Your fantasies of zooming from place to place in the Great Glass Elevator à la Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may be turning into reality!
Preparing to revolutionise the average Hongkonger’s daily vertical commute is ThyssenKrupp, a German lift manufacturer, which promises to transform elevator travel to go up, down, right and left, all without the use of a pulley!
The new system will be called “Multi” and will make use of magnetic levitation, or “maglev”, technology that allow lifts to hover and move from place to place without being attached to ropes and wires.
With 1,300 skyscrapers dotting the city and more than 60,000 lifts servicing said buildings – twice as many as there are in New York, making it the most in the world for a city of its size – Hong Kong is the ideal market in which to implement the Multi system, said a ThyssenKrupp spokesperson in an interview with the Sunday Morning Post.
ThyssenKrupp claims that several lifts will be able to function in a single shaft, which will be smaller than the size of current ones, and will increase its carrying capacity by half.
Furthermore, by travelling at a speed of five meters per second, the company believes that no Hongkonger will have to wait for more than 30 seconds for a lift to arrive. Our mornings are about to get a lot happier, if that’s true.
However, after two years of research and development, a 245-meter test tower prototype is only now being built in Germany. ThyssenKrupp believes that it will be operational in 2016.
Until then, we’re stuck with frustratingly slow lifts that only service even or odd floors.
Source: International Business Times Image: Flickr
