The State may further require that in excessively tall buildings, where the elevators constitute the only practical means of egress in emergency, there shall be a proper sufficiency of such appliances capable of removing the occupants within a reasonably safe period of time.
The limitations of the carrying capacity of an elevator are now well understood, and the safety of operatives in high loft buildings and of tenants in loftier “tower” office buildings, demands that the parsimony of owners and the ignorance of architects should not be allowed to restrict the exit of occupants of such buildings. A second elevator, in the Triangle fire disaster, would not only have saved its capacity in human occupants, but would have averted the fatal overcrowding of the single car which rendered it practically of no avail.
Many loft buildings of twelve stories and some even exceeding twenty stories are in existence in which the elevator accommodation is utterly inadequate for the removal of occupants of upper floors in a reasonable time, in case of emergency. The effectiveness of exterior “fire escapes” and of crooked interior stairways, especially for great heights, is now known to be strictly within certain limitations, and elevators have on many occasions demonstrated their value in the saving of life in panic and fire.
Office buildings are constructed thirty and more stories in height, without fire escapes and with winding stairways which are useless in emergency, and with such limited elevator capacity as would not remove the tenants in less than thirty minutes.
A most important and desirable subject for general action is afforded by provisions for safeguarding elevator gates and doorways. In and about these orifices, as previously observed, a large proportion of unnecessary accidents and fatalities occur. The unlatched door, the open gate, the absence of inner gates, the projecting sill, and the slippery tread, are fruitful causes of deplorable injuries and have caused the unnecessary loss of many precious lives. The proportion which this class of occurrence bears to the total is evidently large. An analysis of a list of four thousand accidental occurrences shows the following proportions:
| Per cent. | |
| Getting on or off cars | 58 |
| Falling through unguarded openings | 20 |
| Fractures and fall of cars, only | 17 |
| Mechanics making repairs in shafts, etc | 4 |
| Unexplained | 1 |
A number of devices have been developed during recent years, which have overcome objections to their use in the past, whereby the gates of elevators must be securely locked and fastened before the car can be moved. Six of such devices are approved for use in the State of Pennsylvania. It would seem that so simple a feature eliminating the essential danger surrounding the operation of a car moving vertically between floors in a shaft would long ago have been demanded by every form of authority.
With other engineers, I was at one time opposed to the use of such appliances on the ground of their uncertainty. But the growing volume of fatalities directly attributable to the lack of such safeguards, together with radical improvement in their construction, now demand the opposite conclusion.
There has been particular objection in some large cities to the application of devices for locking the gates, on the ground that the speed of operation on rapid schedule service would be retarded and inconvenience and overcrowding would result. In order to satisfy myself upon this point, I made this year a series of comparative trials of elevators equipped with one such appliance, the Clarke automatic safety devices, and found that no such loss of time in service actually resulted. On the contrary, a trial of the elevators in the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company’s Building, 49 Wall street, New York City, and in the Hotel Imperial, showed that the operators made better time with the device in service, as they were compelled to make more exact landings and thus avoided much of the time frequently wasted in reversals of the car movement.
Under the present circumstances, therefore, it seems that the proper time has arrived for action in this respect, and that the example set by the States of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island may be embodied in careful legislative requirements in other States, which would, at some expense, it is true, to private owners, safeguard the public from those peculiarly present dangers which have taken such unnecessary toll of human life and limb, in the ghastly entanglement between the gate or doorway and the moving car, or the dreadful fall through the opened gate.