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Welcome to the bottom of the barrel.
Today we’re talking about elevators.
This is the Shanghai tower—the second tallest building in the world behind the Burj Khalifa
in Dubai.
Now, building tall buildings is a bit of a… uhh… rooster measuring contest and nowhere
likes flaunting their flightless birds more than China and the UAE.
The Shanghai Tower, which cost $2.5 billion to build, stretches to over 2,000 feet or
600 meters and has 127 stories.
As a point of comparison, if you put eight 747’s on top of each other, the Shanghai
Tower would still be taller mostly because, according to my engineering degree, that’s
not a structurally sound building.
Now, part of the difficulty in having buildings this tall is that people, who mostly come
from the ground, need to get to the top of the building quickly.
If people can’t get to the top of the building easily and quickly, they won’t want to buy
property in the building, which I’m told is a pretty important aspect to profitability.
Therefore, for super-tall buildings such as this, a ton of money and time is put into
designing, as they pretentiously call it, their vertical transportation system.
For the Shanghai Tower, this was so important that its designers hired a company, the Edgett
Williams Consulting Group, to design their system.
To be clear, these guys weren’t designing the elevators themselves, they bought those
from other companies, they were designing the system of elevators.
Now, you might think that you could just have a bunch of very long elevators like any other
building but if you think that, you’d be wrong and you should feel bad.
Here’s why.
Let’s say there’s an eleven story building where there’s a lobby, and then ten floors
which each have one resident.
Now, ten people need to travel from the lobby to first floor because everybody lives above
the lobby, but then from the first to second floor, only nine people need to travel because
only nine people live above the first floor, only eight people live above the second floor,
etc, etc, etc, and only one person lives above the ninth.
The problem, though, is that with a traditional elevator system, you have to build the elevator,
which goes up the whole height of the building, to have exactly enough capacity to transport
exactly as many people travel between the lobby and the first floor even though, when
that elevator gets to the top, it only needs enough capacity to handle one person.
For shorter buildings, it’s just simpler to have one elevator system running to each
floor.
While it’s less efficient from a space perspective, it saves a lot of time.
For taller buildings, though, the problem is that a lot of people fit in the building
and therefore you need a lot of capacity.
With each additional floor in the building, you need more elevator capacity and therefore
more elevators which generally need one shaft each and so, by building an additional floor,
you actually remove overall usable floor space from the building based off the space the
additional elevator shaft takes up on all the floors.
Based off this principle, there’s a theoretical limit to how tall traditionally shaped skyscrapers
can be since, at certain heights and capacities, the space needed for the elevators would be
greater than the horizontal space of the tower itself.
As alpha as an all elevator building sounds, it’s, again, not good for profitability…
unless it was like, an amusement park for all those elevator enthusiast YouTubers.
For all these reasons, most super-tall buildings use a different method of elevators.
Taking the elevator in these buildings is almost like taking the subway which is fair
considering that the Burj Khalifa is taller than the shortest subway line in New York,
the 42nd Street Shuttle, is long.
Unlike the New York Subway, though, the elevators aren’t whizz flavored.
How it works in the case of the Shanghai Tower, for example, is that there are five sky lobbies,
as they’re called, spread out throughout the tower.
From the ground lobby, one set of elevators will go directly to the first, then one set
directly to the second, one to the third, to the forth, and fifth.
From there, people will transfer onto a local elevator that can take them to the exact floor
they want between the two sky-lobbies.
That way, there are only a few elevators at the top where not many are needed thereby
saving space and you can also have two elevators in one shaft—the express one and the local
one.
Now, you might wonder, why not just have sets of elevators that travel direct from the ground
floor up to each sky-lobby and then switch to local after that.
Well, it’s because not all elevators are created equal.
The express elevators are double-decker meaning, in the same shaft, they have double the capacity
and they’re super-fast.
The local elevators, on the other hand, are just fairly normal elevators.
But now for the titular question.
Like any good super-tall building, the Shanghai tower has an observation deck so you can pay
to look down on the plebs.
In fact, this is the highest observation deck in the world but to get to it, you wouldn’t
want all the tourists to have to deal with sky-lobbies and local elevators and all that
confusion because tourists are known for their limited intellectual ability.
Therefore, there are three elevators going directly from the ground floor all the way
to the 121st floor—a distance of 1,898 feet or 579 meters.
That’s record number one—its the furthest traveling single elevator in the world.
Record number two is that this is the fastest elevator in the world—it gets people from
the ground to the 121st floor in only 55 seconds.
That’s a speed of 40 miles or 65 kilometers per hour.
On the way down, though, the elevator only goes a measly 22 miles or 36 kilometers per
hour.
The reason?
Any faster, and it would be uncomfortable as people couldn’t equalize their ears fast
enough.
Of course, the reason these are so fast, in addition to just the prestige of having the
record, is to save room.
You can either have one elevator that makes the trip in 55 seconds or two that make it
in 110.
Now that you’ve learned absolutely everything there ever is to know about the second tallest
building in the world, you probably want to learn more about the tallest building—the
Burj Khalifa.
Luckily, you can do so for free by watching this great documentary on Curiosity Stream.
This documentary gives a unique glimpse into the lives of those that live and work in this
vertical city.
Curiosity Stream, meanwhile, is, of course, that great website where you can watch any
of more than 2,400 documentaries for free on pretty much any device you want.
Better yet, by going to https://curiositystream.com/hai and using the code, “hai,” you can watch
for free for a month.