Dumbwaiter

From Dead Media Archive
Revision as of 15:44, 5 November 2008 by Valerie (Talk | contribs) (Impacts of the elevator)

Jump to: navigation, search

The dumbwaiter, or hand hoist, is a small platform used to transport goods from one level of a building to the next.

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination

Genealogy of the Elevator

Machinery to reduce work has been around as long as humans have been creating permanent dwellings, from the invention of the wheel and the first lever system 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.

Da Vinci’s design for an early elevation system.

Wind pulley.jpg

Earliest known uses of non-hydraulic elevation systems

One of the earliest in home elevation systems recorded was in 1744, a gift from Louis XV to the favored Duchesse de Châteauroux, to provide rapid transport from her apartments at Versailles to the royal bedchamber. This was not in place for long as the Duchesse was replaced and her follower had it removed (Gavois).

Also popular in France, the early “italics” “tables volantes,” essentially a table sized dumbwaiter, able to be set entirely and raised into the dining room as well as removed discreetly, without the presence of servants interrupting the post-meal chatter (Gavois).

The Industrial Revolution

Otis presentation.jpg

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 from a store which had recently had a horrific accident with their primitive elevator system (Otis).

In a momentous display in 1953, 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).

Impacts of the elevator

Adv.jpg

The invention of the elevator would revolutionize the inner workings of the city, allowing for the sky scrapers and high rises we now characterize New York by. The sudden possibility of expansion which the passenger elevator saved Wall Street, which was rapidly out growing its downtown location from relocating, effectively making sure that New York stayed the center of the USA’s financial world (Otis). After all of the many high rise, expensive edition “rapid transport” elevators available in the Otis Company’s 1886 inventory catalogue, one page is dedicated to a little device referred to as the “portable hand hoist,” what we will come to recognize as the forbearer to the dumbwaiter.

How it works

The term “dumbwaiter” has gained many colloquial meanings and actually has a great variety of technical variations. Early dumbwaiters, such as Otis’ “portable hand hoist” were operated with a simple system of cranks and levers on the user end, with a pulley system attached above the mechanism to raise and lower. Later dumbwaiters utilized a hydraulic pump for increased ease, and eventually could be installed to run off of electricity (Vogel).

A changing society

During the mid to late 1800’s New York was undergoing a huge population boom. These years marked a drastic influx of immigration, which then led to the rapid and haphazard establishment of tenements for them to live in (Cromley). This fast shift in housing demand caused a social divide between those who live in tenements, widely seen to be for poor immigrants who lacked ‘American’ norms of living proxemics and those who lived in a freestanding homes around the city, mostly people who had lived in New York back when it was still just considered a city, instead of the city.

The ‘home’ ideal

Brownstone.jpg

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.

The dumbwaiter in the traditional row house was a boon, however the dumbwaiter thrived as more than just a mere retrofitted technology. The shift to vertical rearrangement in the city was inevitable, and the buildings who benefited most from the installation of this device were the newly constructed apartment buildings which Americans were trying to wrap their minds around living in.

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

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination

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.