Question

an essay about my claim was slow I took the stairs on the escalator ​

Answer 1

Answer:

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Mitch Hedberg was a funny guy, and the main reason he was funny was because his one-liners were so on-point.

Perhaps his best-known one involved the escalator. “An escalator can never break, it can only become stairs,” he famously joked. “You would never see an ‘Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order’ sign, just ‘Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience. We apologize for the fact that you can still get up there.’” But today, we’d like to argue that Hedberg’s most famous joke is misleading at best, and downright wrong at worst. (But we still think you’re funny, brah. Hope you and David Foster Wallace are rockin’ it in shaggy-guy surrealist heaven.)

Let’s talk about escalators, those moving death traps that will injure you, your family, and everyone you care about — if you let them.

“The object of the invention is to enable persons to ascend and descend from one story of a building to another, without exerting any muscular strength; the stairs being also capable of being used in the ordinary way, when desired.”

— Inventor Nathan Ames, describing the primary use of his revolving stairs, which he first patented in 1859. (Ames, who died in 1865 at age 38, never got around to building one himself; Jesse Reno was the man who successfully got the device off the ground in 1891.) Despite Ames’ claim all those years ago, safety experts have slowly moved away from the idea that a turned-off escalator is actually just as effective as a stairwell, due to small differences in the way the level-movers work. For example, safety materials by the Elevator Escalator Safety Foundation call the stairs-but-not-really thing a myth. “Escalator steps are not the correct height for normal walking, and should not be used in that manner. The risk of falling and tripping is increased,” a facilitator guide states. Sounds like an invention that got away from its inventor.