The Secret Life of the Lift - remastered
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- I've been in my workshop making things ever since, and the covid lockdown was the perfect time to make some new videos, trying to pass on some of what I've learnt. So if you're interested do try my new 'Secret Life of Components'
These old films were remastered and upscaled by Norman Margolus from a 1987 PAL tape made directly from the 16mm print, using machine learning software from Topaz labs. Commentary added in Feb 2021.
View all 18 episodes of the series and read about their background on my website:
www.timhunkin....
The videos are also here @ / timhunkin1
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One of my favourite episodes, partly because at the time I worked at Express Lifts and my desk was in the corner of the lab that had the simulator in it. Some footage was shot with me operating the simulator but did not get used because it was better with Tim pressing the buttons while explaining what was happening. The simulator was quite clever in that half of it was a real lift dispatcher running the real software. Later they introduced some more compact simulators - a collaborative project with Loughborough University if I remember right. Happy days!
Have that footage so you could show us?
Very good!!!! Gretings from Brazil 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
Finally we saw Meg Amsden! Lady in lift, that did lots of the voices.
Really? Ha awesome!
Whaaaaat?? That is so cool!! Thank you!
The macroswitch makes another appearance!
To this day, EVERY TIME i get on an elevator, I see in my mind the demonstration rig that Tim and Rex built so many years ago.
I have to say Rex was the heart of Secret Life of Machines. We would laugh at how much Rex seemed like your faithful worker Tim, always ready to unleash mechanical schemes into the world at your bidding. LOL.
The basement of the Science Museum in London, which houses Tim's exhibition "The Secret Life of the Home" has glass walls around the lift machine room so you can see the workings.
Tim, the Express Lift Tower does still exist! It’s just the factories which surrounded it have been flattened and replaced with houses. It’s such a shame about Express Lifts. There’s quite a few of their old lifts still knocking about, but rapidly disappearing. Look out for their signature “oval” buttons!
Yes, I used to live in a building that had a lift in it, made by FIAM, that had been taken over by Express during a upgrade some time in the 1960's, where the original FIAM motor and gearbox were still in use. 3 phase single speed motor, with the original windings from when it was installed in 1939 (paperwork was complete, still had the original commissioning certificate therefrom FIAM), though the brake solenoid had been rewound a few times. Around 1998 the old Express controller was removed (unreliable and no more spare parts available for the shaft mounted switches and guide units, that held state and car position info in the state of the floor switches) and an Otis controller was installed. Funny though still used the original motor, brake and the transformers that dated from 1939, along with the old controller frame.
I do have one engineering drawing update in there as well, a bit of cardboard I used to draw the rough sketch of the change, signed off by a PE in the office, and laminated, and included in the as installed plans for the unit as an addendum. Literally a single wire moved one position on a breaker, and a wire link, so as to split the current draw for the retiring cam solenoid and the brake solenoid, as the total current was 11A, so the 10A breaker would trip if you did a full shaft travel, but not if you stopped at any floor, as it would trip just about a half meter from level. Split onto 2 poles of the 3 pole breaker, with the third pole being interconnected to the shaft safety circuit, so the car would stop if the breaker tripped.
Did have trailing cable faults, where the first replacement cable (old DCC cable both had not enough spare pairs, plus failed insulation resistance testing, but was fine with driving 115VAC lamps and coils) relaxed after a month, slicing through the cable, and burning out the controller by applying 230VAC to the 24VDC bus. New cable was installed, along with new controller (free under warranty) and was well secured and routed, plus had weekly checks for the first 3 months. Otis lost a lot of money there, they had underquoted for the initial cost, plus all the failures as well, but they ate that cost, to a customer who was a long time with them. We paid almost nothing, I saw the component cost alone, which was more than 5 times what the quote was.
Yep, it's a Northampton landmark, and has the LED lighting treatment at the top. Red and Green for Christmas etc.
I was going to make a similar comment👍It's a grade II listed building, so should be around for a while🙂
Wogan named it the Nothampton lighthouse and it's there now in the middle of a roundabout in a housing estate! (google map NN5 5FH) What if they have to demolish it? Still used for training purposes - fills the houing estate with engineer vans! At the bottom it has a thin concrete floor, a falling lift would punch straight through, upright steel beams in ??m of gravel would decelerate it, thus not blowing out the base of the tower! My dad used to safety approve it every year by looking for cracks and stamping on the concrete!
@@Dripfed Port and starboard.
Happy to see that so far no stairs have found this video! 🏆🇬🇧
Two sets of stairs managed to find the video so far..
*stares*
Hot off The remastering press. Love this series.
I bet you guys had a blast doing these shows, all the work, imagination, ingenuity, teamwork, a very special place in time.
How incredibly exciting and pleasing to learn that someone sent you a link to the presentation Howard and I gave about elevators! :-D
(And you are so gracious to mention it with kindness in spite of the fact that when we showed a brief snippet from your original program, I rather immaturely made a somewhat unkind crack about British dentition. That was a bad cheek and I regret it now very much... and I just have to say how absolutely delightful all of your material is, I have discovered!)
Hi Dev! I’m guilty as charged on the email
This show is part of why I watched your presentation. I loved this show as a kid, and I grew up and became a cyber security expert, trapped in an elevator, in a National Security agency leased building that will remain nameless. And I was baffled as to how such a thing could happen.
I'm a lift engineer by trade, it's nice to see a balanced overview of Lifts, if you'll excuse the pun.
It has its up and downs! :-D Groan, I know, you heard it to often!
@@BoB4jjjjs that joke is one of the ups and downs of the job :) I groan every time I hear it, but I also repeat it often
I have a sinking feeling it's going to keep coming up.
@@unacceptableonanon2655 Groan!!!! :-D
@@unacceptableonanon2655 I once rearranged all the buttons in a lift, it was wrong on many levels
I have been awaiting this one to see the lady in the lift, she is so glamourous. I am sure she does the voices and is in the the car that drives away on three wheels, but we never get to see her until this episode and we never get to find out who she is. The way she ignores Tim is brilliant.
The way she ignores Tim is even funnier when you find out she is Tims partner in real life.
@@8807smoore Is it funnier? When was it funny? It actually means by his acting the little movements he does makes it seem more natural.
That with the replica lift and the beginning and the end was superb. It did indeed look like the real one. The end flight was very Willy Wonka. Those demonstrations were rather crazy and amusing. The lift simulator looked awesome with all those buttons etc. I've now got to check out the lift hacking video.
The lecture mentioned at the end probably is this one:
ruclips.net/video/ZUvGfuLlZus/видео.html
Love the callout to Deviant's lift security talk, it's one of the all-time greats.
I just found out about this from the internet. It is very cool to see, although I had to absolutely offer a brief apology to Tim (as seen in my other comment here under this video) for the immature chuckle that was afforded when we played a clip of the original program during our lecture.
Hi Tim! Yeah I’m the guy who emailed you the link to DeviantOllam’s talk at DEFCON. We actually discussed it a bit at Novelty Automation one night before I moved to the US. Glad you found it useful!
I can't believe we're still getting new remastered episodes so quickly. Thank you and Norman so much!
Loved your tv programmes. We had a physics teacher that would record them (vhs) and play them in class. Looking back he was probably just lazy. 🤣
Maybe, but being lazy has its virtues.
Lazy people are efficient people. If someone else explains a topic better than you can, what's wrong with acknowledging that and giving your audience the benefit of the best explanation?
Lazy or sensible?
@428 Renegade Ah yes. Remember there are lazy teachers, teachers who have lazy days and teachers who know when to let their betters take over. I showed these episodes occasionally when I was a teacher because they illustrated principles better than I could have done, which is your point.
@@nickdryad exactly. There are some legit lazy teachers out there for sure, that's just an inevitable and statistical certainty. But myself, in finding this series, became inspired to tinker and experiment more than I had before watching this series. If showing these videos to students inspires a similar reaction in only a few of them, it was worth it in my mind. Everyone learns a little differently, and maybe the video explanation helps certain students better, and your way of explaining it helped other students better. Never hurts to give people opportunities to find what works for them, or to encounter the thing that inspires them. I would applaud any teacher that showed these videos to students, even if their reasoning had been one of laziness and not from any sense of philanthropy.
I still love the model of the microswitch. I keep taking the normal sized ones apart to clean. Would be much easier if they were that size 😁
1:30 is about the most Hunkin thing ever.
So glad I can watch these again.
Interesting watching this again. As I've just been watching loads of Deviant Ollam's presentations on lift hacking. And in some of them, they used the clip from this episode, where Rex cuts the rope holding Tim.
It sort of completes the circle !
My father worked for Otis for about 40 years as an elevator mechanic and service supervisor. Being based in Connecticut, he once took me up to the top of the Otis test tower, in Bristol, CT.
God bless Tim and Rex for these series, and may Rex rest in peace.
I'm so glad you mentioned that hacker presentation, I was about to link it myself. I watched it after being stuck in an elevator for about 20 minutes. It's very curious. I never used to have any phobias. Since then, I became claustrophobic. And when I was stuck in an elevator, I remembered every single word of this program, and logically knew how very safe I was. And yet, when I hit the call-button, and no one answered for over a minute, that knowledge did very little to help assuage the panic in the primitive, illogical part of me.
This was a strange episode, Tim and Rex went into all sorts of dangerous situations but it was still fun. As a kid I would have loved this show but as an adult I'm always focusing on the dangerous side of things.
Just out of interest, which sections of the video are you talking about when you say dangerous situations? :-)
@@Lift.Tracker Every part where Tim stood on stuff that went high, Rex standing on that hydraulic lift without any sort of strap, the demonstration where Rex pulled up Tim through a pulley... The usual stuff.
I always loved the touch that the animations add, and the Utopia Services Lift "Nightmare/Fantasy" sequence is among the best and most brilliant of them all, I think! (at least of those remastered recently or which I otherwise remember from thirty years ago).
It's certainly an interesting difference from modern educational video. I'd have to edit/censor this a bit for my classroom (the nudity/sexual content wouldn't go over well with admin/parents, even if students would have a laugh). Still love that the remaster is faithful for archival purposes though. Best the editing is done temporarily on my end rather than universally.
Love this show! no regard for safety, just men making and testing their creations too prove points.. best!
Note the spelling mistake at 3:54... ;) Seriously though, great to see these old shows again!
Haha. Tim may explain that away as the British spelling.
Come here after watching the recent upload from Deviant Olam and loving this classic piece of British TV. I'd love to see a new series with the same aesthetic and style. The quirky humor and practical demonstrations are fantastic and I feel like this was missing from my childhood. Thanks for uploading this and all the others which I'm planning to go and watch now.
Tim, when you said that lifts haven’t changed much since this film was made, you forgot to mention that there is a new design which means lifts no longer need a machine room. The motor is now commonly secured to the top, wall of the shaft, rather than in its own designated room. This is a new thing which has only been around for 20 years or so.
Also, lifts have significantly dropped in manufacturing quality, as have most things, sadly.
That seems like one of those things one REALLY doesn't want to cheap out on. Like car tires...
@@HamiltonMechanical Or jet engines.
Lifts are built as consumable items now., like your tv or phone.
With known expected life of components, and weakness built in.
Most lifts have a expected 10-15 life now. Major components aren’t repairable, just replace.
Manufacturers have access to the microcontroller running the lift through the emergency phone system.
They can shutdown the lift, lock out access to menus needed to diagnose faults and repair.
Another trade where right to repair has been ignored, and customers pay through the nose.
@@TheSemtexCow the lifts at my old work building, one or more of the three were more often out of service than in. And they'd just been serviced... Annoying when you're on the 6th floor and there's 4 physical floors before 1.
@@TheErador I was a safety inspector, doing the government 5 and 10 year lift inspections where all the safety devices had to be inspected.
Government changed the regulations, which then stopped all mandatory inspections as it had to be called for by insurance company inspectors instead of on a programmed date.
There’s lifts out there that haven’t had the safety systems inspected for over 15 years now.
With a 1 in 4 failure rate that’s not a good ratio if you have no choice but to use a lift.
All responsibility has been dropped onto the maintenance guys, as they are virtually always the last competent person on site.
My advice is to take the stairs now.
I'm loving seeing these again Tim. I just wish you'd had a paternoster in this one, it would have made it complete 🙂
Me too. I all but forgot about these but loved them when they were on. Can't believe so much time has passed. 😩
Essex University library had one, bit scary, don't know if it is still there. Didn't go in there much, a fellow student commented: "did you go in there by mistake?"
@@stevehead365 Still one at Sheffield Uni
@@wisteela is that the one tom scott used in his video on them?
@@TheErador Yep. See also the Beno channel.
1:25 still amazed that they survived doing their own stunts...
6:40 ... oh no, not again...
Happy to hear you found that elevator hacks video. It seemed like it would be up your alley.
I'm sure it's already been mentioned in the comments but the lift testing tower is still there in Northampton and is still used to test lifts but the factory around it has gone and replaced with a new housing estate. It is called The National Lift Tower. TSLOM is one of my favourite television programmes of the 80s and 90s and it's great to see them available to watch here on RUclips
"But for the most perpendicular city....." damn 😂😂. These guys were legendary.
I have seen every episode back when it was on TV and I absolutely LOVE every one of them. I think my favorites are fax machine and sewing machine, but this one is very close up there. Thank you for providing this wonderful series!
These are just a treasure. Seriously, I love this series. Thank you!
I love the imaginary Utopia Services company and wish we could have the logo available on some t-shirts or something.
Me too!
One of my favorite things was riding the freight elevator or lift with my father at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History where he worked. It was so big it seemed like the building moved instead of us.
That phobia / fantasy sequence at 22:18 is hilarious :D
1:15 Don't do it, Tim! We love youuuu!
Every installment of this series has been fantastic! I even like the cartoons!
I used to watch this series as a child... seeing this again feels genuinely magical. This is incredibly nostalgic, I love it!
I remember bigclivedotcom did a video showing old lift switch gear mounted on slate. Great old workmanship. Thanks for these remasters.
No mention of pit shaft lifts. One near me was a mile deep and travelled at 70MPH driven by a huge steam engine with an output power of a few megawatt.
At 65, I can still remember a few lifts that were manned by an operator with a handle from my childhood. Often they had a uniform, and were also stewards of the elevator, with a constant "watch your step", and greeting the people coming on the lift.
I actually have always had quite a fear of lifts breaking etc and this has pretty thoroughly cured me of it. even thought i knew that the safety features would be extensive, seeing them explained is quite another experience!
Ironically the greatest chance of getting hurt in a lift is from falling upwards... If you are in a lift on your own and the brake fails to lift rolls up the shaft unhindered, gathering speed as it goes powered by the weight of the counterweight until the Hits the ceiling, it's only in the last 15 to 20 years has the safety gear for Lifts included upward direction retardation.
Isn’t the fear of elevators known as “Escalatoritus?”
@@deankay4434 I think that's the fear of escalators, what I've often wondered is why it doesn't escalator to have a different name when it goes down??
@@tomnwoo A "deescalator"? Also, see Mitch Hederg's comedy bit about escalators.
@@RCAvhstape I hope you don't mind that I read your comment in a squeaky voice
The end sequence was indeed epic! :)
Returning to this series after many years having avidly watched them originally on Ch 4, is a delight. One of the most informative and entertaining technical series in my view. I do enjoy seeing your retrospective at the end, and seeing the late Rex Garrod so poignant, sadly missed.
My local supermarket shows music videos to entertain people as they shop. When I was there the week before last they showed videos by Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and George Harrison - now all dead.
I've heard from a few places this business that having to add more elevators means limiting the height of skyscrapers, but I've never quite understood it. It seems to me that no matter how many elevators you need, you could always put in that many, then add your floor space around them - you'd just need a bigger footprint for the now-thicker building.
In any particular city, the size of a block is a limiting factor on growing sideways. I suppose that must be why the Burj Khalifa could be so tall? They were building the whole city from scratch anyway?
I suspect it's a matter of cost and weight. The more floor space, the more weight to support, so the stronger the support columns need to be, which eats up more of the usable volume.
In practice tall buildings use sky lobbies and a combination of express and local elevators, rather than having all the elevators run from bottom to top.
@@jonathanhendry9759 I was surprised that the use of express and local elevators was not mentioned in the programme. Basically, the local elevators in different parts of the building can use the same elevator shaft, reducing the footprint.
Mr Otis, "all safe gentlemen, all safe."
Thanks Tim for sharing these videos with a new generation of viewers. Ive been watching them with my son.
Some wonderful props work in this episode. The Express Lifts Tower is actually still there, but there's no lifts inside it anymore - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lift_Tower
"officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 12 November 1982. It has been a Grade II Listed Building since 1997" ... amazing.
"The tower is used by lift companies for research, development, testing and marketing."
"There are six lift shafts of varying heights and speeds, including a high speed shaft with a travel of 100 metres and a theoretical maximum speed of 10 m/s."
Following refurbishment about ten years ago it is very much open for business and very much used by lift, drainage, tourism and safety companies - just not by any company called Express sadly!
What a great episode. I watched the original upload only a few weeks ago but happy to see it again in a remastered format! Lovely to hear your memories of filming at the end. Thanks Tim, and Rex of course.
I'm not intimately familiar with modern lifts but I do think especially smaller ones run on simple squirrel-cage asynchronous AC motors with electronic VFD (variable frequency) controls. DC motors went out of favour in the 1980s or 90s with the introduction of affordable solid state motor controls. Older high-speed lifts often used Ward-Leonard rotary inverters, huge lumps of iron and copper converting mains AC into variable DC, often using one motor and two generators. Simpler designs used AC motors with dual windings to provide an additional crawl speed for levelling. That technique is surprisingly old and was even used in countries such as the Soviet Union. Actually, the prototypical 1970s and 80s Soviet lift looks suspiciously like a Swiss Schindler design from what I can tell.
In the early days of electric lifts, the electricity boards were quite concerned about inrush currents, therefore even small motors (both AC and DC) were started using series resistors for current limiting. This technique was used well into the 1930s with resistors in the rotor circuit of a synchronous AC motor, usually between three to six resistors that were removed from the circuit one after another. In the 1950s, when large stretches of European cities were converted from DC mains to AC, most of those highly elaborate mechanical contraptions, sometimes driven by a weight and kept at the proper speed by a mechanical governor, were replaced with two plain three-phase contactors that connected an induction motor straight to the mains, either going up or down. Compared to the gentle start of the old resistor designs the acceleration was quite abrupt.
The Tower still survives. It's now a listed building and has a radio transmitter on the top.
Love the Val Bennet Track it opens with. Always sets the mood.
Much love from America!
Thank you so much for all of these wonderful videos and the lifetime of commitment you’ve given your craft!
Would love to see more electronics content from you. I absolutely love the machines you build, and I really enjoy hearing about the circuits and electronics in them. Especially enjoyed your LED video! And the switch video. That giant microswitch model is a beautiful piece of work! Such a lovely device.
also one of my favourites, but also one of the more surprising. and entertaining.
Someone needs to tell Hollywood about Otis' safety device
I'm pretty sure you're talking about DeviantOllam's video! he has a whole bunch pen testing that are just freaking awesome. It really is amazing how many doors out there are not properly installed.....
Very likely. I emailed Tim a copy of that talk in 2019
I remember this video as a kid. Made me feel a lot safer to ride the elevator. :)
this should have so much more views !! love it must have been a joy making these series, and also working with rex !
Love the BTS on Utopia Services! And this is the episode with the giant microswitch.
I like the little ones that never stop. No doors.
If you notice on the breaking of the rope @ 7.06 there is a socket one end and a ferrule the other, the wire will always break at the ferrule, this was the only way we could be sure where the rope would break and advise where to put the camera, the two guys in the test best (other than Tim) was Bob Clarke and Duncan Stanley
I love the commentary at the end of each episode but at the same time there seems to be a bit of sorrow in his voice. It sucks that there is never enough time to do what we want to before we get too old or we lose someone we love or life just moves on etc. Tim can rest assured that he has changed (and still changes) the lives of many people for the better and he has left a legacy of good work that will go on forever. Thanks Tim & Rex
I can't express how much I enjoy re-watching these episodes that I used to watch as a young kid. :)
My Dad told me that he saw this series on endless loops while he was in prison. That was in the '90s.
I met a man from Texas who was responsible for the installation of the lifts and elevators in Canary Wharf.
He was an incredibly funny guy and it's a shame I lost touch with him.
There were many different nationalities involved in installing the lifts at Canary Wharf. It’s a very special skill and so many were needed for so many lifts. I was lucky. I could cycle to work from home.
@@caroleast9636 Thats Ok. I was trying to say he was hired as the engineer in charge. From what I gathered he had alway done numerous intentions for Otis and Schindler
9:41 Next door to Saints rugby stadium in Northampton, it was still there last time I went that way.
This was such a great show! I remember loving these when I saw them years ago. Great to hear Tim's insights at the end. Must have been even more fun making these as they are to watch!
One of the best series ever. This is one of my favorite episodes.
Another wonderful remaster, this one seems like you and Rex enjoyed yourselves really a lot! Thanks so much Tim!
I'm binge watching your videos I'm from America with we had this earlier!
Love these remastered episodes and the extra commentary. Thanks.
deviant ollam reference!!
I am amazed! 😁👍
Another timeless episode of The Secret Life of... I think these shows are great! Alas never again could one repeat some of the effects done with a crane on this episode without the OSHA guy clutching his chest in horror and handing out a good number of citations. Ahhh the good ol' days....
Have you ever visited the Burj Khalifa in Dubai? The lifts in there travel at 10 m/s or 32 feet per second and it's barely noticeable. I actually thought of this episode when I first visited the Burj Khalifa. Amazing experience!
Thanks Tim. I love your hands on approach - you have a great knack for sharing your knowledge on a level that is easy to understand and you keep it interesting. All the very best!
Express was originally a GEC company, we used to do pcb repairs for them after they became Express-Evans, as well as pcb repairs for Thyssen-Krupp lifts.
You missed the paternoster lift
Reminds me beginning of the film SPEED with the lifts. Good episode
Rex sure looked really enthusiastic to make that last cut to the rope with that saw😉.
What would you call a group of people joyriding in an elevator?
An Uplifting Party...
That mental image of you staring at people on the train before you got off. ;)
I was not on this world when this episode aired originally. I am happy to have found it here and now, thank you for your very nice work.
This is a fabulous episode. I used to hit a cafe in the morning before work here in San Francisco at 7th and Howard. A back table would have about 5 guys who were Otis Elevator guys hanging out before work. You never heard so much swearing in your life. Nobody was angry, it was just a way to cover yourself to keep from looking too enthusiastic about the subject, showing weakness or a feminine quality. It was real obvious. I almost told them that after a couple of years of it. Almost.
My favourite episode, and my favourite video about lifts (had to pause for a moment, 4 years of living in Finland has somewhat converted me to use the word "elevator"). Also fantastic to hear a reference at the end to Deviant Ollam's "From the Pit to the Penthouse" talk from the Hope conference, my second most favourite video about lifts. Thanks for remastering these, and your reflections on the episodes at the end are extra special. I remember emailing you some years back asking if you ever visited Edinburgh, with the hope that you might drop in to the Hacklab there for a good chat about the filming of the series amongst other things, and hearing you now talk about the episodes has now answered that wish.
Regarding Tim's follow-up; Northampton's lift tower (Express Lifts) is still there!
28:09 I’m parked outside the tower in Northampton at this very moment!
It’s not gone! I hunted down your video the moment I parked up beside it as I remembered this video from my youth and wanted to see if it was the same :)
What a masterpiece! 🙏❤
Thanks for uploading these The Secret Life of Machinery episodes Tim, in particular, this one. I must have watched this episode many, many times over the past decade or so, along with the rest of excellent series. Keep up the fantastic work.
I remember when I was in Spain on holiday in 1984.
The lift in the building don't have inner doors, just outer ones to prevent you from falling down the shaft.
As I was riding inside, I can see the shaft wall as the lift moves.
BBC tv programme 'That's Life' warned about the dangers of these lifts in Spain with reports of serious injuries.
This episódio as fantastic.
Thank for remastering theses. Am a very technical person myself and I know most of what these go over but the extra insight and history is amazing. These are important for next generations.
This looks great, Tim! I'm very grateful to see a man so passionate about life-long learning.
Excellent and good fun thanks Tim
Seeing these for the first time after they've already been remastered is a rare luxury. Cheers
Never seen this series, watching it as new. Fascinating episode. The lift animation was funny.