Elevator Troubleshooting & Repair: A Technician's Certification Study Guide

CHAPTER 1

HISTORY

It is likely that animal- and human-powered elevators predated written history. Unlike masonry and stone buildings, the cars were probably woven baskets or wooden platforms with or without guardrails, and the support structures built of wooden logs, so these remains would have decayed centuries ago. We can only surmise that they existed, powered by domesticated animals on the ground, who worked long hours at a turnstile. Alternatively, occupants of the car may have pulled a looped rope that turned a pulley with more ropes that lifted the car, as shown in Figure 1-1.

FIGURE 1-1 The rope was operated from within the car. The hoistway was primitive, but it did the job.

Early Elevators

Vitruvius (c. 80–15 BC), a Roman author, architect, and engineer, provided the first extant written reference. He reported that the Greek mathematician Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) built a bank of elevators operated by hoisting ropes wrapped about a drum. It was turned by humans and this torque was applied to a capstan, causing platforms to lift gladiators and fierce animals through vertical shafts into the arena. In the seventeenth century, English and French monarchs built flying chairs to discreetly transport their mistresses to upper palace levels. These machines, powered by humans and animals, were eventually eclipsed by steam, water, and finally electric motors.

Where it gets interesting, from our point of view, is in the nineteenth century. During this 100-year period, the elevator evolved from steam-powered platforms used to move coal in English mines, to electrically-powered elevators that lifted passengers to ever greater heights in comfortable rooms with plush furniture.

In the late 1790s, William Strutt (1756–1830), shown in Figure 1-2, assumed control of his father’s textile mills in England. Among many projects, including fireproofing and improving the heat system, he designed a combination passenger and freight elevator, known then as the crane. It was adjacent to the main stairway and was used to transport workers within the five-story building. Strutt’s elevator was powered by a flat belt, running off of power shafting that ran throughout the building, presumably powered by an outside water wheel.

The principle components were a brake wheel, two fixed and two free pulleys, two endless belts, and a belt shifter. A crossed belt permitted the direction of car motion to be reversed, as needed in any elevator.

FIGURE 1-2 William Strutt (1756–1830) (Wikipedia)

A pinion gear was attached to one end of the main shaft, and its teeth meshed with those of a spur gear attached to the hoisting pulley shaft.

This was the first in a long series of working elevators that spanned the nineteenth century. Strutt’s Teagle, as it was known, was complex in the sense that it had a lot of ropes, belts, and pulleys, but simple in that these things worked smoothly together to deliver the power to where it was needed so that the car could deliver workers throughout Strutt’s five-story textile mill.

By the 1840s, two trends in vertical transportation merged. Increasingly, elevators were optimized to carry freight exclusively or to transport only workers, residents of tall buildings, and hotel guests from ground level to the growing number of floors in taller buildings that began to crowd the cities. Also, of necessity there was greater emphasis on safety.

Safety Measures

Previously, lower-powered lifting machines had their share of accidents, sometimes resulting in well-publicized fatalities. This was true not only in elevators, but throughout the world of increasingly mechanized, more powerful and faster machinery that characterized the new industrial age. Accidents took two forms. In one, the suspension rope and associated rigging that raised and lowered the car in a traction elevator failed, causing the car, which was slowed only a little by the air column below, to free fall to the bottom of the shaft. The inevitable result was severe injury, often fatal. The other type of accident involved the absence of reliable door interlocks, which would prevent a door from opening when the car was moving and/or prevent the car from moving when the doors were not closed and locked.

Without these interlocks, an occupant of the building could step through an open door assuming that the car was at the landing, and fall to the bottom of the shaft. Another equally great hazard was that an occupant of the car could be crushed between the car floor and the top of the door opening at any floor while the car was ascending. We shall see how mid-nineteenth century advances in elevator technology confronted these hazards and greatly reduced the number of injuries resulting from them.

Before midcentury, freight elevators were typically designed in-house to meet the needs of the many industrial facilities that were appearing, especially in England and eastern U.S. Then, beginning around 1845, industries and commercial operations such as hotels and office buildings began to look to certain emerging elevator manufacturers to meet these needs. Henry Waterman in New York City was a freight and passenger elevator manufacturer. One of his early machines, built in Manhattan for Croton Flour Mills, was operated from within the car so that an outside attendant was not required. Car motion was initiated by moving a simple iron lever, rather than tugging on the shipper rope. For passengers, the trip became smoother and more user-friendly. The control lever moved an attached chain that passed through openings in the car roof and floor, then engaged devices at the top of the shaft. The mechanism consisted of a friction clutch driven by a conventional power shaft, eliminating the need for pulleys and a belt shifter as in Strutt’s Teagle.

The operator caused the car to ascend by pulling the handle, which released the brake and engaged the clutch. Upward travel continued as long as the operator maintained pressure on the handle. The clutch disengaged and the brake was applied when the operator released the handle. To descend, the operator applied an intermediate amount of pressure on the handle, releasing the brake, and the car would descend, its speed regulated by the brake.

The innovation in Waterman’s elevator was that it was controlled from within the car by means of what we would call a joystick, rather than the bothersome shipper rope that is prohibited today.

By 1850, George H. Fox and Co., a Boston firm, was building freight elevators that were safer and more efficient. Fox replaced meshing spur gears with a worm gear attached to the winding shaft. This arrangement is superior because it is self-locking. The worm can turn the gear, but the gear cannot turn the worm. Consequently, a separate brake was not required for the hoist, which would hold its position when the driving belt was disengaged. This arrangement meant less chance of a car and occupants falling to the bottom of the elevator shaft due to mechanical failure in the drive system.

Safety was further enhanced by other innovations by Fox and Co. One was the replacement in 1852 of traditional hemp rope by stronger and more wear-resistant steel wire rope. The other innovation was a safety brake, which could stop the car from free falling in the event of rope failure. This brake, however, was not automatic and depended upon quick action by an alert operator.

Falling cars were still a severe hazard, but after 1850 new developments in elevator technology greatly reduced the number of occurrences.

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Adams and Co. manufactured freight elevators in Boston. In 1859, one of their freight platforms in a group installation dropped to the bottom of its shaft. An engineer for the firm, inspecting the damage, found that it was not as severe as might be anticipated. He concluded that the hoistway, as built, happened to be relatively airtight, and as a result, the air as it was compressed below the falling platform acted as a cushion and slowed its fall. This suggested a way to mitigate these disasters, and in fact the idea was patented and hardware developed and marketed.

Elisha Graves Otis Invents Safeties

Another very active key figure in the evolving elevator industry in mid-nineteenth century America was Elisha Graves Otis (1811–1861). His Improved Elevator of 1854 incorporated an automatic safety mechanism, which in the event of rope failure as shown in Figure 1-3, would activate automatically.

All elevators, of course, had guide rails, which were necessary to prevent the suspended car from swinging from side to side, striking the hoistway walls. The Otis Improved Elevator was a variation on existing rack-and-pinion drives, in which the rack was attached to the guide rails. In the new design, the teeth curved upward rather than extending perpendicular from the rack. The brake, relocated below the cross beam at the top of the platform or car, consisted of safety dogs connected to a spring and the hoisting rope. Because the rope, as long as it remained intact, supported the freight platform or passenger car, the spring remained compressed and held the safety dogs away from the rack and the elevator functioned as expected. In the event of a break in the rope or if for any reason it lost tension, the safety dogs would engage the upward angled rack teeth, preventing the car or platform from falling.

Otis was an accomplished mechanic and very inventive builder of elevators, always sensitive to safety issues. However, on the financial side his business failed to prosper despite the success of his Improved Elevator with its advanced safety mechanism. Beginning around 1860, nearly all traction elevators incorporated his braking system in one form or another.

FIGURE 1-3 Elisha Graves Otis cuts the hoisting rope, demonstrating his new safeties, still used, that prevent an elevator car from free falling. (Wikipedia)

Just three months after receiving his patent, Elisha Otis died of natural causes. His business flourished under the ownership of his sons, who reconstituted the firm as N.P. Otis and Brother. The company prospered under the inventive and financial skills of Norton and Charles Otis. They quickly adapted to the new post-Civil War environment, in which the focus now included passenger elevators built for the new generation of higher-rise hotels, shops, and office buildings.

Hydraulic Elevators

At about the same time that these developments in traction elevator safety and reliability were occurring, in England and continental Europe as well as in the U.S., hydraulic elevators were emerging in low-rise applications. Here we are talking about water pistons, as opposed to the hydraulic oil machines of today. Typically, the water supply was from a high-capacity pump system or reservoir. The water pressure would cause the car to rise to the top floor or as high as required. Then, a discharge valve permitted the car to descend at a measured pace due to its own weight.

Hydraulic elevators had some intrinsic advantages in low-rise applications. Those running off a natural or impounded reservoir had no further fuel costs, and unlike steam power, there were not the tasks of moving in coal and disposing of ashes. They were simple and quiet. In the event of piston failure, the car or platform would not free fall, its speed of descent regulated by the size of the rupture.

Bedrock or a high water table could make for a difficult installation. Builders of hydraulic elevators could then, however, resort to hybrid designs, standing the cylinders vertically above grade outside the buildings or laying them down horizontally. These installations required additional wire rope and pulley mechanisms, compromising the advantages of simplicity and safety.

Just as the nineteenth century was a time in which elevators evolved from primitive lifts to becoming a defining fact in the great cities of America and Europe, so in the ninth decade of that century did the electric motor assume new forms, enabling it to replace coal-burning steam power.

Throughout the 1870s, hydraulic (water) elevators were installed in great numbers. Drive configurations and structural variations proliferated as did the number of manufacturers building them. Additionally, there were many exclusively wire-rope machines being built and installed, with great innovations that made them safer and more efficient. Still, steam power, which was noisy, hot, and required frequent human intervention, powered most elevator installations.

Edison and Westinghouse

Then, beginning around 1880, the DC electric motor changed everything.

The first electrical distribution system was Thomas Edison’s 110-volt DC utility in lower Manhattan, intended for indoor residential and commercial use. It was energized in 1882, followed four years later when George Westinghouse began building an AC system, enabling the use of transformers to increase the voltage for efficient transmission and lower it for users. AC eventually eclipsed DC, but meanwhile Edison commenced large-scale DC motor production and for many decades these motors remained in use in many applications for which they were better suited than AC motors, notably in elevators.

DC motors could be run off an AC power supply by means of a simple motor-generator set, often in a single enclosure with no exterior shafts, and later by tube-type and inexpensive solid-state diode rectification. The reason a DC motor was at the time preferable to an AC motor was that, although both could be reversed, the speed of an AC motor could not be easily varied, as required to operate an elevator. In contrast, DC motor speed is varied simply by adjusting the voltage applied to the armature or current applied to the field circuit.

Nikola Tesla, working with George Westinghouse, developed three-phase AC power distribution and he invented the highly efficient and maintenance free three-phase induction motor, shown in Figure 1-4, which quickly permeated industrial facilities worldwide. But since it was essentially a single speed device, it was not suitable for elevator power until the 1960s, when the variable frequency drive (VFD) was introduced. This consisted of electronic circuitry that permitted users to run AC induction motors at lower (or even higher) than rated speed by means of pulse-width modulation (PWM), which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 3.

FIGURE 1-4 Tesla’s AC induction motor was not suitable for elevator use until the 1960s, when the variable frequency drive made speed control possible. (Wikipedia)

When electric motors were first suggested for elevator power, the public was skeptical. There had been a number of power line fatalities as new distribution systems were being constructed, and fire hazard was perceived to be an issue in high-rise buildings compromised by wooden hoistways piercing multiple floors. Early electric codes such as NEC, first issued in 1897, decisively confronted these hazards, and soon electric motors became part of everyday life.

The first elevator motors powered building-wide belt driving shafts in manufacturing facilities, so they were external to the elevators. But space and manufacturing costs could be saved by integrating the motor directly into the elevator assembly. That was accomplished before 1890, and is how it remains today.

Frank Sprague

Before the end of the nineteenth century and continuing to the present, electric elevators improved, with new designs becoming safer and more efficient. A key figure in this development was Frank Sprague, shown in Figure 1-5.

Electric motors and their applications in human transportation were Frank Sprague’s life. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy and a short stint on ship and in Europe, the young electrical engineer joined Edison’s large assembly of electricians, mechanics, and glassblowers in the lab at Menlo Park. While Edison was focused on producing a practical electric light bulb, Sprague wanted to develop a DC motor that would maintain RPM under varying loads. Edison was temperamental, but went along with this idea.

FIGURE 1-5 Frank Sprague (1857–1934) (Wikipedia)

Prior to 1880, electric motors were repurposed electric generators, then known as dynamos, which had preceded them. It had been found that voltage applied to what had been the generators’ output terminals would cause them to turn. These devices would actually run and could be configured to perform work, but they left a lot to be desired.

Sprague had some big ideas. He envisioned a DC motor that could run a loom, hoist, pump, blower, or machine tool. His highest ambition, eventually realized, was to build powerful motors that were reliable and capable of powering railroads, replacing the inefficient, smoky, and dangerous steam engines of the day.

Dynamos repurposed as motors bogged down under heavy load, and while this didn’t make much difference in some applications, in others these primitive devices were not suitable. A skilled mechanic was needed during running hours to advance or retard the brushes and adjust field strength for various loads and RPMs.

Sprague, at this juncture and throughout his life, demonstrated that Edison wasn’t the only electrical and mechanical genius. While Sprague has had less impact than Edison in the popular imagination, in many ways he was more advanced and insightful. Sprague built an electrical motor that maintained constant speed under varying load. Rather than the steam engine’s mechanical governor, Sprague’s electrical motor incorporated a reverse winding that automatically varied field strength in response to speed and loading. He solved the problem of brush position not by moving them physically, but by rotating the magnetic field to achieve the required alignment.

Since Sprague was working for Edison, the improved motor design at this point belonged to Edison. Sprague evidently saw the writing on the wall, and shortly thereafter tendered his resignation.

While Edison continued to refine his incandescent light bulbs and DC power generation and distribution system, Sprague, after eleven months working in Edison’s large organization, formed the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company. His lifelong project was to move rail traffic by means of electric motors. In this he was very successful and was renowned among electricians and transportation workers as the father of electric traction. He came to define these words to include vertical as well as horizontal traction. His elevator work was a relatively brief interlude, but its impact was enormous. After completing some difficult early streetcar and railway projects, he turned his attention in 1889 to elevator design and construction.

Sprague, together with his old friend Ed Johnson and elevator manufacturer Charles Pratt, rented a factory building and in 1892 formed Sprague Electric Elevator Company. Ed Johnson was the legal and financial specialist. Sprague provided electrical expertise, and Pratt was the mechanical engineer. Together they planned to offer two very different types of elevators. For low-rise buildings, a conventional drum-type elevator would be reconfigured with a reversible, adjustable-speed electric motor replacing the steam engine.

For high-rise applications, a faster machine would consist of a large, threaded-steel shaft placed horizontally and powered through a gearbox by an electric motor. A large nut would move along the turning shaft, driving a cable pulley. The contraption actually worked, and in fact dominated the industry until shortly before the turn of the century.

After constructing a small prototype in their new Manhattan facility, the firm secured a contract to install a similar elevator in the Grand Hotel in New York City.

There were problems in this installation. The control system, which had been satisfactory in Sprague’s electric trolleys, did not provide the smooth performance required in an elevator.

Sprague’s electrical expertise was severely challenged. First, he built an improved resistance network, known as the grid, for the controller. This smoothed out the elevator motion, but the resistance network and controller mechanism heated and contacts had to be replaced.

The elevator was put back in operation, but after a few days at an upper floor the ascending car suddenly dropped, its speed doubling, coming to a stop after striking the bumpers at the bottom level.

Fortunately, there were no injuries. The cause was determined to be a defective motor that ran the reversing lever in the controller. The sudden reversal damaged the safeties, permitting the car to drop.

Soon redesigned safeties and controls were in place and the elevator resumed normal operation. This did not solve the network problem. Eventually, the firm built and installed a new controller with heavier contacts, but the problem persisted. Sprague favored a cast iron grid, which turned out to work on a long-term basis. The Grand Hotel signed off on the project and Sprague Electric Elevator Company moved on to another project, the Postal Telegraph Building. This was to be located close by on Broadway and be far bigger and faster than the Grand Hotel installation. There would be four local and two express elevators, rising 14 stories above street