The First Passenger Elevator: This Day in Otis History

On March 23, 1857, the first commercial safety elevator designed specifically for passenger use went into service.

Eder V. Haughwout equipped his five-story, upscale department store in New York City with Otis’ first passenger elevator. The cast-iron building wasn’t any taller than other New York buildings of the time. But Haughwout hoped that people would come to check out this revolutionary technology – and stick around to shop. In the coming years, his customers would include Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

This was just five years after Elisha Otis invented his elevator safety brake – an inspired solution to a universal problem of the industrial age: how to safely move freight from floor to floor without risking lives and destroying the cargo if the hoisting rope broke. The Haughwout building marked the technology’s first use intended for passengers – a milestone that would help give rise to the modern vertical city and forever transform how people live and work. The elevator, with a fully enclosed cab, was powered by a steam engine and ran at 0.20 meters (8 inches) per second.

New York was already among the world’s largest cities at the time, with around 800,000 residents. Its population would surpass a million by 1880. Today, the city’s population is nearly 8.5 million, in a world with a total population of 8 billion – more than half of whom live in cities.

We’ve come a long way since Elisha Otis invented the modern elevator. Our elevators today are equipped with sophisticated dispatching technologies, energy-saving features, and other advanced systems designed to deliver a quiet, comfortable ride for the 2.3 billion people Otis moves each day.

Otis elevators can be found in some of the world’s most iconic buildings, as well as apartment buildings, commercial towers, and the busiest retail centers, metros and airports – everywhere people on the move. To learn more about Otis innovation and history, visit /web/company/about-us/history