Smelling Salts at the Top
The first person to patent an escalator never built one. In 1859, Nathan Ames, a patent attorney from Massachusetts, patented his "revolving stairs." He said the steps could be upholstered or made of wood, but no working model was ever made. In 1889, Leamon Souder patented a similar "stairway," which was never built either.
The first working escalator came from Jesse W. Reno in 1896. He called it the "inclined elevator" and installed it at Coney Island in New York City. It was really just a sloped belt with cast-iron slats for grip, climbing at 25 degrees. A few months later it was tested for a month on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge.
England got its first moving staircase at the Harrods Knightsbridge store, unveiled on November 16, 1898. It was a leather belt made of 224 linked pieces. Some customers found the ride so unnerving that staff at the top revived them with free smelling salts.
A Name Built From Latin
The word "escalator" was invented by Charles Seeberger. In 1895 his lawyer told him to name his new machine. Seeberger opened a Latin dictionary and took "scala" as the root, adding "e" at the front and "tor" at the end. He roughly translated it as "means of traversing from." He wanted it said ess-KAL-uh-tor, but by 1906 the public was already saying ESS-kuh-lay-tor.
Seeberger teamed up with the Otis Elevator Company in 1899. Together they made the first commercial escalator, which won first prize at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Seeberger trademarked the word in 1900, and Otis held the rights for decades. Rivals had to get creative. Peelle sold the Motorstair, Westinghouse sold the Electric Stairway, and Haughton simply called its product Moving Stairs.
That ended in 1950 with the case Haughton Elevator Co. v. Seeberger. The decision said the public saw "escalator" as the name for any moving stairway, and noted that Otis itself had used it that way in its patents and ads. The word was genericized and fell into the public domain.
How Flat Steps Become Stairs
An escalator is a loop of steps on a chain that keeps going round. The steps ride up, flip over at the top, and travel back down underneath. The whole thing rests on a truss, a hollow metal frame that bridges the lower and upper landings. The top landing usually holds the motor and the main drive gear.
The clever part is two tracks. One guides the front wheels of each step and the other guides the back wheels. Along the slope, the tracks sit far apart, which forces each step into a right angle with the next one, making a staircase. Near the ends, the tracks come together, and the steps flatten into a smooth sheet so they can travel around the bend.
At each end, the ribbed steps slide past comb plates, whose teeth mesh with the grooves to keep the gap tiny. If something jams in the comb, it can push back and trip safety switches. Handrails are pulled by their own chain at the same speed as the steps. When a handrail slowly drifts ahead or behind, that is called creep, and it comes from slippage and wear, not design.
Spiral Escalators and Other Odd Ideas
Inventors have dreamed of curving escalators for more than a century. Jesse Reno built a spiral one at Holloway Road tube station in London in 1906. It was the first escalator installed in any underground subway system, but the experimental machine never carried the public. Its remains now sit in the London Transport Museum's depot in Acton.
Others kept trying. Souder patented two spiral designs, Seeberger drew at least two, and later inventors held patents by 1973 and in 1992. The company that finally made it work was Mitsubishi Electric. The world's first practical spiral escalator, a Mitsubishi model, was installed in Osaka, Japan, in 1985, and Mitsubishi alone has sold them since the mid-1980s.
There are even stranger designs. The Levytator, from City University in London, can run in straight lines or curves. Its returning steps do not hide underneath. Instead, they come back on the other side to carry people the opposite way. Meanwhile, the escalator's cousins, travelators, carry people along a single floor instead of between floors.
Stand on the Right, or the Left?
Where you stand on an escalator depends on where you are. In Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, France and the United States, riders stand on the right and walk on the left. Australia and New Zealand do the opposite. Japan even splits by city: riders in Osaka stand on the right, while in Tokyo they stand on the left.
That habit has a hidden cost. Standing on one side and walking on the other can wear the machinery unevenly. So some busy systems, including the East Japan Railway Company and the Prague metro, encourage people to stand on whichever side they like. All Tokyo metro stations have posters asking riders not to walk at all.
In 2016, Transport for London tested standing on both sides with no walking for several months. It worked: capacity went up and queues before the escalator disappeared at peak times. Even so, the follow-up report did not recommend keeping it. For scale, a single-width escalator moving at about 0.5 metres per second can carry about 2,000 people an hour.
