AI and BMI together will destroy the human race. The former will replace human brains and the latter, Body Mass Index, will condemn our swollen bodies to vast communal graves. But until then, thank God for elevators.
I was reminded of this during an elevator ride with two big men. We had checked the sign (maximum weight: 228 kg) and decided it was safe to enter, but elevators are only interested in your weight and ignore your bulk. I am as slim as a giraffe, but the other two were not and the hinged lift doors opened inwards. We could enter easily enough, but closing the doors meant compression until we resembled pieces of vacuum-packed meat. The lift was old, wood panelled and had a small folding seat, like so many of their ilk in Florence, charming but inconvenient. After a little research, I discovered that Italy is second only to Spain for the number of elevators per head, due to the way the cities expanded upwards rather than sideways as the population grew over the past 150 years.
I asked ChatGPT about Florentine elevators and was surprised to “learn”:
– While most visitors to the Campanile di Giotto climb its 414 steps to reach the top, there is a hidden gem: an elevator…
– While technically not an elevator, the funicular allows for a quick way to reach the San Miniato al Monte monastery from the lower parts of the city.
Nobody here knows anything about these vertical miracles and clearly AI was making them up, perhaps imitating tour guides who sometimes play games when their tourist groups look bored and invent impossible details to see if anyone notices. I decided to get some facts.
For over 2,000 years, people have been lifting things with ropes and pulleys, but the ropes often broke and domestic lifts were thought to be dangerous. There were food delivery lifts in grand houses that linked the kitchen to the dining room with added benefits: hot food and fewer chances of poisoning on the stairs. In 1780, Maria Theresa of Austria had a device that lowered her into the crypt of the Capuchins to pray at the tombs of her parents, but the world at large had to wait for a safety device invented by Elisha Otis. He had started a lift business that was going nowhere until he hauled himself up onto a platform at a New York public exhibition and cut the cable in mid-air. The crowd below were amazed and disappointed when nothing happened; the lift stopped instantly. It was 1854, and a new era of vertical living had begun.
By 1900, there were elevators everywhere. Some were pushed up exceedingly slowly by a hydraulic piston or a rotating screw, but the winner both then and now was the metal cable with a wheel and drum above the lift and a counterweight that moved in the opposite direction to the cab. America built skyscrapers, impossible prior to the elevator as it would take an hour to climb to the 50th floor, while Europe fitted lifts into stairwells. Harper’s new monthly review advised that such lifts were essential for the “indolent, fatigued or aristocratic persons”.
Then there was a golden age of elevator design. Tremendous mahogany cabins with windows and upholstered seats rushed up and down shafts that were surrounded by robust metal netting. The grandest were in hotels and, after passing their vertical driving test, well-trained lift operators drove them with great skill to make sure they stopped exactly in line with doorways. One was Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, a con man and perfectionist: “I will not rest until I no longer make the smallest step”. He so impressed an aristocratic lady that it led to seduction, at first inside and later outside the lift. Unfortunately, push-button controls stopped the fun and now lift boys with button hats can only be seen in films. The push buttons were in a vertical line that made life difficult for dwarfs and children, who could only reach the lower buttons, and people found them miraculous as the same button could tell the lift to go either up or down—an early form of artificial intelligence. Nowadays, there is sometimes a button to close the doors that reveals the foolishness of human psychology. (They close as soon as they can and do not need to be reminded.) I understand they are often not actually connected. The most pressed is the lift call button. How often have you pressed one again and again because the stupid lift has not yet arrived?
The Otis invention prevented deaths from broken cables, but there were other ways to die that soon altered lift design. People opened the landing doors and fell down the lift shaft, or put their head inside to see if the lift was coming, and it was. Stranglings from scarves caught in the doors have almost stopped and trapdoors in the ceiling of the cab makes access to the lift shaft safer for engineers. Regulations require masonry lift shafts with doors that only open when the lift is the right place, the cab has to be completely enclosed, and all the grand metal grilled lifts in Florentine hotels have had to be replaced. Lifts still get stuck between floors as happened to Nikita Krushchev in a New York hotel and to me after a good dinner in the Hilton in Istanbul. When this happens the greatest fear is not death, but incontinence.
At first the novelty of elevators led to new illnesses. Elevator nausea came first, leading in extreme cases to vomiting, which is impressive as there is hardly time, except in the very tallest buildings. This illness has disappeared, as has elevator neurosis, claimed by Freud to happen only when going down. Later came closed cab claustrophobia, commoner going down than up, the sensation perhaps accepted to avoid an exhausting climb.
Most lifts in Florence have been inserted into the stairwells by ingenious lift engineers. Apartments in old buildings were not built as a series of identical boxes one on top of the other. Instead, they grew like plants. New branches were added, the high ceilings of the piano nobile were converted into two apartments with low ceilings or two floors merged into a duplex. As a result, when you press the button for the first floor you may be surprised to see a floor whizz past you before you emerge on the second floor. My apartment is on the sixth floor according to the staircase, but third by lift button. Unfit guests who climb the stairs arrive eventually, sweating, breathless and cross. Another lift I know has its doors facing in different directions. You enter from the south, but get out facing west and you have to be quick as the west door starts to shut as soon as it is fully open. You jump through like a frightened antelope, but it traps your backpack.
You can still find hydraulic lifts, installed where there is no room for the machinery at the top, but the long piston used to push the cabin up needs a deep hole or the lift has to start halfway up the staircase and can only manage a few floors. They are also disturbingly slow, and it is hard to know whether the lift is actually moving, leading to deep thoughts of relativity.
One of the most surprising elevators in Florence is a hybrid in the hospital Piero Palagi. You stand in a quite large room with other patients, wondering whether you have made a mistake. Then the door shuts and the room moves up noisily in a diagonal direction, half elevator, half escalator. Sadly, I have been unable to find a pre-1970s lift with a coin in the slot box on each floor. Apparently, these were usual in apartment blocks and the lift would not go until it had swallowed your 10 lira coin. If you know of one, please let me know.
