapitated by an elevator, leaving the upper half of his head inside with another passenger as his body, lower jaw, and left ear fell down the elevator shaft.

7. The "PPDG" penthouse in Guadalajara, Mexico, has a toilet with a glass floor looking into a 15 storey elevator shaft. The building used to be an old Mexican colonial building and was supposed to have 2 elevator shafts. The second elevator was never installed.

8. The Olds Elevator, which looks like a normal Archimedes screw elevator but rotates the casing instead of the shaft.

Why do they build elevator shafts first?

You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.

The first elevator shaft was built 4 years before the first elevator, in the Cooper Union Foundation building in New York. Cooper had it made cylindrical, because he thought it would be the most efficient design.

Deep Purple played a concert in Indonesia in 1975 where a member of the road crew died by falling 6 flights down an elevator shaft and Indonesian police armed with machine guns, truncheons and a pack of Doberman pinschers waded into the audience, seriously injuring over 200 people - source

Paternoster elevators constantly run in a loop through two elevator shafts, with no doors and no call buttons. - source

In 2013 the town of Benidorm in Alicante, Spain, had almost completed its 47-story skyscraper when it realized it excluded plans for elevator shafts.