50 free Elevators trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Elevators trivia is more fun than it sounds. This quiz starts with the ancient and odd: Archimedes' hoist, the 25 lifts under the Colosseum floor, Louis XV's flying chair, London's 'ascending room' of 1823. Then Elisha Otis: the bedstead factory in Yonkers, the rope-cutting stunt at the Crystal Palace, the Haughwout store on Broadway, and the Otis employee who coined the word 'escalator'. Siemens's first electric lift, Frank Sprague's controls and Alexander Miles's automatic doors follow. The middle section covers how lifts work and the companies that build them: sheaves, counterweights, hydraulic limits, machine-room-less designs, ThyssenKrupp's cable-free cars, Kone's Finnish name, Schindler's Lucerne workshop, destination dispatch, Sabbath mode and the truth about the door-close button. There are questions on the paternoster and its German ban, the fastest lifts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, the record descent in Yokohama, sky lobbies, the elevator operator strike of 1945 and Betty Lou Oliver's 75-storey fall. It finishes with the elevator paradox of Gamow and Stern, Muzak, and the space elevator from Tsiolkovsky to Arthur C. Clarke. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on elevators, Elisha Otis, Otis Worldwide, paternosters, Kone, Schindler and related pages, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone; the expert tier reaches Artsutanov's Cosmic Railway and Government House, Calcutta.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01According to the Roman architect Vitruvius, who built the first known elevator, probably in 236 BC?
Archimedes
Vitruvius is the earliest known reference to any elevator at all.
Q 02The Colosseum had roughly how many elevators for hoisting animals up to the arena floor?
25
They were operated by hand and counterweights, long before any motor.
Q 03Which French king had a 'flying chair' built for one of his mistresses at Versailles in 1743?
Louis XV
A century later a Neapolitan architect installed another 'flying chair' at the Royal Palace of Caserta.
Q 04What did architects Burton and Homer call their 1823 London attraction that hoisted customers up for a view?
The ascending room
Twelve years later Frost and Stutt developed a belt-driven, counterweighted elevator called the Teagle.
Q 05In which year did Elisha Otis introduce the safety elevator?
1852
He demonstrated it two years later by having the rope cut while he stood on the platform.
Q 06Where did Otis stage his dramatic, death-defying demonstration of the safety elevator in 1854?
New York's Crystal Palace
Demand for the safety elevator began to climb after the show.
Q 07The first passenger safety elevator was installed on 23 March 1857 in which New York building?
The E. V. Haughwout store, 488 Broadway
Otis also designed a special elevator for Peter Cooper's Cooper Union building, whose construction began in 1853.
Q 08In which US state was Elisha Otis born in 1811?
Vermont
He was working in Yonkers, New York, when he devised the safety hoist.
Q 09Elisha Otis was installing machinery in what kind of works when he invented his safety elevator?
A bedstead factory
He had earlier invented a turner that made bed posts four times faster than by hand.
Q 10Elisha Otis died in 1861, aged 49, of which disease?
Diphtheria
His sons Charles and Norton carried on the business, later Otis Brothers & Co.
Q 11Which word for a moving staircase was coined by an Otis Elevator Company worker?
Escalator
Some rivals call their moving walkways 'autowalks'.
Q 12Who built the first electric elevator, in Germany in 1880?
Werner von Siemens
Anton Freissler developed the idea further into a successful elevator business in Austria-Hungary.
Q 13Which American inventor's electric elevator company, with 584 units sold, did Otis buy in 1895?
Frank Sprague
He also developed the idea of running multiple elevators in a single shaft.
Q 21What was the name of the world's first machine-room-less elevator, introduced by Kone in 1996?
MonoSpace
It used 70–80% less energy than a hydraulic unit and put all components inside the hoistway.
Q 22Which family has controlled the Finnish elevator maker Kone since 1924?
Herlin
Harald Herlin bought the company that year; his great-grandson Antti has chaired it since 2003. The name Kone means 'machine'.
Q 23Schindler, one of the world's biggest lift makers, was founded in 1874 in which Swiss city?
Lucerne
Robert Schindler and Eduard Villiger began with a workshop on an island in the river Reuss.
Q 14Alexander Miles of Duluth, Minnesota, patented what elevator feature in 1887?
Automatic doors closing off the shaft
Before that, riders had to shut shaft doors themselves, and open shafts caused many falls.
Q 15Where was India's first elevator installed by Otis in 1892?
Government House, Calcutta
Otis remains the world's largest maker of vertical transportation systems, based in Farmington, Connecticut.
Q 16What event in New York in 1945 helped speed the adoption of automatic elevators without operators?
An elevator operator strike
Emergency stop buttons, telephones and a soothing automated voice were added to reassure nervous riders.
Q 17Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver survived a fall of how many storeys when a B-25 hit the Empire State Building?
75
She had already been thrown from her car on the 80th floor; the second car's cables had been severed by the plane's engine.
Q 18The paternoster lift is named after the Lord's Prayer because its chain of cars resembles what?
Rosary beads
Germany still had 231 of them as of 2015, and the Czech Republic 68.
Q 19In which building did Peter Ellis install the first paternoster-like lifts in 1868?
Oriel Chambers, Liverpool
The tallest paternoster ever was in Stuttgart's 16-floor Tagblatt tower of 1927.
Q 20In which year did West Germany ban new paternoster installations?
1974
An attempt to shut down all existing ones followed in 1994; Germany saw about one paternoster death a year before 2002.
Q 24Schindler's 1992 Miconic 10 pioneered which elevator system, where riders enter their floor before boarding?
Destination control
Grouping passengers by destination can raise elevator load by up to 25% in buildings like the Burj Khalifa.
Q 25Which conglomerate owned Otis from 1976 until spinning it off as an independent company in April 2020?
United Technologies
In 1977 Otis launched Elevonic, the first solid-state microprocessor elevator control system.
Q 26Which building held the record for the world's fastest elevators, at 20.5 metres per second, until 2017?
Shanghai Tower
The Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre then edged it with 21 metres per second, about 76 km/h.
Q 27Which building holds the record for the fastest descending elevator, dropping at 45 km/h?
Yokohama Landmark Tower
Descent speeds are kept lower than ascent speeds to spare passengers' ears.
Q 28In a traction elevator, what is the industry name for the deeply grooved pulley the steel ropes run over?
Sheave
The friction between ropes and pulley supplies the 'traction' that names the whole system.
Q 29A traction elevator's counterweight equals the empty cab plus what fraction of rated capacity?
40–50%
That balance means the motor only has to move the difference, saving power.
Q 30Above roughly how many floors do hydraulic elevators become impractical, forcing traction machines?
Seven
Hydraulic units are cheaper and simpler but slower, and long underground cylinders raise environmental worries about leaks.