No pressing a button and waiting for a lift with this modern incarnation of a late-19th-C elevator design! In a cyclic elevator a string of passenger cars run by in a continuous loop. One simply steps into one of the open cars scrolling up or down through its adjacent elevator shafts and takes off. To your weary Canadian correspondent, presently immobilized in Berlin by an angry planet, the hassle-free transport offered by Solon's cyclic lift was a source of almost drunken pleasure.
Unfortunately, it may also be quite stupid (so to speak).
To Germans cyclic elevators are Paternosters, Latin for 'Our Father' -- a riff on the looping action of rosary beads. The lifts were a hit across Europe until the emergence of safety regulations in the 1970s. Authorities suddenly blanched at Paternoster accidents that crushed body parts, as well as the risk of fires spreading vertically through their open shafts. West Germany banned new Paternosters in 1974, and outrage at ongoing accidents has progressively winnowed the ranks of those left operating.
Solon won an exemption with a joint design from German elevator contractor Schoppe-Keil, engineering certification firm TÜV, and the Berlin State Office for Occupational Safety adding some high-tech safety features. For example, flashing green and red lights tell users when to step on and off. A visual detection system arrests the lift if one pokes even a pinkie past the threshold when the lights are flashing red.
It could be the start of something. Japanese heavy-engineering firm Hitachi is already talking up a Paternoster revival with its Circulating Multi-car Elevator System. Hitachi's system improves safety with an ingenious scheme for stopping individual cars while passengers hop on and off. And the firm claims that it could move more than twice as many office workers than a conventional elevator, shrinking the share of floor space in high buildings dedicated to lifts.
My question is: At what carbon price? Solon's impatient motto seems to embrace the urgency of scientists tracking global climate change, and its crystalline silicon solar panels offer an important alternative to fossil fuels. But where is the righteousness in its Paternoster's nonstop power drain, especially in a country which (like the US) burns coal to generate about half of its electricity?
I'm told that Germany's Federal Foreign Office in Berlin plan to remove their Paternosters as one means of reducing energy consumption.
Perhaps these are just quibbles from a grumpy travel refugee, whose emotions rise and fall daily with the passing of each trans-Atlantic booking. Solon certainly has plenty more to worry about just now after the economic meltdown rocked its world, prompting Spain to withdraw solar subsidies and slashing Solon's sales to 320 million euros last year -- roughly a third what they booked in 2008. Its stock price has slumped to barely 5 euros from a high of 92 euros in 2007.
Germans have an expression for things like Solon and I that go up down. Wait for it... Yes, they call them Paternosters. As in this 2001 post to a German investor discussion site on stock price gyrations entitled "Solon's Paternoster Ride". In fact, a commenter of little faith questioned whether that word usage, in light of Solon's seemingly inexorable descent at the time into single-digit share pricing:
Who knows the difference between a Paternoster and Solon? The Paternoster goes up again sometime!
In hindsight it's tempting to think her comment 'stupid'. But that would be arrogant and ignorant, in the eyes of this interloping Paternoster. Almost as bad as using stupid in a corporate logo.
