By Siddharth Singh, 1st August 2015
An interesting anecdote about automated elevators from the 1940s provides an insight into how disruptive technologies go mainstream (today, we don’t know what manual-only elevators are anyway) .
When New York was growing vertically and it were still early days for elevators, every single one of them had operators who were in charge of stopping the lifts at the desired height, opening/closing the doors, and choosing which direction to take. However, this was a very sloppy process (as described in this NPR radio show), owing to which elevator companies invented safety bumpers, automatic stopping and eventually, fully automated elevators which did not require operators.
However, people were apprehensive to use such elevators. It probably felt unsafe to ride in an elevator alone. What if something went wrong? But everything were to change in 1945, when New York’s elevator operators went on strike. A host on…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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