The first passenger elevator got off to a slow start. Installed in 1857 at the Haughwout Department Store in New York, it was shut down after just three years because customers refused to accept it. Powered by a steam engine in the basement of the five-story building, it traveled at a mere 40 feet per minute. (Today's fastest elevators can travel upwards of 40 feet per second.)

At the time, elevators were more of a tourist attraction than a means of transportation. The world had no tall buildings yet, and lower floors were the most desirable because they didn't require you to climb many stairs. The higher the floor, the lower the rent.

But the elevator would change that completely, ushering in the era of the skyscraper and transforming the social and architectural landscape of the modern city.

Even in the 1850s, the elevator wasn't an entirely new idea. "Mechanized hoisting devices had existed since the early 1800s, but the transition from carrying goods to carrying people happened in the late 1850s," Lee Gray, a professor of architectural history at UNC Charlotte, said in a phone interview. "That required a complete transformation of the technology, because early freight hoists had no cars: they were simply open platforms and, therefore, very dangerous."

That spurred an immediate focus on safety. Industrialist Elisha Otis, who installed the first passenger elevator in New York, held a public demonstration at the 1854 world's fair in New York in which he hoisted a platform high above a crowd, then cut the cable with an ax. "All safe," he proclaimed as his safety device halted the fall. It was a clever system: if the rope snapped, a ratchet would pop open and catch on racks that ran alongside the shaft, stopping the car's descent almost immediately.