Education is the heartbeat of our industry. We have more training opportunities than most other trades – including two four-year programs and massive amounts of continuing education available to both union and merit shop companies. This issue introduces a new level with the Elevator Learning Center (ELC). First Class by Kaija Wilkinson reports on the opening of the ELC by D & D Elevator to great fanfare. Appropriately, it is situated in Yonkers, New York, where Elisha Graves Otis invented the first elevator safety brake and built the first elevator factory. The center includes classroom and hands-on training using the Certified Elevator Technician® program that Bob Schaeffer, president of D & D, helped develop.
Why are safety and education so important to one another? There are still states that do not require elevator technicians to be educated or licensed – New York is one of them, but it won’t stop people like Schaeffer from trying.
Another education opportunity occurred several thousand miles away in Istanbul. IEES 2018 by Angela Baldwin covers the inaugural International Elevator and Escalator Symposium (IEES) organized by Liftinstituut Solutions BV and Elevator World, Inc. By all accounts, it was a total success. The subject was Safety in Vertical Transportation and New Technology. Some 165 attendees listened and questioned the presenters of 20 papers. Two of those papers are presented in this issue under the focus topic of Safety. The IEES will reoccur in the fall of 2019 in Las Vegas.
As mentioned above, the focus this month is Safety. First up is Give me a Brake by Brian Mather. The author notes that elevators didn’t really gain popularity until the above-mentioned safety brake was developed. This article discusses all the types of brakes with suggestions for troubleshooting and maintenance. Another article aimed at the field is Your Safety Manager is on Your Side by Ray Downs and Robert Pitney. While safety managers don’t run into burning buildings, they know that safety training, education and enforcement helps save lives. Our historian, Dr. Lee Gray, wrote Elevator Accidents 1870-1920: Statistics. This is the first of a two-part series that examines accidents on elevators in an era when usage was growing yearly. The first paper from IEES is A New Approach Necessary to Keep all New Lifts Safe and Reliable by Luciano Faletto. He traces the history of code development and ISO standards from prescriptive to performance based, which allowed for more creativity. A similar article is PESSRA in Lifts and Escalators – an Overview, by Lakshmanan Raja and Teck Eng Ng. When programmable electronic systems (PES) are used to make decisions about safety, its reliability becomes critical and is measured in SILs (Safety Integrity Levels). Electronic Safety Actuator by Randy Dube, Peter Herkel, Dr. Pascal Rebillard and Rubén Sánchez Muñoz is the second paper from the IEES. The authors speak to the advent of the machine-room-less elevators that challenge engineering teams with increased safety, hoistway reductions and installation time reductions. Otis’ answer is the Electronic Safety Actuator (ESA).
It is a fully packed book with a new CE by David Herres and a beautiful On Camera called Dreamweaver by Kaija Wilkinson. It features an amazing elevator in a house in Barcelona designed by Antoni Gaudí, a Catalan architect active in the early 1900s.
Lastly, as we celebrate education and training, we mourn the passing of one of the best teachers in the industry, Walt Glaser. He supported and wrote for ELEVATOR WORLD most of his life. He was a good man who helped me understand the industry – the mechanics of it and the people. We will not see his like again.
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