The elevator is a platform which can either be open or enclosed and is useful in lifting people to upper floors within a vertical structure. Elevators are considered a standard part of any tall residential or commercial building. In recent years with the introduction of the Federal Americans with Disabilities Act has required the use of two story and three story buildings to be retrofitted with elevators. For this purpose, hiring an elevator installer in Toronto is recommended.
The first elevators were manually operated and were used in lifting freight in warehouses as well as in manufacturing plants. It was in the early 1600s that these lifts were first used. The modern elevator is considered to be a direct descendant of a design which was first shown by Elisha G. Otis during the New York World’s Fair in the year 1853. A notable feature of it is that the principal reason of its popular acceptance is that it is equipped with a safety device which immediately engaged and held the elevator if in case the hoisting cables broke. The first ever elevators were operated via steam power in order to turn the cable drums. In the year 1871, the first hydraulic elevators were first introduced with the use of water pressure as the source of power. At first, the hydraulic rams were considered one-piece which meant that a hole had to be dug under the elevator shaft which is as deep as the elevator. In a lot of cities hydraulic power for these early elevators were supplied by the power companies which maintained and installed networks of hydraulic piping in the entire city. The first ever commercially successful electric elevator was first installed in 1889 and soon electricity became a very accepted source of power.
Elevators which are powered with electricity offered two very significant advantages. First, the electric power was becoming very universally available and any building which is likely to be equipped with an elevator will also have electric power. Second, hydraulic elevators were very much limited in the height to which they could rise while the electric elevators made use of a simple pulley and cable system and had no virtually height limit. For several years, electric elevators used either alternating current motors or direct current motors. Today, almost every elevator system use either alternating current (AC) motors or the direct current (DC) motors. The most common are geared motors for the elevators which move at speeds of up to 500 feet per minute while the direct drive motors are used for elevators which are moving at much higher speeds.
The control systems used on early elevators required the human operators to regulate speed of the lift as well as descent, in order to stop the elevator in every floor and to open and close the door as well. In the year 1950s there was a new control system that replaced the manual controls which is known as the automatic pushbutton systems. Every elevator installer in Toronto knows how these machines have evolved from olden times and then to the present.