Word: elisha
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There are other less illustrious but equally interesting personages in Old Granary: Elisha Brown, for instance, who in 1769 barricaded himself in his home and for 17 days successfully "oppofed a whole Britifh Regt. in their violent attempt to FORCE him from hif legal habitation." And there is the tomb of Benjamin Woodbridge, who died in the first duel fought in Boston, after quarreling with his friend over a game of cards. The friend skipped the country in a British vessel and died of grief in France...
...Elisha Otis' tiny workshop in Yonkers, N.Y. grew the Otis Elevator Co., the world's largest. It has built more than half (128,918) of the elevators in the U.S. (224,417), has sold 69,000 elevator installations abroad. Last year it grossed $61 million, in March had a backlog of more than $100 million in orders...
Biggest & Fastest. All this is a far cry from the elevator seen by New Yorkers at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853. The inventor, a New England master mechanic named Elisha Graves Otis, rode up & down in it, occasionally making the crowd gasp by cutting the elevator's rope cable with a knife. Others, as far back as Archimedes, had built vertical hoists of one kind or another, but Otis was the first to build one with an automatic safety catch to keep it from falling. It was a kind of ratchet, like the gadget that prevents the spring...
...Elisha Otis' original safety catch has been succeeded by scores of automatic speed and leveling controls. Until 1945, Otis boasted that not one of its passenger elevators had ever fallen because of broken cables. That year an Army bomber, bursting through the Empire State Building between the 78th and 79th floors, severed the cables and all the safety devices on one Otis elevator, which plummeted to the subbasement. Even so, the operator (who was alone) got out alive...
Married. James Elisha ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom, 39, governor of Alabama; and Jamelle Moore, 21, secretary in the State Highway Department; in Rockford, Ala. (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS...