The Baťa Skyscraper, in Zlín, Czechia,
is a landmark of architecture.
I know it doesn't look like much by modern standards,
but this isn't from the 1970s or 1980s...
it was completed in 1939.
It was Administration Building Number 21,
built to run the Baťa company,
which had started as a small shoe manufacturer
and grown into a huge multinational corporation
across dozens of different industries with tens of thousands of employees.
And this building wasn't just modern in style.
For a pre-World War 2 building, it's surprisingly advanced.
It has air conditioning and heating, adjustable for each floor.
It has a couple of small paternoster lifts
for getting between adjacent floors,
a continuous chain of cabins that never stop:
they're very efficient, just a bit dangerous.
And the boss has a corner office on every floor.
Because the boss's office... is an elevator.
The control panel is next to the desk,
and we're going up.
However, only the museum staff here
are actually allowed to push the buttons,
so please this enjoy this little bit of camera trickery.
The folks who are showing me around didn't want to be on camera,
which is fair enough!
So I'm going to be your tour guide today.
This elevator was built by Otis, the American elevator company,
for Jan Antonín Baťa, the head of the company.
And the technical side of this
is roughly the same as any other large goods lift:
Otis have built much bigger and heavier elevators than this.
Scaling up to five metres by five metres isn't too difficult,
and the furnishings don't add that much weight.
It does have a few extra features:
two telephones, one for local calls and one for international;
plus separate lighting and air conditioning, but those were
pretty much all solved problems for elevators by 1939.
If you're running one cable for lighting,
it's not much more effort to add a few more
to power some fans and provide telephone lines.
But the bit that surprised me was the sink.
How is there hot and cold running water, and a drain,
in a moving elevator?
When I first heard about this,
I thought there'd be a sink installed on each floor
and it would just line up,
but no, this moves with the elevator.
And then I thought maybe there was some incredibly clever plumbing,
like in that rotating house I visited a while ago...
but actually there's just a water tank above
and a wastewater tank below and every so often
maintenance would fill that one and empty that one
because sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
These days, it's kept dry.
Now, there is a story that the boss would use this elevator
to always keep a watch on employees, appearing at any time,
staring from his chair out of the door,
but the guides here say that's a myth.
And it doesn't make sense anyway.
Because each floor of this building is 80 metres by 20 metres,
and this is a corner office with fairly narrow doors.
There just aren't the sightlines to make that possible.
And besides, there's a big light-up indicator outside
that tells you what floor the office is currently sitting on.
It's not recorded whether employees would ever just push the button
to call the office to their floor as a prank,
I really hope that happened sometimes.
I couldn't tell you for sure why this was built.
It's probably efficiency?
It is quite a long walk to the main public elevators,
plus it's much more private,
rather than the boss riding along with everyone else.
And besides: Jan Antonín Baťa never actually got to use this.
Because the building was completed in 1939,
by which point Europe was at war,
and Jan Antonín had left the continent with his family.
The history of him, and the fates of the various
international branches of the company after that are...
complicated.
Complicated enough that you could probably get a whole PhD trying to understand it.
After the war, he was declared a traitor, and he died in exile in Brazil in 1965.
But in 2007, the conviction was officially overturned,
and in 2019, he was given Czechia's highest honor for services to the country,
and there's a statue of him in the park just over the road.
History is complicated, particularly Second World War history in central Europe,
and particularly when I just came here
to make a video about an interesting elevator.
This building is now the main government office for this whole region,
and a local tourist attraction.
And every so often, someone still stops by
to service the elevator.