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Elisha Otis once risked his business, his reputation, and his life with one stroke of an ax.
Looking down on the crowd at the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York in 1853, Otis gave the signal to chop the only rope that held him suspended on a platform high above the masses.
The crude elevator immediately began to fall. There were gasps and screams. But after just a couple of inches, the platform stopped. “All safe, gentlemen, all safe!” cried Otis.
And just like that, the man who had sold only three elevators the year before became the world’s number one dealer.
To this day, the Otis Elevator Company is, according to their website, “the world’s largest manufacturer and maintainer of people-moving products, including elevators, escalators, and moving walkways.”
Elisha Otis didn’t invent the elevator. Those had been around for years. What he made possible was a safe elevator – one that wouldn’t plunge catastrophically if anything were to happen to the suspension rope.
His secret was a heavy spring that was held in check by the weight on the rope. As soon as the rope was severed, the spring released a pair of giant claws that jammed into a jagged track, holding the elevator in place.
Otis’ brake transformed the world’s skylines. Up to that point, buildings rarely exceeded 10 stories in height. After all, transporting people and furniture up so many flights of stairs got old pretty quickly. Safe and predictable elevators, along with the invention of steel girders, ushered in the era of the skyscraper.
Over the years, elevators have proven to be safer than any other form of transportation.
Still, many of us feel a bit queasy when we hit that button and pause long enough to grasp that we’re traveling in a closed metal box within a windowless, vertical shaft.
What if both the suspension cable and the brakes were to fail simultaneously?
That actually happened once.
In 1945, a U.S. military pilot accidentally flew his plane into the side of the fog-obscured Empire State Building, which at the time was the tallest building in the world. Fire began to spread through the upper floors. A woman named Betty Lou Oliver raced for the elevator. The fire had already weakened both the cables and the braking system, however. The former snapped and the latter failed.
Betty Lou’s elevator plunged a nightmarish 75 stories, all the way to the basement.
And she survived.
Forensic analysts still wonder how she pulled it off. The best theory is that the car was moving so quickly that it compressed the air in the shaft beneath her. Think of the resistance you feel when you push down on a bicycle pump. The piled-up air provided the elevator a soft landing.
Thus, the next time you’re in a high-rise elevator with someone who’s battling anxiety, just smile and say, “Don’t worry, Betty Lou Oliver’s got us covered.”
What Elisha Otis did 173 years ago represented an amazing act of faith.
You simply don’t cut the support rope that is holding you up unless you know for sure something else is going to keep you from falling.
Jesus asks us to do that all the time.
There’s no end to the variety of “ropes and cables” that people believe will keep them safe. Some depend on luck. Things always work out in the end, right? Others bet their security on their looks. Or their health. But both will fail. Still others trust their future to their ability to manage things – their customers, their family, their circumstances. But if you’re counting on being able to control the details of your own life, you’re in for a rapid descent.
Every one of those wannabe suspension ropes will ultimately fail.
But that’s OK: They were never intended to keep us safe, anyways.
Our security lies in what can only be described as the Bible’s greatest elevator verses: “Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy— to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore!” (Jude 24-25)
God is not only able to keep us from falling in this new year. He’s willing, too.
That’s the one and only thing that can keep us going up, both in this world and the next.