It was a restless tinkerer named Elisha Graves Otis who hit upon the clever idea of a “safety hoist” that wouldn’t fall even if its hoisting rope were cut.

Author Jason Goodwin describes how this invention changed the skyline of modern cities in his new book, Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City. Goodwin traces the business from its origins in a small Hudson River factory to its status as the world’s largest and best-known elevator company.

Reviewers have called the book “…a well-told and straightforward corporate history” that is “chronicled with insight and style.”

The following is the first in a series of excerpts describing the company’s earliest days:

On a late May day in 1854 a man in a black overcoat and stovepipe hat stepped off the Thomas E. Hulse, a small paddle wheeler with a single upright stack, onto the wooden town dock at Yonkers, New York. Down by the water’s edge, a railroad gang was laying the new Hudson River Railroad, soon to link Yonkers to New York City. Downstream on the other side of the tracks, the parish cemetery ran off into the distance, with the steep escarpment of Yonkers Heights rising to the eastern horizon.

Alfred Wilde sniffed the air appreciatively. He liked the bitter sea-coal stench he knew so well. He tipped a penny to one of the boys perching on the dockside railings, and followed him along the waterfront. The boy pointed out the bedstead factory that Wilde had come here to visit, took his penny and ran off.

The factory was a plain three-story brick building with a tin roof already turning to rust, standing on a jetty ringed by old oak pilings… The man who rented the shop was one Elisha Otis, and if Wilde was initially disappointed to learn that Otis senior was away, he soon found the young man minding the machinery perfectly capable of discussing his needs. Some 67 years later, that young man could still recall the visit, at the end of which Wilde left for Cohoes [N.Y], with some rough-sketched diagrams of an elevator suitable for hoisting freight, and Charles Otis kissed the Union Elevator and General Machine Works Co.’s first unsolicited order for a No 2 Hoist Machine, value $300.

The power of advertising had lured Wilde to Yonkers. Earlier that month he had witnessed an interesting exhibition at the New York World’s Fair. This had been a splendid occasion, as everyone agreed-managed by P. T. Barnum, the impresario, funded by the New York Chamber of Commerce and modeled on the first World’s Fair held in London two years earlier. On a site now occupied by Bryant Park, west of the city reservoir on 42nd Street, the committee had erected a huge pavilion of wrought iron and glass to display and market some of the new wonders of American invention…Six feet tall without his top hat, Elisha Otis hourly stepped into the shaft and onto the open platform of his machine. Put into gear, the platform lurched skyward; a drum squealed, a rope squeaked, wheels rattled, and in the midst of this din, at a rate of about 12 feet a minute, Otis was winched to the top of the shaft.

The New York Recorder’s official artist, who had been idling all morning beneath the palms, set busily to work with his block and pencil, on a drawing which would be reproduced thousands of times and come to decorate Otis offices around the world, illustrating an event that has long since eclipsed the bigger show it was a part of. It wasn’t Otis going up that dazzled the crowd-it was Otis not coming down with a crash after he slashed the hoisting rope with a saber. “All safe, gentlemen,” he announced, as the brakes kicked in. “All safe.”

Barnum paid Otis $100 for this stunt and apparatus. Elisha was not too proud to take the money from the man who had given the world the Bearded Lady, the Feejee Mermaid and the man who dived into a teacup from a circus roof. And wisely so. Mr. Wilde of the Cohoes Cotton Mills was in the audience, together with representatives of Johnson, Cox and Fuller, of Spuyten Duyvi; a visiting businessman from Charleston, South Carolina; a Boston manufacturer of linseed oil; even a contractor for the U.S. Assay Office building on Wall Street-one of the very first buildings to be erected using wrought-iron floor beams, and so a precursor of the skyscraper. All of these men watched Otis’ exhibition with interest, and were sufficiently impressed to have placed orders with Otis’ Union Works by the end of the year.

For when Otis had severed the hoisting rope with his saber, the lift had fallen only a few inches, then stopped with a jolt. The mechanism was simple, it was automatic, and it promised to make the hoist safe for the first time in 2,000 years. By executing this stunt, before a gasping crowd, Otis had heralded the birth of the elevator industry.

Watch this space for more excerpts from Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City, written by Jason Goodwin and published in 2001 by Ivan R. Dee.