Elevators, Lifts, and Travelators: Everything You Want to Know

The World of Movement

Elevators are the backbone of movement inside buildings with the advent of modern skyscrapers and residential complexes. Known for its towering structures, the most iconic amongst which is the Burj Khalifa, any elevator company in Dubai has a lot to handle and a lot to offer on the front of lifts, travelators, and escalators. Elevators have revolutionised modern buildings, enabling vertical access across hundreds of floors in a matter of minutes.

This guide aims to make you aware of the specifics of lifts but without those annoyingly cumbersome technical details. Historical insight into the development and evolution of the kinds of lifts also finds its place in this guide.

What is an elevator?

It might sound like an absurd question, but it actually does not have an overly simple answer. 

An elevator, also known as a lift, is a means of conveyance that helps move people and cargo up and down floors without employing staircases or lifting heavy loads. 

The most visible part of the elevator is, of course, the car. Inside and outside mechanics are quite interesting: some may have gears, ropes, and pulleys to shift the car up or down; some may have features such as being voice command accessible, touch screens synched with a remote control, glass doors, and many more. The moving stairs, also known as escalator, have been around for a while before the elevator came into being—more on that in the next part of the guide! 

How was the elevator invented?

The history of the elevator is nothing short of fascinating—the first-ever passenger elevator was installed in a New York department store in 1857 but shut down after 3 years because customers were too sceptical to get on.

It was a super slow structure, travelling at the speed of 40 feet per minute, while today’s fast elevators can travel 40 feet in a second! The 5 stories of the department store were accessed by the vertical travel of this steam-powered structure, the result of the ingenuity of a man named Elisha Otis. Otis held a public demonstration in NYC in 1855 of his invention, where he hoisted a platform high and cut the cable attaching it swiftly with an axe. Much to everyone’s amazement, the hoisted platform did not come hurtling to the ground; it remained suspended as a ratchet popped open, stabilising the structure and stopping the descent of the platform. And so, lo and behold—the technology that was born, which would transform the landscape of the modern city! The elevator wasn’t the first time in human history when people were using levers and pulleys to hoist stuff or even lift people, but for the first time, it was a closed structure, since the open boxes of these old forms of the elevator were extremely dangerous. This interest in the elevator was largely because of the world’s circumstances during this time—a rise in population meant more space needed to be accommodated within buildings, and since the higher the floor, the lower the rent, builders were motivated to install this machine and keep raising their small structures to the sky!

Types of Elevators 

There exist many kinds of elevators, the functions, designs, and specifications of which are all different from each other. 

1. Passenger Elevators

Passenger elevators are standard features in residential buildings, hotels, malls, and generally any place with foot traffic and a lot of floors. These have the function of transporting people inside buildings. Passenger elevators are of many kinds: wood, glass, and steel; hydraulic, gearless, and MRL; and can accommodate between 4 people in some models to 50+ people in others. 

2. Freight/Cargo Elevators

As its name suggests, these elevators are intended to move things around in a building, from heavy materials to installing machinery and even cargo, across floors. These have specifications that are different from passenger lifts, such as the strength to carry much heavier loads, a few less safety specifications, and they appear much less aesthetically pleasing than the fancy passenger lifts do.

3. Residential Elevators

Travelators and escalators are more or less similar to passenger elevators; however, they are relatively smaller and can be customised as per the requirement because they are built inside homes and residential complexes rather than malls, hotels, and offices catering to people in bulk.

Travelators, Escalators, and Elevators: Which is Which?

One can hardly mention the word travelator without getting it confused with an elevator, so let’s break down the difference between the two.

Unlike a car suspension system that moves vertically in a building, a travelator is a flat conveyor belt on an incline not as steep as an escalator but which moves people across a flatter surface over medium distances.

They are commonly located at airports and move steadily at a low pace along a maximum length of 100 meters, though they mostly come to be about 10–20 meters in length.

They are supposed to make people walk through long shopping malls and airports with luggage and shopping bags freely. 

Conclusion 

Much is lost to us when we access these daily conveniences, but the technical knowledge of insight and functions can help you make that right decision as far as what kind of lift or travelator installation you want in your premises.