Elisha Otis invented the safety elevator. I learned about him in 5th grade history class from the Ron Paul Curriculum; however, the elevator was not his only invention. In this essay, I am going to talk about Elisha Otis and his journey to his invention of the elevator.
Elisha Otis was born in Vermont in 1811. He left home wen he was nineteen and moved to New York. At this point he worked as a wagon driver. He married in 1834. He had two children with his wife before she died. During this time Otis took part in his first entrepreneurial activity when he invented his own gristmill, which is a type of flour mill. He did not make enough money from this so he tried to turn it into a sawmill, but he met with no greater success than with his gristmill. He then began a business building wagons and carriages, and finally met with some success here. It was at this point that his wife died, leaving him with his two sons and nobody to care for them. He remarried and the left Troy, New York the city of Albany in the same state. He worked for a company that made dolls during this time, but was unsatisfied with the results of only being able to make twelve dolls in one day. Otis invented a machine that could make bedsteads much faster than normally, and his boss set him to using that machine instead of making dolls. Otis again started his own business. This time he invented a brake for steam engines and an automatic oven for bread. These both used steam, and so when his access to steam became obsolete (Albany couldn’t spare the water), he was put out of business. He worked a few other small jobs before inventing the elevator. He was trying to convert an abandoned sawmill into a bedstead factory when he needed a way to move things up and down in the factory. He and his sons designed a “safety elevator†which would catch the elevator box after falling just a few feet. He incorporated it into his factory, and, when his bedstead factory failed, he and his sons started Union Elevator Works which produced and sold these elevators. They later rebranded to Otis Brothers & Co, which still produces elevators and escalators to this day. Otis did not invent much more after this, but enjoyed great success with his elevators. Elisha Otis died in 1861at age fourty-nine.