Introduction and Basic Elevator Engineering

Hello, allow me to introduce myself: Joe Moleski, principal of JD Moleski & Associates Inc. an elevator and escalator consultation firm located in Central Florida. I will send out my personal and our firm's bio upon request. We will be attempting to cover the elevator & escalator industry news, events and technical advances in these forthcoming articles. Please contact us with any comments, questions, concerns and stuff you would like to have covered in future blogs. We encourage a "give & take". Let's first discuss moving people and goods safely and effectively; elevators have been around as long as people saw the need for vertical movement. There is evidence of crude elevators in use for thousands of years. Ropes made of animal hair and plants connected to woven baskets carried goods up cliffs and structures via rudimentary pulleys and smoothened logs. Did the supporting cables (rope) heat up due to friction as it passed over the pulleys? Sure it did, so what type of coolant was used? Water? What was the effect on the ropes performance? I bet it wasn't long, perhaps the second trip, before the freight loader/rope puller decided that if it works for mud, could it work for me? On and up we go. That probably involved some type of counterweight system, as pulling a man's weight could not have been easy in places where manpower was it. Now we get into real engineering! A system to determine how many rocks were needed for counterweight, or better yet why not freight on the other end? Move both at once; now we have product efficiency to be included in our calculations. What about safety? Engineers always have safety concerns for a product or process. Some hay or straw piled beneath the elevator? How much to absorb the falling weight? How would you come to the answer? The point here? Engineering. To me the best engineering comes from finding a means to provide a solution to a need. In this case; safe and efficient early vertical transportation. We have much to discuss in future blogs and we won't be stuck in Stone Age for long. Joe