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ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]
- ajarmst 9y agoPoor choice of title. It may be the first direct-drive or non-linear elevator, but rope and cable-free hydraulic elevators have been in service for decades.
- martinko 9y agoThere already are rope-free elevators, for instance: - the hydraulic elevator (https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFWNDQDN2hE/T3nbR7woCAI/AAAAAAAABgs/7G0JKEacDJI/s1600/holed+1.JPG https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFWNDQDN2hE/T3nbR7woCAI/AAAAAAAAB...) -the Paternoster (http://www.audioguideportal.de/assets/Foto/thumbnail520x397/1093_rp_mainz_kaiserstrasse5_paternoster_08_2001_mlpreiss.jpg http://www.audioguideportal.de/assets/Foto/thumbnail520x397/...) The post title is just clickbait for a ThyssenKrupp commercial, plus it only shows animations of these new elevators. Yawn.
- dom0 9y ago> plus it only shows animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7QlAsxJP-g#t=58s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7QlAsxJP-g#t=58s
- devdoomari 9y agoI'd rather not ride a paternoster --- seems quite likely to function as an execution machine :(
- mschuster91 9y agoNope. The first 25cm in front of the cabin opening are a flap, which means it will not shear your head off.
- ManuelKiessling 9y agoThere are several Paternosters in operation where I work (HBC Europe HQ in Cologne), and they are very cleverly designed in subtle ways to work around the likelihood of an execution.
- userbinator 9y ago"World's first 3D people mover" might be a more appropriate --- and enticing --- title, because "rope-free" can also refer to hydraulic elevators (which have been around for over a century.)
- londons_explore 9y agoAs far as I can see, the design only allows 2D movement. If you wanted the lift to move toward or away from the camera, you would need either some kind of 2nd attachment point on a different side.
- samstave 9y agowhy couldn't a horizontal segment have a curve to change the Z axis by whatever angle you wanted to get to. Also, they could have a completely circular horizontal segment to move people through an upper level of a round building - like a stadium...
- CydeWeys 9y agoOr a vertical segment could have a curve too. Imagine rotating by 45 degrees as you go up ten floors -- suddenly now you're in a completely different plane.
- userbinator 9y agoThey could use the bottom of the car.
- tootie 9y agoThe rendering of the cabin traversing a skyway looked it followed some kind of bend.
- tajen 9y agoWe could also check whether "The Willy Wonka elevator" arouses more curiosity: It's a feature of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book (and in the movie from Tim Burton).
- saidajigumi 9y agoExcellent, looks like we’re finally on the path to the turbolifts from Star Trek!
- joatmon-snoo 9y agoI was thinking more along the line of Willy Wonka's glass elevators :p
- Naushad 9y agoInteresting, they are basically Trains running vertically switching tracks.
- the8472 9y agoGetting closer to Turbolifts. Canonically they form a network throughout the ship, use induction motors, can also go sideways, have multiple cabins in the shafts, switch routes etc. No inertial dampeners of course.
- netsharc 9y agoOff-topic, who is the narrator? I think I've heard him on another German "corporate presentation" video, and I can hear a slight German accent... And back on-topic, googling to find the details instead of just a flashy video, here's Tom Scott on MULTI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI
- dom0 9y agoHe sounds somewhat similar to the kurzgesagt voice-over artist.
- sschueller 9y agoI have heard him before as well narrating stuff I'm German. Sadly I have no idea who he is.
- leeoniya 9y agolooks expensive to build, purchase and maintain. not sure there's anything "revolutionary" here.
- sharpercoder 9y agoIf the rails are solid state using for example magnetic levitation, I can see this being much cheaper to maintain.
- samstave 9y agoEver been in an elevator during a power outage?
- dom0 9y agoProbably no one at ThyssenKrupp thought of that. You should write them a letter outlining your concerns.
- mschuster91 9y agoNo problem either - do it like on freefall towers or on other park attractions, where eddy current brakes, fully passive, are employed as safety mechanism.
- dom0 9y agoAll elevators have multiple safety brakes working on their guide rails (this is the famous invention of Otis); so do these. Besides batteries lasting longer (two hours, they say) than the median European power outage.
- CydeWeys 9y agoPlus hopefully battery banks (which you'll likely want on the elevators anyway to be able to store energy from regenerative braking) to power the car long enough to come to a rest where the passengers can get out in the event of a power outage. There's going to be several layers of safeguards, like there are with current elevators.
- DanBlake 9y agoLooks to be about.... 10? times the cost of a normal elevator if I had to guess. I bet the maintenance costs are fun as well. As such, doubt you will see these except in niche buildings (things like the porsche tower, etc..)
- the8472 9y agoThe tallest skyscrapers have issues with elevators because the cables can only be so long before they snap under their own weight, so you need elevator changing floors, which take up space and lower throughput. Either you find flexible materials with a higher tensile-strength to weight ratio than steel or you forego cables entirely.
- dom0 9y agoClassic elevators also need a lot of floor space to achieve good throughput. This system is basically like a paternoster on steroids; it can rise much higher, move much faster, use arbitrary circuits and has none of the safety issues. Even if this system only saves, say, 40 % floor space, it'd still be a win for many projects.
- nabla9 9y agoKone UltraRope carbon fiber core hoisting rope allows 1 kilometer.
- kentf 9y agoSo many negative comments for a Saturday. This is a marvel of engineering and deserves a celebration. Humbled by our ability to re-invent more and more. Well done to all involved.
- occultist_throw 9y agoIndeed! It reminds me of the root foundations of a TurboLift from Star Trek.
- sabujp 9y agoI always thought that they used the vacuum of space to accelerate and decelerate those
- rhgbb 9y agohi
- nabla9 9y agoI hope HN could avoid mindless cheering and positivity related to technology matters. Negative or positive comments that only express private feeling should be discouraged. They reduce the value of the discussion. Interesting technological discussion means criticizing.
- Eridrus 9y agoI feel like they didn't really do much to motivate this. Some of the comments here about increasing throughput provide clearer motivation - they do show this super briefly in the video with elevators operating in a cycle, but the benefits didn't really click.
- CydeWeys 9y agoThis might be a little bit premature. I'd want to see broad commercial success before celebrating it as a marvel of engineering. Systems like this have been invented repeatedly throughout the decades, but they never succeeded for one reason or another. The problem isn't in coming up with the concept (or, now, making animated 3D renderings), it's in making it actually work well. This, incidentally, is why so many of us are so ecstatic about SpaceX -- because they've made something amazing that actually works.
- dclowd9901 9y agoI hate to be so cynical, but for how often the TK elevator in our building is out of service (these things have been around for 100 years and still break down more than a Fiat), I don't have the confidence necessary to step foot in this thing.
- dom0 9y agoTime out of service has much more to do with who services them.
- Rjevski 9y agoNote that a TK elevator doesn't mean it's actually still maintained by TK. For example in my previous building there was an Otis elevator but at some point the maintenance stickers on it became TK's, probably because they offered a cheaper maintenance contract. TLDR: the manufacturer can't do much about the owner not maintaining their product properly.
- stinos 9y agoCame to post a similar comment. Of course it's anecdotal, but in our old building we had a +20 years old Schindler's lift (yes that sounds very close to Schindler's List, the joke is never far away) and in the 5 years I was there I never saw them failing. In a new building no single month passes by without one of the TK elevators needing servicing, at worst multiple times a week. And if they're in service there are still always chances they forget the floor entered or one of the special programs for limited access areas stops working. Definitely software problems but might also be hardware related sometimes. Like the doors sliding open a couple of mm then closing again, until the technician shows up once again. I know that doesn't mean all their products are like that and maybe human error is at fault here, but it ceryainly does not leave the same good impression as the Schindler's ones.
- icebraining 9y agoMy previous workplace had a couple of Schindlers, which failed multiple times per year.
- 9y ago
- samstave 9y agoMy dad was is an elevator repair man, has been for the last 33 years. When I asked him what he thought about his job, he said "just like any other, it has its ups and downs" But after seeing this, now we are going back and forth on the future of the industry!
- kumarvvr 9y agoImpressive video. The implementation looks complicated and might have reliability issues. Wonder what tech they use for traction while moving vertically.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- samstave 9y agoThe real problem I see with this, is the complexity of the components required to make anything seen in this video is orders of magnitudes more that vertical shaft versions -- thus the cost of an elevator will me massive. What are the seismic implications - the tolerances on the XY intersections are surely tight. How the hell would you inspect some of the complex systems. You would need a sensor car that just roams the tracks measuring tolerance levels - make it a service car that repairmen can be in which has no walls. You'd be more cost effective putting all your large sensor objects in a car as opposed to thousands of them throughout the system What happens when a rotating intersection piece fails and its the only route a car can take/the piece fails with a car on that portion of track - there is no door/escape/access to the passengers in that scenario. Also - the building would require extra height to accommodate horizontal passages if the intersection between XY cant happen at ingress/egress points. If they DO happen at such points - what happens when E1 wants to go right and E2 wants to go left. one car need to give way, then get back on track to go... routing conflicts could occur frequently - like the skyway connectors between towers where that Sim takes the car from tower1 to tower2 but he gets out of the middle of a row of doors.... And as mentioned, elevators are already not that cheap - I don think all but the Nakatomi Plaza and Ono Sendai HQ buildings could afford these yet... Actually - There are buildings with primary structural elements on there external (HSBC Building in Hong Kong, for example) -- So I could see this as an external bolt-on layer to the side of a building - as opposed to a network of tunnels and shafts throughout - but then that eliminates a majority of the horizontal movement, unless it wraps onto two sides of a building...
- revelation 9y agoSoo many machined pieces... wonder if that is the production design.
- SomewhatLikely 9y agoAccelerating and decelerating in line with gravity is a lot more forgiving on the occupants than lateral accelerations. Seems like this would put a big limit on horizontal movement.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoDepends on whether or not the car can 'tilt' while it is moving sideways (I know they don't show it doing so). If it can then any amount of acceleration can be presented as 'up' and 'down' force to the occupants much like a plane.
- aaron_m04 9y agoSounds complex and expensive.
- ant6n 9y agoWell, tilting itself involves acceleration, which will be perceived differently in different parts of the cabin... So there are still and issues.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWhen combined with the acceleration they are indistinguishable. I got a chance to ride in the full motion simulator at NASA Ames and it used this 'trick' to recenter itself after it had made a left or right motion. Inside you felt nothing, like the system was unmoving but outside it was moving the flight pod back to the center of motion so that it had maximum reach for the next maneuver. I'm sure the TK folks could manage it. The trick is that the 'tilt' of the car on the linear motor would add an additional degree of freedom to deal with. And yet it would be expensive but they seem to have already crossed that bridge :-)
- londons_explore 9y agoMy ideal elevator would accelerate at a pleasant 4 m/s^2 and have a jerk not exceeding 4 m/s^3. It would have doors that close instantly when the doorway is clear, and start right away. That would be able to take me up a 100 yard high building in 11 seconds. Why can't real elevators be like that? Why must the doors move slowly, and wait for 5 seconds before even starting moving? Why does the elevator reach a sluggish top speed, even with very little load? Why when arriving at the destination floor does it take a further 2 or 3 seconds for the door to open?
- mabbo 9y agoI can think of three possible reasons why not, all equally likely: 1- no one has bothered. 2- it's been tried, something terrible happened and now they don't try it anymore. 3- it's been tried, but the extra cost doesn't cover the extra benefit. No one wants to pay for it. All that said, I was at a hotel once that had, to my mind, perfect acceleration like you describe. No one else cared, but I was blown away by it.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoPeople with reduced mobility or reduced vision will love instant closing guilliotines.
- jjoonathan 9y agoThe door closing mechanism is designed with limited power and there's an optical sensor to prevent it from even trying to close on someone. Why wouldn't that still be the case on a fast closing door? More tellingly: fast closing doors are absolutely a thing, so clearly the safety issues are not insurmountable, but I only see them in more modern/expensive locations. I suspect it's a price grading move and if you wait another century fast-closing doors will be everywhere.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoYeah but the faster they go the more inertia the whole thing has to handle for those safety mechanism, right? And the added machinery weight impacts on the elevator loading as well.
- leeoniya 9y agowhat problem does this solve to justify the crazy expense, complexity and maintenance? the reason elevators exist is because people cannot easily climb 100+ vertical ft, especially while carrying stuff. on the other hand, humans are well adapted for horizontal travel - 15mi per day without breaking a sweat. and when they're not, there are movable walkways like in airports. this whole thing is a solution looking for a problem, IMO. we don't yet live in Matrix-style human incubators with miles of horizontal travel in buildings that are also miles high - it's usually either/or, and not because we've been lacking these revolutionary elevators.
- chki 9y agoIf those elevators worked they would actually solve a big engineering problem: Very High Buildings can only have a limited number of elevator shafts. But it takes a significant time to use them which makes it problematic if there are a lot of people who want to go. But if elevators were able to travel horizontally that is a first step towards having multiple elevators in one shaft. There are still other problems that need to be solved in order to do this but if it works you can easily transport a lot of people in skyscrapers by having one "upwards" shaft and one "down" shaft which the elevator capsule can change between by moving horizontally.
- leeoniya 9y agoyou can have dedicated up and down shafts where the cars move horizontally only at the top and bottom, like a ferris wheel. without having them move horizontally at any floor. you just need a way to disconnect the rope (like ski lifts). or you can have towing cars that have only 50 ft of rope and operate on rails (like ships that get towed through Panama locks)
- russdill 9y agoThat means that all cars must traverse the entire distance and that all cars must wait each time a car reaches a floor.
- mabbo 9y agoThis will be how we build towers twice as tall as existing megatowers. As beautifully explained by xkcd[0], "If your building has lots of floors, you need lots of different elevators, since there would be so many people trying to come and go the same time. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms." But if one elevator shaft can have multiple independent cars, suddenly you've got a huge capacity multiplier without the space costs. The horizontal motion part is cute, but I don't think it will matter nearly as much. [0]https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/
- robotresearcher 9y agoThe car motion is not independent and it's hard to use the capacity well. Consider the morning rush in a big office tower when everyone starts on the ground floor. You can only use the bottom car to move these people. You need a sideways dimension of movement to avoid this problem.
- mabbo 9y agoOh, definitely, I agree. You need at least 2 (probably 3 or 4 for extra redundancy) shafts. But you need them to be usually one-way shafts. So everyone going up gets in at the same door, and the empty cars can fly down the other side to be ready to take more people up.
- notatoad 9y ago>You need a sideways dimension of movement to avoid this problem. you mean like the elevator system being discussed here?
- robotresearcher 9y agoYes. I was replying to this comment: > But if one elevator shaft can have multiple independent cars, suddenly you've got a huge capacity multiplier without the space costs. > The horizontal motion part is cute, but I don't think it will matter nearly as much. My point is: 1. Stacked cars are not independent. 2. Horizontal motion matters a lot.
- dingo_bat 9y agoThis is awesome! Hopefully this means the elevator can now directly open into my apartment!
- veli_joza 9y agoThis is exciting possibility, but I would expect the builders will try to minimize the volume taken by shaft. Corridors are less expensive to build and maintain than these high-tech shafts.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- armitron 9y agoReminded me of CPU interconnects.
- sabujp 9y agocrossbar
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThe follow up video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OBHUZetYIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OBHUZetYIU was a bit more interesting. It shows the mockup system running through a variety of transitions. I'd be interested in why they decided to make the 'track' as complex as they did. The transition nodes are an amazing mechanism but it seems also a likely failure point.
- 21 9y agoIt's explained in another video. Those "tracks" are linear motors, with periodic electro magnetic coils. Looks like it will be crazily expensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI
- rl12345 9y agoBeautifully made and well-structured video. In just 120 seconds, they effectively: I. Set the stage by showing a trend. II. Describe two premises and derive a logical conclusion from them. III. Show a product that not only is the objective answer to the conclusion above but also fits perfectly into the initial narrative.
- rhgbb 9y agohi
- panic 9y agoLooking forward to playing SimTower Multi!
- SeeDave 9y agoAbsolutely incredible video, and great product!
- alfanick 9y agoSchedulers for Multi must be fun - I'm sure they must have employed a whole research group for solving this problem. Scheduling simple elavator systems is still a problem nowadays, this one? It's so much harder.
- brink 9y agoNothing a little deep learning can't solve. Right? Right guys?
- minus7 9y agoSounds like it'd be a fun game
- stdclass 9y agohttp://play.elevatorsaga.com/ http://play.elevatorsaga.com/ There you go. Lost so many hours playing this game though.
- lkbm 9y agoThank you for sharing this. I've also now lost quite a few hours to it. Also got two of my coworkers into it.
- m_eiman 9y agoSimTower started life as an elevator simulator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower
- gruturo 9y agoI'm rather sure they haven't. Source: Myself, working in a high-rise building served by ~20 ThyssenKrupp elevators, 10 of which actually share 5 shafts (they're not the ropeless version though, AFAIK), and the scheduling sucks big time. We got them to informally acknowledge that they're being wiped every night to get around some nasty bugs, so they never learn traffic patterns, but even then it's infuriating to see how crap they are even on a Sunday with the building empty.
- todd8 9y agoKind of reminds me of IP packets, but of people not bits. They could even travel underground from building to building and then we would have an internet of elevators transmitting packets of people (hopefully with reliable delivery and no dropped packets).
- danielvf 9y agoThe big benefit is that you get more than one elevator per shaft. For skyscrapers the amount of floor space wasted by elevators grows exponentially by the number of floors. Say you have a 5 story building that needs a one shaft elevator. 5 floors tiles 100 sqft per floor is 500 sqft of wasted shaft space. Then say you have a 10 story building that needs two shafts. Now you are wasting 10 floors times two shafts or 2,000 sqft. And so on. An old and terrifing solution to this was to use two shafts and run a continuous loop of open door elevators. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro3Fc_yG3p0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro3Fc_yG3p0
- anoother 9y agoPaternosters. You say terrifying, I say fun. There's one in Leicester University (not the only one in the UK, I'm sure). Really not that dangerous, with a cable near the top of each aperture that triggers a stop if it's touched.
- stcredzero 9y agoThe SF garage my fiancee parks in has this thing made from an industrial belt, with steps bolted onto it. I think there are quite a few of those in Stuttgart as well, though they are being fazed out. It's very efficient, but not for ze stupits!
- pimlottc 9y agoOut of curiosity, where in SF? I'd be interested to see one.
- stcredzero 9y agoThe parking garage near the corner of Bush and Mason.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- URSpider94 9y ago
- ChristianGeek 9y agoAm I the only one who noticed that the first elevator shown in the video, while the narrator discussed the birth of the elevator in 1854, is gear-based and hence rope-free?!
- snatoeuhsnta 9y agoThe first elevator is a Elisha Otis demonstration of the elevator brake. You can see the rope snap, and the teeth on the side stop the elevator. The gears were presumable to pull the rope up for the demo.
- Animats 9y agoThat's Otis's original safety elevator, and it was a rope system. The innovation was that it had a mechanism to stop it if the rope broke.
- ChristianGeek 9y agoAh, thanks for the clarification...the animation made it look like it was the gear system that was controlling the movement.
- Animats 9y agoThe animation is a redraw of this picture.[1] It's one of the most famous demos in history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elisha_OTIS_1854.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elisha_OTIS_1854.jpg
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoGood to know. I saw the animation as a snipe at roped elevators, freezeframing just as the elevator fails and goes into freefall. It makes more sense knowing the history.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoAnytime I see something about elevators I am reminded of this amazingly detailed, and highly engrossing article on the life and history of elevators. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-dow...
- GrayShade 9y agoI think the routing algorithms could be interesting. It's funny to think about the possibility of gridlocked elevators.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoAside, for those interested in the music behind the video, it's an original composition, and you can learn more and download it here: http://www.urban-hub.com/de/people/der-videoproduzent-der-multi-filmreif-in-szene-setzte/ http://www.urban-hub.com/de/people/der-videoproduzent-der-mu...
- Animats 9y agoThe elevator industry has been playing around with multi-cab systems for many years. The Otis Odyssey system (1997) [1] had cabs that could move both horizontally and vertically. The cabs were more like containers carried vertically in ordinary elevators and slid out sideways for horizontal movement. Otis built a full-sized prototype, but nobody ever ordered one. Otis considered ropeless elevators, but in 1997 it looked like it would increase the energy consumption by 7X. Without counterweights, the motors have to do a lot more work. But maybe Multi can recover some of the energy via regeneration. There are automated parking garages that can move cars sideways.[2] Those go back to the 1960s, and tend to be high-maintenance. The Multi system looks really complicated mechanically. All those moving parts. Worse, they're on vertical surfaces in the shafts, where maintenance will be difficult. With regular elevators, the high-maintenance items are in the machine room. This will probably go into some prestige tower, but not be replicated much. [1] http://www.barkermohandas.com/images/Integrated%20Vertical%20&%20Horizontal%20Transport.pdf http://www.barkermohandas.com/images/Integrated%20Vertical%2... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vtpGtyw1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vtpGtyw1k
- mpalmer 9y ago> Worse, they're on vertical surfaces in the shafts, where maintenance will be difficult. Maybe - but movement on two axes lets you get creative with your tools. You could for instance store a "maintenance car" with special fittings that expose the shaft mechanisms. The car could be introduced into the system as needed and removed when it would just be in the way.
- pm90 9y agoWow. Kinda off topic, but looking at the complexity of the automatic parking garage makes me wonder whether, in the future, growth of jobs will look like, e.g. automatic parking garage repairer...
- dredmorbius 9y agoMy first read is that this system would be useful for inventory or parts management / movement. Rather than pepole movement, cargo. This would also be 1) more forgiving of "whooses", and of what I suspect are going to be some pervasive acceleration and directional issues. Crates of goods don't get motion-sick.
- nneonneo 9y agoThe resulting internal transportation network enabled by this system resembles a public transit tramway system more than it resembles a traditional elevator system - and I'm willing to bet that isn't accidental. As skyscrapers become bigger and more ubiquitous, it seems natural that their internal transit systems would get correspondingly more complex, and borrowing from public transit seems like a perfectly natural way to solve the problem. Plus, in this system all the elevators are centrally scheduled and therefore there won't be any concern about human drivers fouling up the system :)
- CydeWeys 9y agoI had a chance recently to ask the famous architect David Adjaye what new upcoming technology he thought would change architecture in the coming years, like how steel beams and reinforced concrete allowed the skyscraper innovation from the last century, and his answer was immediate: 3D elevator systems. Apparently traditional linear elevator systems are really limiting as far as what can be accomplished with skyscrapers, to the point that a famous architect sees fully flexible 3D people mover systems inside a building as being the next big innovation to radically change what cities look like.
- closeparen 9y agoInteresting point. Buildings that are very large on the horizontal plane (like the Pentagon) have adopted systems of personal transport like bicycles and Segways. But I guess there's no reason why the elevator model shouldn't work horizontally. Still, elevators in general are more like ridesharing than public transit: they move according to the requests they receive in real time (with some central planning influence), rather than on a schedule set by committee months or years prior.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoOne issue I haven't seen addressed is that the horizontal shafts will block foot traffic through the building.
- dredmorbius 9y agoSolutions: Have an elevator plane on the building -- shafts and corridors which are all located at one extreme side of the building, rather than the core. And/or have horizontal transit floors. You don't need horizontal transit at every floor, just sufficiently frequently to accomplish lateral transfers.
- jjoe 9y agoThis might read a bit odd and tangential but I cringe every time I get into a ThyssenKrupp elevator. Thyssen and Krupp were huge fans of Hitler and the Nazis. The two families donated large sums of money to their cause. They both benefited from Hitler's support and promoted the use of forced labor. ThyssenKrupp is largely seen as a Hitler firm in many circles. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThyssenKrupp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThyssenKrupp [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp [2] http://spartacus-educational.com/GERthyssen.htm http://spartacus-educational.com/GERthyssen.htm
- dom0 9y agoThe case of Thyssen is actually quite interesting, because he was an avid Hitler supporter in the early 1930s, but later heavily opposed Nazi policies and fled the country.
- pm90 9y agoMany of the progenitors of modern Japanese companies were heavily involved in assisting the Imperial Japanese government during WW2 as well. Although US did dismantle a lot of the zaibatsu's after the war.
- makarb 9y agoYou know what, nobody cares about that anymore. Only those who desperately want to be seen as victims.
- altstar 9y agoI think you can give it a rest. It has been 70 years.
- riffic 9y agoWow, just more over-engineered mechanical shit that will break down in spectacular ways.
- lathiat 9y agoHere's a tour of the system in their test tower by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTsbFS4xmI And it has it's first production project in the OVG East Side Tower Berlin (though not yet finished building)
- cable2600 9y agoOne step closer to the Wonkavader. Which always freaked me out that it could move anywhere and even fly.
- amai 9y agoI posted this more than 2 weeks ago and nobody seemed interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807079
- aurora- 9y agoThis holds the promise of being able to call a car in the foyer and being delivered directly into your own home in a residential building; directly into the reception of the business you're visiting or working in; or directly door-to-door, business to business within the same building. It would be really cool in a hospital. No matter how well a hospital is laid out (and many aren't), some patient flows are bottlenecked by the next required treatment or investigation step not being adjacent. To be able to unload a trauma patient from an ambulance in ED and have the same door in the Resus Room lead almost directly to Radiology; Operating Room; or Intensive Care as required would be a time and life saver ...
- Cellestro 9y agoNobody is going to call it multi if this takes off. It will be called a multivator. They better come up with a good naming system for getting to lateral destinations.