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SPEED OF ELEVATORS. Where the Largest and Best Elevators are Located. The maximum speed of the fastest pas senger elevators which have ever been built is 1,500 feet a minute, a rate of one mile in three minutes and a fraction. Before the fire in the Western Union building occurred that company had a machine which could run 1,500 feet a minute. It was the only one of the kind in the East. Thomas E. Brown, Jr., a consulting engineer of this city, thinks it possible there are few of equal speed in the West. These machines are of the water balance type —that of the original hydraulic elevator, the invention of Cy rus Baldwin. Owing to its expensive ness, and the fact that it could not be controlled automatically, it went out of use.The speed was regulated by the en gineer, and it went fast or slow, as he pleased. With the modern elevator al most any speed desired can be obtained; it all depends on the power used and the distance traveled. In a building which has a shaft of 250 feet, a speed of from 850 to 1,000 feet a minute can be obtained. On a rise of 150 feet it is easy to get a speed of 750 feet per minute with a weight of 1,000 pounds aboard the elevator. In New York the fastest elevators are in the Union Trust Company’s building on Broadway, near Watt street. They shoot up or down, carrying 3,000 pounds, at a speed of 600 feet a minute. When tested with lighter weights they have traveled from Sv0 to 900 feet in a minute. But the average speed of elevators in of fice buildings in and around New York is 300 feet a minute. It is best adapted for work, and experience has demonstrated that more passengers can be carried daily in a car going at that speed in the ordi nary large building than any other. The increase in the size of elevators is in keeping with improvement in other di rections. The largest passenger cars in the world are those now in course of construction at Weehawken. These elevators, of which there are three, are designed to carry 135 persons on each trip, and are equivalent to ten tons. They will be owned by the North Hudson County Railway Com pany.
Newspaper Details
Sacramento Record Union
Sacramento, California, US
Mon, May 09, 1892
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Francisco N.
USA 29 Dec 2025
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