“Going up!” We’re all accustomed to department stores having floor upon floor of products. Sportswear and electricals in the basement. Up a flight and there are the cosmetics on the ground floor. Travel up again and you see the fashion goods and perfumes, menswear, women’s wear. The escalator gave birth to vertical shopping.
It began as a novelty ride at the Old Iron Pier at Coney Island, New York, when in 1896 Jesse Reno put passengers on a moving stairway that took them up on a conveyor belt at a 25-degree angle. He had patented his moving stairs or inclined elevator in 1892. A previous patent had been granted in 1859 (to Nathan Ames of Massachusetts) for a steam driven unit called ‘revolving stairs’, but this was never built.
In 1897, along came another inventor, Charles Seeberger, with a revamp. His word for his moving stairs – ‘escalator’ – came from the Latin ‘scala’, meaning steps. In 1899, Seeberger started working with the Otis Elevator Company to get his first commercial escalators into production at the Otis factory in Yonkers, New York. In 1900, the wooden escalator they had created won first prize at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Meanwhile, Jesse Reno was still working on his own designs and in 1902 founded the Reno Electric Stairways and Conveyors Company. Both Reno and Seeberger sold their patents to the Otis Elevator Company. The company’s engineers, led by David Lindquist, upgraded the Reno and Seeberger designs by creating the ‘cleated’ level steps of the modern escalator that we still see in our stores and shopping malls today.
Modern escalators have single-piece aluminum or stainless steel steps that move on a system of tracks in a continuous loop, with moving handrails that keep pace with the movement of the stairs. Designs vary according to how many people they are expected to transport. A single-width escalator traveling at 1.5 feet or 0.46 meters per second can move an estimated 170 people every five minutes.
Contribution to Retail History
Being able to move a large volume of people around a store and up and down shopping mall level, with ease and in comfort, helps encourage sales. But it’s not just about mobility. Escalators are invariably located in the center of the store or mall and provide customers with a bird’s-eye view of merchandise, optimizing the retailers’ opportunity to promote goods and offers. Today, stores are installing escalators designed to take a shopping trolley so that customers can keep their purchase with them as they journey through the store.