Popular Mechanics:
Passengers push buttons to call an elevator, and the elevators respond to these requests. But here it starts to get tricky. At any moment there could be any number of pickup and drop off requests from different parts of the building. With so many options for where to go next, what’s an elevator to do?
Try to picture the perfect elevator system. What makes that system so great? Does it serve the person who’s been waiting the longest? Or always go to the closest call? Where does it make the compromise between speedy service and keeping energy usage down?
Elevator engineers grapple with all these questions, and none of them are as simple as they seem.
For some reason, elevators have always fascinated me. On the surface, they are just a box going up and down but there is so much science, engineering, technology, and sociology that goes on with that box.
I have it on good authority that the elevator system in at least one NYC building was programmed to go to the closest call, based on the amount of time anyone might need to wait for one.
The elevators where I work were replaced with more modern ones a couple of years ago. They were not an upgrade. Now the up/down light above the door only lights if the corresponding call button was pressed: if an elevator stops at your floor to let someone off but is going the opposite way than you want to go (or you haven’t pressed the call button yet), there is no visual feedback. And that’s just -one- complaint with the damned things.
The details matter.
From The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: “Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons” jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.
Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.”