Ingenieur Vol 71 ingenieur July 2017 | Page 46

INGENIEUR

ESCALATOR – GRACIOUS VERTICAL TRANSPORTER

By Ir. Lum YL, Vice President, Persatuan Pengurusan Kompleks Malaysia

FEATURE

“ An escalator can never break down: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.”- Mitch Hedberg

The escalator is one of the most amazing pieces of engineering design in the history of science, it is able to move thousands in an hour from floor to floor without having the passengers’ walking experience impaired. This is totally unlike riding lifts, where passengers’ experience in a shopping mall is drastically affected by getting into a“ cage” and being“ released” from it after having arrived at their destination floor. It may or may not be realised by many, the existence of escalators in shopping malls is more than just science, it

44 VOL 71 JULY- SEPTEMBER 2017 is an art, and it has its own philosophy.

YOU SEE WHERE YOU ARE GOING

The journey of one entering a“ lift” is a quantum leap of faith, which most of us have taken for granted. We have been taught to believe that once we enter a lift and press the button, we are“ assured” that the intelligence system hidden somewhere in the building will definitely deliver us to our floor. Without a doubt, we expect that once the lift doors open, we are assured that we will be walking on the landing instead of being in the middle of the ocean. We have faith in this piece of machinery that we are stepping in and out of, because we believe there are tens of thousands or millions of hours spent by scientists and engineers behind this 150 yearold invention.

But riding an escalator is a whole new level of excitement compared with a lift in terms of its technological complexity. The escalator is less dramatic and there is nothing much horror movie directors can do about