By Peter Grant | Photography and Video by Todd Midler for WSJ
The elevator, one of the most defining technologies of the modern city, started with a stunt.
In the 1850s, Elisha Otis consulted with showman P.T. Barnum to design an elevator demonstration for the 1853-54 World's Fair in New York. At the event, Otis hoisted a platform above a crowd and cut the cable. Gasps turned to cheers as his safety brake snapped into place, halting the fall.
Otis's brake solved the central problem of vertical transportation: safety. It turned height from a dare into a design choice -- and set off more than a century and a half in which elevators and cities rose together.
Over the next 175 years, the elevator drove the rise of the skyscraper, concentrating jobs and capital in dense urban cores, and reshaping how millions of people lived and worked. As land values surged and horizontal growth became constrained, elevators and downtowns together climbed vertically from the steel-frame towers of the late 19th century to the glass supertalls that shape today's skylines.
Today, innovation in the elevator industry continues, quietly powering a global business that generates more than $80 billion a year and moves hundreds of millions of passengers through buildings every day. While much of today's advances are less showy, focused on things like energy efficiency and reducing elevator wait-times, some of what the industry is working on may yet produce a few gasps.
Among other things, elevator companies are integrating their systems with autonomous robots that will ride elevators and navigate buildings. Some are even exploring technology that might one day allow elevator cars to move not only vertically but horizontally, blurring the line between buildings and urban-transportation systems.
"There's a lot more that's going to come," says Neil Green, chief digital officer of Otis Worldwide, the Connecticut-based company founded by Elisha Otis and now one of the largest elevator manufacturers.
Nonstop innovation
The earliest passenger elevators were powered by steam engines and used hemp ropes. But those features were soon replaced by electric motors, which allowed smoother, faster and more-efficient rides, and steel cables that provided more strength, reliability and safety. Together, those advances made taller towers practical and economically viable, accelerating the rise of cities.
By the turn of the 20th century, engineers added another critical refinement: counterweights. Introduced widely in the 1900s, counterweights reduced the energy needed to move an elevator -- a principle that remains at the heart of most elevator systems. They eased mechanical strain, making it practical to run banks of elevators continuously, packing in larger workforces and turning vertical circulation into a scalable system rather than a bottleneck.
Innovation also reshaped the passenger experience. Early on, elevators were operated by attendants who controlled speed and stopping manually. That began to change in the 1920s, thanks to improvements in automatic doors, controls and leveling technology.
Building owners never looked back. They embraced push-button elevators for their speed and efficiency, not to mention as a way of avoiding rising labor costs. By the 1970s, elevator operators had largely vanished, lingering mostly in luxury hotels where their old-world charm and sense of ceremony still held appeal.
Speed vs. comfort
Many of the most important changes over the past half-century have been less visible. Elevator speeds continued to climb through the late 20th century, reaching over 20 miles an hour in the 1990s. Those advances allowed architects and developers to push building heights ever higher.
Between 2000 and 2025, the number of buildings taller than 200 meters (about 656 feet) has increased almost 10-fold, according to Otis.
But at higher speeds, engineers began to encounter a different kind of ceiling: human comfort. Elevator rides of over 25 miles an hour can result in ear pressure, dizziness and an unsettling ride experience.
As a result, most major elevator manufacturers have largely shifted their focus away from ever-higher speeds and toward smoother acceleration, energy efficiency, digital controls and smarter dispatch systems.
"Speed is not limited by technology," says Philippe Delorme, chief executive of Finnish elevator maker Kone (which is Finnish for machine). "It's limited by human comfort."
The laws of physics have created other problems. In the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower in Dubai, passengers cannot ride a single elevator from ground to summit. Steel cables limit how far one elevator can safely travel, forcing riders to transfer between elevator banks. The problem is that steel cables become so heavy over long distances that their own weight adds enormous strain to the system.
But, as with many constraints in the elevator business, this one is starting to give way. Under construction in Saudi Arabia is the Jeddah Tower, a more than 3,280-foot building expected to surpass the Burj Khalifa when completed.
Kone is installing an elevator system for that tower that relies on carbon-fiber composite technology far lighter than steel. The result is a system designed to carry passengers from the ground to the world's highest observation deck in one uninterrupted ride.
Shaping future cities
Today, elevator engineers are working to overcome numerous other obstacles as cities of the future take shape.
Otis continually tests new elevator technology at a 383-foot tower in Bristol, Conn. Inside the 14-shaft facility, engineers run elevators through endless simulated days -- loading them with sensors, feeding them data and deliberately pushing components toward mechanical or safety breakdowns to ensure such problems don't occur in real-world use.
Kone does much of its research underground in Lohja, Finland, in a facility sunk deep into a working limestone mine that lets engineers test travel distances of more than three football fields. TK Elevator of Germany, meanwhile, has a 807-foot tower in Rottweil, where engineers run high-speed trials and simulate real-world forces like building sway and vibration.
Much of their work is focused on efficiency, integration and intelligence. The idea is to use software and sensors to do things like monitor equipment so maintenance can be scheduled before breakdowns occur and position elevator cabs strategically to shorten wait-times when workers arrive, leave or head to lunch.
Looking toward the future, some elevator companies are integrating their systems with autonomous robots that will bring room service to hotel guests, medications to hospital floors or documents across sprawling office towers.
Further out on the horizon, some elevator manufacturers are exploring the possibility of reshaping cities with magnetic-levitation, or maglev, technology, which uses powerful magnetic fields to lift and propel vehicles without physical contact. Maglev systems already are used in a handful of high-speed rail lines in Asia.
Maglev could one day allow elevator cars to move not only vertically but horizontally. In theory, transportation systems could connect buildings -- and even clusters of buildings -- moving people sideways and up-and-down through large complexes, campuses or dense urban districts. Such flexibility could fundamentally reshape building design, allowing architects to think beyond single towers and instead create interconnected structures where movement flows through entire developments rather than up and down individual shafts.
"If you can connect vertical transport with horizontal transport, buildings stop being static," says Luca Cesaretti, co-founder of Ironlev, an Italian company that has been a pioneer of applying maglev technology successfully tested in railway transport to elevator systems.
For now, most real-world maglev installations are far more modest than the sideways-moving elevator visions. For example, Ironlev's elevators in use today use maglev to reduce friction, noise and wear but still rely on cable-and-shaft architecture that defines most commercial elevators today.
As the technology advances, elevators will break free of the vertical box, Cesaretti predicts. "They become part of a flexible circulation system."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 02, 2026 15:00 ET (19:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments