Difference between revisions of "Dumbwaiter"

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Thus, the term refers to two distinct forms of technology. The first, a piece furniture that is static, privatizing, and decorative in its function; the other, a technology that is dynamic, utilitarian, and ultimately democratizing.  
 
Thus, the term refers to two distinct forms of technology. The first, a piece furniture that is static, privatizing, and decorative in its function; the other, a technology that is dynamic, utilitarian, and ultimately democratizing.  
 
[[image:wind pulley.jpg|left|frame|Illustration of an early wind pulley.]]
 
  
 
=Genealogy of the Dumb-waiter=
 
=Genealogy of the Dumb-waiter=
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 +
[[image:wind pulley.jpg|left|frame|Illustration of an early wind pulley.]]
  
 
Humans have always created technology to minimize work, from the invention of the wheel to modern day high rise cranes. The study of mechanics and physics took a great leap forward during in Europe from 1500 to 1800 with the work of such renaissance inventors as Galileo and Da Vinci who made developments in rudimentary mechanics and laid the groundwork for the Industrial Age of the late18th and early 19th centuries.  
 
Humans have always created technology to minimize work, from the invention of the wheel to modern day high rise cranes. The study of mechanics and physics took a great leap forward during in Europe from 1500 to 1800 with the work of such renaissance inventors as Galileo and Da Vinci who made developments in rudimentary mechanics and laid the groundwork for the Industrial Age of the late18th and early 19th centuries.  
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=Elevator Technology=
 
=Elevator Technology=
  
[[image:Otis presentation.jpg|frame|200px|right|Elisha Otis reveals his invention at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition.]]
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[[image:Otis presentation.jpg|frame|200px|left|Elisha Otis reveals his invention at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition.]]
  
 
Elevator technology had a profound impact on the shaping of the modern industrial city: both businesses and homes grew vertically at astounding speed. As floors stacked upon floors, elevators moved people and goods between them with minimal effort.
 
Elevator technology had a profound impact on the shaping of the modern industrial city: both businesses and homes grew vertically at astounding speed. As floors stacked upon floors, elevators moved people and goods between them with minimal effort.
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==From Static to Dynamic==
 
==From Static to Dynamic==
  
[[image:adv.jpg|left|200px|frame|E. Brewer's 1888 advertisement in the New York City directory for small lifts, including dumb-waiters and personal elevators.]]
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[[image:adv.jpg|right|200px|frame|E. Brewer's 1888 advertisement in the New York City directory for small lifts, including dumb-waiters and personal elevators.]]
  
 
The mechanized dumb-waiter, the form that typically comes to mind when we talk about them today, became ubiquitous in the tall apartment buildings that Otis's inventions allowed, but the designs for these living spaces and their subsequent popularity are largely attributed to French architect Calvert Vaux. In an 1857 presentation to the American Institute of Architects, he revealed "Parisian Buildings," a new apartment building with generous spaces and amenities, including a dumb-waiter that connected the basement, pantry and service areas (Cromley).  
 
The mechanized dumb-waiter, the form that typically comes to mind when we talk about them today, became ubiquitous in the tall apartment buildings that Otis's inventions allowed, but the designs for these living spaces and their subsequent popularity are largely attributed to French architect Calvert Vaux. In an 1857 presentation to the American Institute of Architects, he revealed "Parisian Buildings," a new apartment building with generous spaces and amenities, including a dumb-waiter that connected the basement, pantry and service areas (Cromley).  
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The "Parisian" apartment wasn't the only high density living space finding ubiquity in the American city. New York tenement buildings, consisting of small two to four room units stacked six stories high, carried the stigma of poverty and disease. Buildings that catered to tenants of all economic backgrounds soon proliferated, and the public identified the specific amenities belonging to each with either European sensibility or ethnic squalor.
 
The "Parisian" apartment wasn't the only high density living space finding ubiquity in the American city. New York tenement buildings, consisting of small two to four room units stacked six stories high, carried the stigma of poverty and disease. Buildings that catered to tenants of all economic backgrounds soon proliferated, and the public identified the specific amenities belonging to each with either European sensibility or ethnic squalor.
  
For example, the 1874 "cheap flat" design published in an 1874 issue of <i>Scribner's Monthly</i> devoted little precious space to public stairways and lobbies, nor service stairs or dumb-waiters, because tenants would be lower class. Buildings for the upper-middle class, however, carefully incorporated designs that ensured the separation of service routes from those intended for tenants and their guests. The smaller living spaces that the Americans bourgeoisie reluctantly accepted only increased desire to maintain psychological distance from their servants, if not spatial.
+
For example, the 1874 "cheap flat" design published in an 1874 issue of <i>Scribner's Monthly</i> devoted little precious space to public stairways and lobbies, nor service stairs or dumb-waiters, because tenants would be lower class. Buildings for the upper-middle class, however, carefully incorporated designs that ensured the separation of service routes from those intended for tenants and their guests. The smaller living spaces that the Americans bourgeoisie reluctantly accepted only increased their desire to maintain psychological, if not spatial, distance from servants.
  
 
In his book, <i>Alone, Together</i>, Elizabeth Collins Cromely explains that:
 
In his book, <i>Alone, Together</i>, Elizabeth Collins Cromely explains that:
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</blockquote>
 
</blockquote>
  
The distance between private and public, upper and lower,  
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The distance between private and public, upper class and lower, efficiency and service, shrank.
 
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As the city changed around them, owners and renters who wanted to live in traditional style “row houses” found themselves increasingly disappointed. The more demand for freestanding houses in the market, the smaller and narrower the houses became (Cromley). Row houses appealed to the traditional American desires of privacy and autonomy. The basement levels were designated for the kitchen and service rooms, the ground floor was considered the public floor, with a parlor or study, and the upstairs levels were for living in, safely removed from the public eye (Cromley). In this sense, dumbwaiters actually could appeal to the modern homeowner of late Victorian America. They were often retrofitted to go from the service levels up, minimizing the work of the servants around the house, but definitely not replacing them.  
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===Americans in apartments===
 
===Americans in apartments===

Revision as of 18:49, 26 September 2010

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term dumb-waiter first appeared in the English language in 1749, referring to 'an article of dining room furniture intended to dispense with the services of a waiter at the table.' Its first American usage in 1847, however, includes mention of a system of pulleys and weights that allowed food and drink to be easily transported from a kitchen to floors above.

Thus, the term refers to two distinct forms of technology. The first, a piece furniture that is static, privatizing, and decorative in its function; the other, a technology that is dynamic, utilitarian, and ultimately democratizing.

Genealogy of the Dumb-waiter

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Illustration of an early wind pulley.

Humans have always created technology to minimize work, from the invention of the wheel to modern day high rise cranes. The study of mechanics and physics took a great leap forward during in Europe from 1500 to 1800 with the work of such renaissance inventors as Galileo and Da Vinci who made developments in rudimentary mechanics and laid the groundwork for the Industrial Age of the late18th and early 19th centuries.

One of the earliest recorded applications of elevator technology within the domestic sphere comes - not surprisingly - from Versailles, the playground of the French royals. In 1744, Louis XV installed a personal lift between the apartments of the favored Duchesse de Châteauroux to the royal bedchamber for rapid and discrete transportation. Unfortunately, the Duchesse soon fell from favor and her successor had the 'gift' removed (Gavois).

The same century in France saw use of the table voletes, or tables machinées, that surprised and delighted guests at elegant dinners. A contemporary description of these 'flying tables' states that they:

lifted all at once by a machine in such a way that the surface of the table, the frame as well as its attachments, is composed by a section of the raised floor...When the guests enter the dining room, there is not the least sign of a table; all that can be seen is a uniform floor that is adorned by a rose at its center. At the slightest nod, the leaves are retracted under the floor, and a table laden with food makes its sudden ascent, flanked by four servants emerging through the four openings.(el-Khoury 1997:62, citing Bonnet in Grimod de La Reynière, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent, and Bonnet 1978:64-65)

This spectacle, sparing no economy, only emphasized lavish domestic service. Indeed, servants literally sprout from the ground with sumptuous meals at hand. Descriptions of the performance - and indeed it was - would then circulate among French society, elevating the [status?] of the host.

From the Royals to the Bourgeoisie

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"The Dumb Waiter", from Harper's Weekly, 1874, shows one of the many early forms of the stationary dumb-waiter.

Employment of the term dumb-waiter, however, proliferates in the mid nineteenth-century and through the early twentieth, when Europeans and Americans struggled to make sense of dramatic socioeconomic shifts that gave rise to the [bourgeoisie] and the democratization of home dining. Early accounts of dumb-waiters, those furnishings upon which tables and glasses were stacked, often surface within the context of the upper class.

For example, an engraved illustration from the Harper's Weekly Supplement of September 1874 entitled "Dumb-Waiter" shows a large taxidermied bear standing in servitude, snarl frozen on his face, waiting to serve champagne from a silver platter. The short article below explains that the creature belonged to Lord Suffield, who shot it while accompanying the Prince of Wales on a Russian hunting trip - an activity "that involves fatigue and danger, and requires endurance and courage." The analogous relationship between animal and servant could not be more clear. The fearsome wild animal, conquered in an act of courage, has been literally domesticated. Though the bear flashes his teeth as if he were ready to let out a mighty roar, Suffield successfully renders it silent, or 'dumb.' Harper's readers must have found it amusing - indeed it is - that Suffield displayed such impressive power over a piece of functional furniture - especially one that was beginning to find its way out of royal residences and into the homes of the well-to-do.

As the upper middle-class expanded, crowding into urban spaces, those households increasingly reconciled the disappearance of the waiter from the domestic dining room by re-situating the servant as a nuisance, an assault against fast-disappearing privacy. E. Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable explains that dumb-waiters are so-called because "it answers all the purposes of a waiter, and is not possessed of an insolent tongue." [citation] For respectable bourgeois households, domestic service was a double-edged sword. Keeping up appearances required the use of servants, many of whom belonged to the lower classes. Thus, 'cultured' private spaces were in constant danger of being penetrated by the 'vulgar' (Fahrni).

Elevator Technology

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Elisha Otis reveals his invention at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition.

Elevator technology had a profound impact on the shaping of the modern industrial city: both businesses and homes grew vertically at astounding speed. As floors stacked upon floors, elevators moved people and goods between them with minimal effort.

The name most widely known and closely associated with the invention of the modern day elevator is undoubtedly that of Elisha Otis, founder of Otis elevator company. Elisha revolutionized elevation technology with the invention of the first passenger elevator with a fail safe safety mechanism (Peterson). After years working for as a lift technician for a bed frame company, Otis received a request to design a safe passenger elevator for a store that had recently had a horrific accident with their primitive elevator system (Otis). In a momentous display in 1853, Otis presented his first passenger elevator to the public at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition, cementing his place in history as the inventor of the first useable passenger elevator (Gavois). Soon afterwards he established a factory, and was providing the first hydraulic and steam operated elevators ever to companies around New York (Otis).

From Static to Dynamic

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E. Brewer's 1888 advertisement in the New York City directory for small lifts, including dumb-waiters and personal elevators.

The mechanized dumb-waiter, the form that typically comes to mind when we talk about them today, became ubiquitous in the tall apartment buildings that Otis's inventions allowed, but the designs for these living spaces and their subsequent popularity are largely attributed to French architect Calvert Vaux. In an 1857 presentation to the American Institute of Architects, he revealed "Parisian Buildings," a new apartment building with generous spaces and amenities, including a dumb-waiter that connected the basement, pantry and service areas (Cromley).

But the American bourgeoisie did not adopt the new forms of domestic spaces so readily, and anxieties about their shrinking private sphere often surfaces in contemporary descriptions of the small lifts. A 1896 article from Harper's Weekly that describes the 'new' New York apartment building desperately reassures readers that their shrinking living spaces are boons and not disappointments, but in doing so only reiterates impulses to safeguard their privacy and block out the encroaching city:

The rented house of the first half of the century was larger than it has become, but it was a mere empty box, after all—usually it was a part of a monotonous row of such boxes. Now such dwellings are tastefully designed, and an effort is made to give each an individual character...The laundryman long ago joined the letter-carrier, butcher, milkman, grocer, and baker in their periodical visits to the basement door; and whenever madame shuts up her house—all barred and bolted and chained as it has been by the builders—she turns it over to a sort of care-taking or watchman's company.

The new American home

Brownstone.jpg

The "Parisian" apartment wasn't the only high density living space finding ubiquity in the American city. New York tenement buildings, consisting of small two to four room units stacked six stories high, carried the stigma of poverty and disease. Buildings that catered to tenants of all economic backgrounds soon proliferated, and the public identified the specific amenities belonging to each with either European sensibility or ethnic squalor.

For example, the 1874 "cheap flat" design published in an 1874 issue of Scribner's Monthly devoted little precious space to public stairways and lobbies, nor service stairs or dumb-waiters, because tenants would be lower class. Buildings for the upper-middle class, however, carefully incorporated designs that ensured the separation of service routes from those intended for tenants and their guests. The smaller living spaces that the Americans bourgeoisie reluctantly accepted only increased their desire to maintain psychological, if not spatial, distance from servants.

In his book, Alone, Together, Elizabeth Collins Cromely explains that:

For apartment-house designer, circulation questions split into two kinds - public paths of movement (for tenants, guests, and servants), and movement inside the private apartment unit. Problems of public circulation in apartment buildings involved the arrangement of stairways, elevators, lobbies, corridors, and dumbwaiters.

The distance between private and public, upper class and lower, efficiency and service, shrank.

Americans in apartments

In the spacious, “wide open plains” sense of our national identity, we have established a cultural opinion around the idea of “living space.” Considering also that the US is a country founded upon Puritanical ideas about privacy and censorship, it is unsurprising that Americans are adverse to the idea of living in apartments. The trouble was that people were rapidly being priced out of the housing market in the quickly growing city. While this was the case, Americans were very reluctant to adjust to the idea of apartment living for the above reasons. On New York’s journey to becoming the city that it is today, architects of the late 1800’s looked to already stuffed European cities for ideas on how to live, trying to strike a balance between practicality and public opinion (Cromley).

In the end, it was only through technological amenities like the dumbwaiter, central heating, and modern lighting that apartment living was made widely popularized and accepted as anything other than lower class. Technological innovation made it possible for the upper class to live one story and relinquish their desire to have primarily compartmentalized space (Hanson). By virtue of their size alone, it was simply not possible to have as many separate rooms with singular purposes in an apartment as it was in a house. Dumbwaiters to the basement level were built into upscale apartment buildings where, for a fee, the tenants could have their food delivered, their laundry done, etc.

"[Apartments] were spatially organized around notions of function still current in the late twentieth century, they depended on an assumption of technological aides replacing servants’ labor, they celebrated convenience, and they both shifted and clarified the place of privacy as a centerpiece of homelife." (Cromley, 173)

In short, the dumbwaiter helped make the necessary connection for Americans to view an apartment as a home, encouraging them to stay in New York during its period of growth instead of moving elsewhere where they would not have to compromise their living space, and helping to maintain representation from all of the classes in the city in the face of rapid immigration and expansion.

Death

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The dumbwaiter largely helped solve some of the problems of social reckoning with an ever expanding city. As the city was able to grow upwards higher and higher thanks to Otis’ invention of the elevator, its relative the dumbwaiter addressed social issues related to the lack of space afforded to city residents. Wherever there are dumbwaiters still installed, they are widely used, such as Yonah Schimmel’s knish shop on Houston. Electric dumbwaiters are still a small business, however they have largely fallen out of popularity and are mostly available as assistance for the elderly or otherwise disabled.

Largely, the dumbwaiter fell out of popularity because of a widespread conciliation with apartment living. Now that it is commonplace to live in an apartment, extra means to appeal to a renter’s sense of propriety and privacy are not common. While Americans still have different norms of privacy than other cultures, apartment living no longer violates them.

Fun Facts

Thomas Jefferson had many dumbwaiters at Monticello, there were ones specifically for wine, food, etc. They were mostly to keep from his guests just how many servants it took to run the place.

In the UK, the term "dumbwaiter" can also refer to a cart of shelves which everyone eats off of buffet style, again, to minimize the presence of servants around for private meetings.

Bibliography

Cromley, Elizabeth C. Alone Together : a history of New York’s early apartments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Ed. Christine L. Krueger. Athens : Ohio University Press, c2002.

Gavois, Jean. Going Up: an informal history of the elevator from the Pyramids to the present. New York: Otis Elevator Co., 1983.

Hanson, Julienne. Decoding Homes and Houses. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Vogel, Robert M. Vertical Transportation in Old Back Bay, a museum case study : the acquisition of a small residential hydraulic elevator. Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.

Otis Brothers & Co. Otis Brothers & Co. Manufacturers of Standard Hydraulic Passenger and Freight Elevators. New York, N.Y.: Otis Brothers & Co., 1886.

Otis Elevator Company. The First One Hundred Years. New York: Otis Elevator Company, 1953.

Petersen, L. A. (Leroy A.), b. 1893. Elisha Graves Otis [1811-1861] and his influence upon vertical transportation. New York, The Newcomen Society of England [American branch] 1945.

Pinter, Harold. “The Caretaker; and, The Dumb Waiter : two plays”. New York : Grove Press, Inc., 1965.

Read, Alice Gray. “Monticello’s Dumbwaiters.” Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 48, No. 3 (Feb., 1995), pp. 168-175.