50 Things That Made The Modern Economy with Tim Harford

Here's a little puzzle for you.

One day, on her regular journey to work, a woman decides that she's going to take a mass transit system instead of her usual method.

Just before she gets on board, she looks at an app on her phone that gives her the exact latitude and longitude.

The journey is smooth and perfectly satisfactory despite frequent stops.

And when the woman disembarks, she checks her phone again.

Her latitude and longitude haven't changed at all.

What's going on?

The answer? This lady works in a tall office building and rather than taking the stairs, she's taken the lift.

We don't tend to think of lifts or elevators as mass transportation systems, but they are.

They move hundreds of millions of people every day and China alone is installing two thirds of a million elevators a year.

The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, has over 300,000 square metres of floor space.

The brilliantly engineered Sears Tower in Chicago has more than 400,000.

Imagine such skyscrapers sliced into 50 or 60 low-rise chunks, then surrounding each chunk with a car park and connecting all the car parks together with roads,

and you'll have an office park the size of a small town.

The fact that so many people can work together in large buildings on compact sites is only possible because of the elevator.

Or perhaps we should say because of the safety elevator.

Elevators themselves have existed for a long time.

Archimedes is said to have built one in ancient Greece.

In 1743, at the Palace of Versailles, Louis XV used one to clandestinely visit his mistress.

Steampower went further. Matthew Bolton and James Wat, giants of Britain's Industrial Revolution, produced steam engines that ran muscular industrial elevators, hauling coal up from the mines.

But while these elevators all worked well enough, you wouldn't want to use them to lift people to any serious height.

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