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Otis Giving Rise to the Modern City :... Sam Leith reviews Otis: Giving Rise to the Modern City by Jason Goodwin. AT first, as I read this magisterially detailed history of the world's largest manufacturer of lifts, I thought it might merely be the most boring book ever written. As time went on, I realised it threatens to set an extraordinary new benchmark in the history of deadpan; something on a scale of which the brothers Grossmith could barely have begun to dream. Gosh, this book is boring. It doesn't bore by accident: it bores with conviction. It bores with the stary-eyed monotonous fanaticism of somebody truly devoted to a subject about which no one in their right mind could give a hoot. The problem, I think, is frittered potential: Jason Goodwin could have used the history of the Otis Elevator Company - purveyors of lifts to, inter alia, Queen Victoria ("the nee [sic] plus ultra of foreign royalty", apparently), the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Centre and the Pope - as a window into the history of the American republic; or into the evolution of the vertical city; or even into the thinking behind the Aerosmith classic Love in an Elevator. Instead, he has used the history of the Otis Elevator Company as a window into the history of the Otis Elevator Company. It is the story of the manufacture of a vital but intrinsically uninteresting industrial product; a sequence of mergers and acquisitions; technological advances and time and motion studies. Do we really need to know that "the Pratt-Sprague 'crew and nut' machine was an ingenious attempt to copy the action of a rope-geared horizontal hydraulic machine, replacing the cylinder with a long screw turned by a motor, and a traveling nut connected to pulleys"? But the history of Otis is more than the history of long screws and travelling nuts. It is the history of such men as Cecil Jackson, who launched the maintenance department and saw lift repairmen as "buccaneering types blazing their way through the static traditionalism of a mature corporation". Men such as David Lindquist: "A rather dashing figure in the world of electrical engineering". "Ironically," writes Goodwin at one point, "little is known about the man who guided the policy of the Otis Elevator Company for almost 50 years." Ironically? Ironically? Nah. A black fly in your chardonnay: that's ironic. The expression you're looking for here is "unsurprisingly" or "thank goodness". In May 1909, we learn, management was worried that "much larger envelopes are being used than is necessary", but pleased that it had standardised three different types of paperclip. "Indeed," Goodwin writes with mounting excitement, and I think the sentence deserves quoting in full: "the overhaul of Otis's stationery department in these years, with its general office stationery numbered 401-999 (including, as random examples, special #572 stock paper, quadrille-ruled, for sketches),* and its special office paper, such as letterhead, numbered from 1001, its new in-house printing service in Chicago, its different coloured notepaper for every zone, all this, so automatically assumed as the birthright, and sometimes the bugbear, of the modern corporation, not only was perfectly new but reflected what was happening to the company as a whole." The footnote appended to that asterisk reads: "Within a few months a stock standard typewriter #687 was already on the list, with #688 for pencil work." Mr Goodwin is a diligent researcher and, I'm sure, a nice man. But by God I wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with him.
To purchase this book in the U.K.
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