The Escalator Was Patented in 1859. Nobody Built One for Thirty Years.

US25076 was granted to Nathan Ames of Saugus, Massachusetts, on August 9, 1859. The title is "Revolving Stairs." It is the first patent for what the world would eventually call an escalator, and it was issued two years before the start of the American Civil War — about a generation before anyone actually built a working one.

Ames was a patent solicitor by trade, which is to say he spent his days looking at other people's inventions. His own contribution describes a continuous loop of linked steps traveling around a frame, carrying passengers up an incline, at about 45 degrees, and returning empty underneath, with fixed steps at each landing to help people on and off. That is, in its essentials, precisely how a modern escalator works.

How he meant to power it

Ames had an answer for what should drive it, and it was the best power of 1859. In large public buildings, he wrote, it would perhaps be desirable to apply steam power and keep the stairs constantly moving at a moderate speed. In private houses, where they would run only occasionally, they might be turned by hand or by a weight. Practical electric motors did not yet exist.

He also floated an application that reads touchingly today: in private homes, he thought, revolving stairs would help "the sick, aged, and infirm" from floor to floor, and be a luxury for the healthy, "especially if the house be large."

Nathan Ames never built one. He died in 1865, aged thirty-eight, with the patent unbuilt.

Who actually built it

The moving staircase arrived in the 1890s, when the surrounding technology finally caught up. Jesse Reno, who had patented his design in 1892, installed an inclined moving belt, more a powered ramp with cleats than a staircase, as an amusement ride at Coney Island in 1896, carrying thrilled passengers up a modest slope. Around the same time, working from a different patent lineage, Charles Seeberger developed a true flat-step moving staircase, and it was Seeberger who, collaborating with the Otis Elevator Company, coined the trade name that stuck: escalator, from the Latin scala, a ladder, blended with the word elevator.

Otis exhibited it at the 1900 Paris Exposition, where it won first prize, and the modern escalator was launched. Otis later bought out both Reno's and Seeberger's interests, which is why the company that made the safe elevator also came to dominate the moving stair.

What the delay tells us

Ames's patent belongs to a specific category this archive keeps returning to: the correct mechanism, described before the world could easily power it. His drawings are not fanciful. The loop-of-steps arrangement is right. What he lacked was the compact, reliable motive power that only electrification would provide four decades later.

And he saw where it was going. His patent says its value would be greatly enhanced by making the upper stories of large buildings easy to reach, "especially in large and densely populated cities." That is the escalator's actual destiny: department stores, subway stations, airports, moving vast crowds continuously. In 1859 the buildings and the crowds did not yet exist. Ames described them anyway.

The word "escalator" was, incidentally, a trademark that Otis lost through genericization in 1950 — it had become the ordinary English word for the thing, which is the fate of a successful invention and the opposite of what happened to Nathan Ames.

See the original

The full text and figures of US25076 are on Google Patents.