Elisha Graves Otis was born on August 3, 1811, in Halifax, Vermont, left home at 19, and spent five years as a wagon driver in Troy, New York, learning how loads, axles, and materials fail. In 1834 he married Susan Houghton, but pneumonia that year nearly killed him and pushed the family back to Vermont near the Green River. There he built a gristmill that failed for lack of grain, converted it to a sawmill that failed for lack of lumber customers, and turned to building wagons and carriages. In 1842 Susan died, leaving him with an eight year old and an infant. In 1845 he married Elizabeth Boyd and moved to Albany, where he invented an automatic turner that sped bedpost production fourfold, opened the Hudson Manufactory in 1848, and designed a railway safety brake before the business collapsed in 1850.

In 1852 he moved to Yonkers to install machinery for Maize and Burns, whose crude rope hoists inspired his safety elevator. A wagon spring held clear of toothed guide rails by rope tension would snap outward and lock the platform if the rope broke. He founded his elevator company in 1853, and at the 1854 New York Crystal Palace exhibition he had an assistant cut his hoist rope with an axe. On March 23, 1857, he installed the first commercial passenger safety elevator in the E.V. Haughwout building. He died of diphtheria on April 8, 1861, at 49.

• His line to the Crystal Palace crowd after the platform dropped only a few inches: all safe, gentlemen, all safe
• How the safety elevator flipped urban real estate, turning cheap servants’ top floors into the most desirable homes
• A steam-powered plow patented in 1857 that nobody bought, a rotary bread oven in 1858, and an oscillating steam engine with his son Charles in 1860
• Why Otis never saw a true skyscraper, since steel framing arrived in Chicago in the late 1880s
• The company’s later path, from coining the word escalator to United Technologies in 1976, a 2020 spinoff, and the Liberty ship SS Elisha Graves Otis