“An elevator with no operator? No way.”

“All safe, gentlemen”

In 1854, at New York’s Crystal Palace exhibition, Elisha Otis stood on a raised platform and had its rope cut. His safety brake stopped the fall, and Otis told the crowd, “All safe, gentlemen, all safe” (Otis, company history). The first selling point was not speed. It was trust.

The machine was ready; riders weren’t

Elevator historian Lee Gray told NPR that driverless, push-button elevators existed by around 1900, but passengers would step in, see no operator and step right back out. Gray says it took about 50 years for automatic elevators to win acceptance (NPR, 2015).

Operators stayed because people trusted people. In 1931 the Empire State Building opened with Otis passenger elevators nicknamed “robot elevators” for their automatic controls (Otis, company history). Yet operators remained a fixture of New York buildings for years afterwards, as the 1945 strike below showed.

New York’s 1945 elevator strike

In September 1945 elevator operators and other building workers in New York went on strike. Joshua Freeman’s history counts about 15,000 strikers and 1.5 million people affected (Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York (excerpt, NYT)). TIME reported 16,600 workers in 2,100 buildings and a strike lasting five and a half days (TIME, 1945). It ended with arbitration (Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York (excerpt, NYT)). The union’s own history covers the period too (SEIU 32BJ, history).

The strike showed landlords how dependent they were on operators. In 1950 Otis installed its first attendant-free Autotronic system, in the Atlantic Refining Building in Dallas (Otis, company history).

Ads, a red button and a calm voice

The industry sold trust. Gray describes ads showing children and grandmothers riding alone, a big red stop button, and recorded voices that told riders what was happening (NPR, 2015). Otis says it offered its pre-recorded Elevoice on Autotronic elevators from 1948, while attendants were still aboard, “to help passengers adjust” (Otis, company history). In 1955 The New Yorker described a talking elevator meant for a public it called “somewhat leery” of self-service (The New Yorker, 1955).

What the popular version gets wrong

Sources

• Otis, company history
• NPR, 2015
• Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York (excerpt, NYT)
• TIME, 1945
• SEIU 32BJ, history
• Elevator World, “Talking Elevators”
• The New Yorker, 1955

Last reviewed: 22 Oct 2026. Historical figures are quoted as the sources publish them; where sources disagree, we say so.