Where are the feelings? Lars Klingbeil looks at his cell phone, on the way to the SPD party conference in Berlin
Foto: DPA/Kay Nietfeld
“Hoppla, I almost flown”: a stumbling that follows a smile and the turn of the head triggered. There is a moment of inflammation between people who slide past each other. Some on the way down, others on the way up-in the subway, in the department store, in the airport. The romance of a fleeting moment, the romance of the escalator.
Jesse W. Reno and George A. Wheeler probably thought of romantic palpitations at least when they wrote escalator history a good 130 years ago. Reno was the first to make a significant contribution to the fact that people no longer had to rise stairs, but got a feeling that closely caught up. On March 15, 1892, he received a US patent for a kind of wooden panel conveyor belt. That was not a real escalator yet, but close. Us479864a is now considered the primal roller staircase. On August 2, 1892, the US authority patented the “Elevator”, ie the elevator of George A. Wheeler. On the drawing that he had submitted in New York, wedge -shaped steps can be seen that are led in the type of conveyor belt.
A good 30 years later, the first travel staircase, as the Technical Wunderwerk is correct, was put into operation in Berlin – 1925, i.e. 100 years ago in the Tietz department store in Leipziger Strasse. It wasn’t the first escalator in Germany. Leonhard Tietz AG had already had one installed in its Cologne department store in the same year. The department store made the new thing tasty to the new things by claiming that the “roller footstore saves time and thus money”. Unlike in Cologne and then in Hamburg, a lift boy at the beginning in Berlin when using the stairs. Supervised roller moving, so to speak.
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What sounded adventurous at the time has long been a matter of course. It only becomes adventurous for many people today when this is a matter of course, for example, they use stairs in the subway or have to trust that the elevators work. At BVG, the Berlin transport businesses, around 45 employees are therefore busy with the escalators running as smooth as possible. In addition, three specialists are planning to renew the travel stairs, the company announced on request for this story. Around 800,000 euros were held in maintenance last year and – as the BVG says – “thus invested in a stable operation”.
The BVG operates 398 lifting stairs. With an average funding speed of 0.5 meters per second, these systems cover around 6.3 million kilometers a year – this corresponds to a distance of more than a hundred times around the earth. »With our lifting stairs you get high: overall, you can overcome a funding height of over 2100 meters. This could almost reach the summit of the Zugspitze (2,962 meters), «enthuses BVG press frau Josefin Langer. And she still has a “fun fact on the edge”: the longest travel staircase in the BVG network is located at the Gesundbrunnen underground station-a proud 14 meters long with 160 steps.
Deutsche Bahn in Berlin has not quite as many kilometers for romantic encounters. In the Berlin regional and S-Bahn stations, 156 escalators carry people, 110 lifting stairs run in the long-distance stations. Each of these systems is in operation on average 12 hours a day. And as with the BVG, a escalator covers about 0.5 meters per second. “Undergraded, our escalators run around 2.1 million kilometers a year-around 50 times around the equator,” says one rail spokesman.
In some of its departments, the KaDeWe may have other romantic factors-but also 64 escalators. They cover 384,000 kilometers a year. “That means that our travel stairs circle the equator 9.5 times a year,” was calculated in the department store.
The leading is much too slow, but those who have no nerve for romance. Therefore, the hurried ones are not on the escalator, but go up or down. So that this works smoothly, there is a rule: stand on the right, go left. So the escalator became a research object from the means of transportation. The Faculty of Social Sciences at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich used escalators for an “empirical examinations for the enforcement of social norms in everyday life” a few years ago.
In the experiment, passers-by who raised or downhill escalators were “deliberately disabled”, as the university explained. Their reactions were observed and documented. What the researchers interested, among other things, does the gender or the clothing of the “normal violating”, that is, those who stood on the left, play a role in how those who were disabled by them react?
“The result shows that both factors have an impact,” says the faculty report. Elegant clothing ensures that you are tackled less often and less violently as a disruptive factor. Women are referred to their misconduct “faster and verbally more frequently and stronger”. In contrast, the Bavarian experiment has shown that there can also be stronger bumps in men.
Social scientists are not the only researchers who find escalators interesting. They are also an exciting object for historians. From their point of view, everything started with the rope. “The rope, a fundamental need for the elevator industry, was used by the early humans to cross rivers or gorges,” explain the US scientists who operate the Elevator Museum online and deal with the escalator as a special elevator.
However, the elevator industry mainly dealt with the vertical lifting of materials and then later also of people. “The philosophy changed when it became necessary to bring crowds over a short distance to underground or increased train stations,” they describe the beginning of the score story.
It was about smooth promotion of people – and about money. Therefore, engineers and manufacturers were motivated to develop safe and efficient devices that would continuously promote passengers hour after hour, less than the faster vertical elevators that transported passengers into relatively small batches, “explains the museum.
The continuous movement was also quite effective due to its continuous movement. “An elevator placed on the side”, as the first escalators were described, was even more suitable to “quickly and inexpensively and inexpensively” promote the bottom and upwards.
While the dream of the effective movement of the masses came true for the American escalators pioneers, the escalator has moved into the dreams of many people. Anyone who stands on a defective escalator in their sleep or drives down on one is worried about their professional development, say diverse dreams. They also drive up on the escalator at night in their subconscious.
Anyone who derives at 0.5 meters per second in the subway station can also dream during the day. Because real romantics are enough a fleeting eye contact to feel the crackling that the German rock singer Achim Reichel once described: “My heart shouted fire on the escalator in the department store, you down, I up, hoppla, I almost flew.”
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