Harmony and Harmonics

Hopefully, our spectacular cover jumps right off the page and into your hands. It is from the feature In Perfect “Harmony,” about the giant cruise ship, Harmony of the Seas. KONE designed special marine elevators to assist moving people around the massive floating city. It worked closely with the shipbuilder in France and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. to ensure that the vertical transportation (VT) was delivered on their schedule.

Our focus this month is on Doors & Door Operators. As usual, we had a great response to this topic:

• Michael J. Ryan of The Peelle Co. wrote The Best VT Solution, which looks at selecting the right type of elevator suitable for a facility where materials are transported in high volume by cart, vehicle, etc. Ryan outlines the features needed to improve productivity.
• Of Hand Dryers and Elevator Door Systems by Trudi Osborne answered the question, “What does a company that manufactures air hand dryers have to do with elevator door detection?” Check out the interesting background on the U.S.’s Formula Systems and the U.K.’s Airdri.
• In A Commitment to Energy Efficiency by Héctor Rivas of Fermator, the methodology to quantify the energy consumed in the door system is described. He describes innovations developed to reach optimum savings.
• Zero-clearance doors are a new trend. The article sent by Niagara Belco, Market Booms for Code-Compliant Swing Doors, highlights the growing demand for flush-mounted residential doors and how the company can meet code requirements though innovation.
• Smooth Operators by Ralph M. Newman touts the advantages of linear door operators over harmonic ones and suggests uses of artificial reality in the future.
• Our historian, Dr. Lee Gray, also got into “door” mode with The Bostwick Elevator Gate. It was patented in 1877 as a rather crude folding gate and sold exclusively by W.W. Bostwick & Co. in 1879 but by many other companies later. Gray traces the improvements on this basic gate into the early 1900s.

Other features this month include a residential lift in a beautiful villa in Lebanon installed by Al Maaz Elevators and Electric Co. of Beirut. In Simplicity, Innovation Mark Residential Lift, an external shaft opens to balconies and a lift with neither machine room nor deep pit. A company spotlight, Twin Towers Legacy in Louisville, is a fascinating history of Madden Elevator Co. and how Sean Madden found out after his father’s death that he had helped install the elevators in NYC’s twin towers. Finally, in Pyramid Power, Bülent Yılmaz writes about the LIFTECH Expo in Cairo. Boasting 85 exhibitors in its fifth edition, it serves the Middle East and North Africa region. In 2016, our first copy of ELEVATOR WORLD Middle East debuted there, and, in 2018, was the main media sponsor.

We are deeply saddened to have learned of the death of two industry icons – Mark Lane (Elevator Motors Corp.) and Lou Blaiotta (Columbia Elevator Products Co., Inc.). Both gave their hearts and souls to the elevator industry with leadership in many industry associations. Both were component suppliers who built strong second-generation family businesses now being run by their sons and daughters. (See full article on Lou in In Memoriam, p. 54).