For more, see this long New Yorker article that includes a lot of elevator history: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down https://www.n

For more, see this long New Yorker article that includes a lot of elevator history: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-do... The quick summary is that Mr. White recovered from the elevator mishap, but his $25 million lawsuit took four years and ruined his life. He ended up settling for low six figures, but lost his job and his friends. "Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator."