Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City. (Going Up).

Jason Goodwin. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2002. $27.95

Horizontal transport in cities generates heated debates. Public versus private, train versus car, more or fewer roads. But vertical transport raises few arguments. Lifts have made the modern metropolis possible, they go about their business quietly and safely, a form of public transport that is never queried.

Otis is the biggest name in the business, and this book tells the history of the firm. Because they have always been lead players, it is also a history of lift engineering and lift making.

There were passenger lifts in the Colosseum and some Renaissance palaces. But it was Elisha Otis, cutting the rope on his lift with his sabre for a fee of $100 at the New York World's Fair of 1854 that started the modern lift industry and enabled city buildings to rise above four storeys. The rope was superseded by the steel cable, enabling the famous nineteenth-century skyscrapers to rise to about twenty floors. The adoption of the hydraulic lift made it economical for apartment buildings. Then came electricity and gearless traction, giving rise to the next wave of high-rise, typified by the Woolworth and the Singer buildings. By the 1920s the limitation on height was the great number of lifts required with the primitive controls of the time -- The Empire State Building has 58, taking up a great deal of floor space. The introduction of Autotronic controls in 1948 mitigated this problem, and led to a further wave of skyscraper construction.

Jason Goodwin tells the story of Otis through all these developments, up to the present situation where it is a subsidiary of the giant United Technologies.