Welcome along, Explorer. My name's Dan. It's me. It's you. And it's an incredible journey all

around the universe to discover those secrets through the solar system and beyond. It's a brand new

fun kid science midweekly. It's a short, snappy, question special. If you have anything sciencey that you really want answered on the podcast, best thing for you to do is to leave it as a voice note for me on the free Fun Kids app and at FunKidsLive.com, send it over to me.

That way you can star in the show and I can do all the science digging.

We're going to travel and meet Father Christmas Santa.

He'll be on in a little bit.

Let's get to your questions.

First one from Caroline, what do you have?

Hi, my name's Caroline.

I'm seven and I would like to know how do elevators work?

So most elevators have five main parts.

You've got the elevator car, that's the box that you ride in.

On the other side of that is a counterweight.

Really heavy, very important because it balances the opposite side of the elevator. Holding that

to the box, you have a steel cable, well, more than one. You've got steel cables and they go around

a motor, which is in the middle. That motor turns the wheel, which moves the lift up or down.

You have brakes as well. So if you want to go up, the motor turns, the counterweight on the other side moves the lift up or down you have brakes as well so if you want to go up the motor

turns the counterweight on the other side of the string lowers and it pulls the lift up if you want to go

down the motor turns the other way the weight goes up gravity does its work and the box drops

now there are loads of safety systems in place with backup power generators,

multiple cables to hold the car. It's not just like one little bit of thread where you're

dangling. Don't worry about that. And there are automatic brakes. So if anything does go wrong,

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