Did you know....

Im sure a few of us never read about this in our history courses in high school, but did you knoe that Alexander Miles od Minnesota patented the first electric elevator on October 11, 1887? We all know he did not invent the very first elevator, his ispriation of a different design was very important and made a impact. He basically improved the style of opening and closing of the actual doors of the elevator, and the improvement of the opening and closing of the shaft when it was not present on a floor level. The actual mechanism was created by him for elevator access. Back in the days, the person getting on the elvator had to manually close the door to cutoff access to the shaft, so this part of the improvement help a lot. When patrons forgot to close the shaft, there were a few accidents, as you can imagine, so this part of the invention was also a matter of safety.
We can look at our local elevator and see the words 'OTIS" labeled on them, which was named after a man named Elisha Otis, who actually made improvements on the hoisting apparatus. So he never invented the elevator himself, he just improved and invented the brake used in modern elevtors, but of course he got all the credit.