isn’t this a case of “cabling gone wrong, fire the electrician”?
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You can see one of these in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” I went to see a reissuing of the film and much of the audience gasped when they saw these elevators on screen. Extremely dangerous.
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I saw one in Germany that didn’t even have walls. You just hopped onto those flaps projecting from a belt.
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This is why every year during Passover at least one building in New York goes up in flames every year because their oven is on for days.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/fire-safety-for-passover-traditions/
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I saw a man lift or a paternoster (I don’t recall exactly) about 9 years ago in a garage in Chicago. “A guillotine”, I thought. It was for the valet drivers only.
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Oh look! It’s a nope-mobile.
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Napier College in Edinburgh, Scotland, had one of these when I studied there in the 1980’s. Contrary to all the fears expressed previously, it was easy to use, even with wheelchairs and crutches. It moved slowly enough that even with bad timing there were no mishaps. Some of us had a theory that it went upside down at the top and the bottom, so were sorely disappointed when we tested it.
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It’s the same reason that Orthodox Jews often leave the lights on the day before, so that they can use the light without needing to flick the switch.
Indeed, there’s even a “Shabbat Lamp” that’s basically a lamp inside a box: you turn it on the day before, and during Shabbat you just open the box when you want light, and close it when you don’t. No work!
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat for more.
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I live in an apartment building with a large number of Jewish residents. On the Sabbath, one of the two elevators is set to run in Shabbos mode. At one point, this apparently entailed stopping automatically at every floor: now it’s set to do automatic stops only on floors whose occupants have previously filled out a form requesting to be included on the Shabbos schedule. I believe that’s now only about a third of the floors, as the building’s demographics are changing. This makes things easier for the non-observant, although it’s easy to forget: I occasionally see some of my goyim neighbors leaping out of the elevator after the fourth stop muttering “Dammit! Shabbos elevator!”
As you say, there’s controversy. In my old neighborhood, I was once asked to switch on the lights at the local shul (apparently someone had forgotten to do it before sundown). But one of my current neighbors will wait for the Shabbos elevator to make its leisurely way to him, rather than ask me to press the button for his floor in the non-Shabbos elevator. So different schools of thought clearly have different opinions on whether asking a goy to do the work is or isn’t the same as doing the work yourself.
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it’s surprisingly hard to find facts about the danger, this article (de) counts 23 accidents (3 fatal) between 1977 and 1986 with, than, 500 paternosters in Germany. here’s one (de) noting a 30-fold risk of accidents compared to elevators (but then elevators are very very safe, I did not find comparisons with escalators, in principle similar to paternosters).
and a final one (de): in 2015 no known accidents with the ~ 200 remaining paternosters in Germany : )
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I’ll bet this thing feeds on toddlers and the elderly.
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The prohibition that shabbos elevators are designed to guard against is not about electricity. This is a common misconception. Electricity is not prohibited on Shabbos. –It’s the activation of a switch that’s the problem!
The law as expressed in the Torah prohibits doing work on Shabbos, and the word used for “work” in the particular sentence is not the most commonplace term. In order to apply this law to Jewish life, the rabbis had to determine what was meant by the word. The same word was used to describe the 39 tasks listed as being involved in constructing the temple, so they decided this was an indication that those tasks are the ones that are expressly prohibited on shabbos. For fuzzy situations, rabbinic authorities also tend to use reasoning that was a bit expansive when attempting to apply prohibitions, to be absolutely sure to “build a fence around the law”.
So these 39 prohibited tasks are interpreted broadly to be sure to not unknowingly violate them. One of the tasks is “building”. This word has a couple of interpretations, but the one that relates to elevators is that it’s interpreted to mean a prohibition against building a structure on Shabbos. Some modern rabbis think that completing a circuit, which is what is done every time a switch is flipped, constitutes the building of a structure. Thus, for those who follow those authorities, it’s important on shabbos to avoid flipping light switches, hitting elevator buttons, or opening refrigerators whose lights automatically turn on when opened. It’s far from all rabbis that interpret the law in this way, but it’s enough of them that in certain areas, for example in hospitals that have many orthodox Jewish doctors (the saving of life takes precedence over most prohibitions, so they’ll still be in on emergencies) or patients, you’ll find one elevator that on Saturdays is set to just stop on every floor in a loop so no button pushing is required.
I wouldn’t say that I find this prohibition to be reasonable, but it’s not a good example of hypocrisy. These elevators accomodate the needs of people who believe it’s wrong to push the button. The compressed-air wheelchair shown in Maher’s film “Religulous” was also a compassionate measure dreamed up to accomodate the needs of religious folk who need a wheelchair and don’t want to violate this same prohibition (their religious authority must have deemed electrical switches to be “building” but not pneumatic ones). There’s plenty to criticize, but it’s inaccurate to say that these devices are meant to work around a prohibition on the use of electricity itself.
On a different note, but one that seems to have come up in this discussion, the shabbos goy stuff gets complicated fast, and often in-practice seems hypocritical when done wrong. I.e., it may be a mess, though it can be a considerate thing for a non-Jew to do for an observant Jewish friend or neighbor. As someone who isn’t an observant Jew who thinks brain cell dedication is a zero-sum game I’m just going to leave this here for anyone who’s curious about the actual rationalizations. My recollection from orthodox grade school is that it’s not allowed to ask someone else directly to violate the laws of shabbat, but some amount of implying may be ok, or if they’re doing it anyway…
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1140867/jewish/The-Myth-of-the-Shabbos-Goy.htm
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I mentioned Jedi mind tricks before so saying, “hey can you press the button for floor 17” may not be not permitted while saying, “I live on floor 17” and if it so happens that someone presses the button is perfectly ok.
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My snarky reply might just be “May God grant you speed, walking up those stairs!”
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Yet we still have escalators with no buttons, doors, or stops all over the place.
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I saw a similar model in a German movie once.
I can’t recall the film at all: some dull thing recorded from a PBS broadcast that was supposed to loosely translate to something relevant to our class topic, freeing up the teacher to complete some paperwork. But the weird office elevator that seemed to completely disregard safety and that all the characters were ignoring as if it were totally normal? That stuck with me.
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Doh! Turns out these are still made 
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Opening and closing a circuit: forbidden.
Opening and closing a box: A-Okay.
What if they build the switch into the lid, like a fridge? Or even into something else, like a bathroom door? “I’m not doing work, I just have to get into the bathroom.”
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I would be one of them. These things give me nightmares, and I don’t think I’ve even seen one in reality. (For some reason I have a disproportionate number of bad dreams about unsafe elevators and stairs. Not sure what that’s about.)
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Actually, the second Wikipedia link addresses just that. It’s ok to open the refrigerator door unless it turns on a light.
Specifically, it’s ok to open the door even though it will probably cause the motor to turn on later, because that event is later in time and not guaranteed, and therefore not directly causally-linked. However, since the light turning on is causally-linked, you must make sure to remove the lightbulb before opening the door, lest you invoke the Wrath of God.
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