[H706]House And Home Decorating

There are many devices that can make work around the home easier, but few of them have as long and rich of a history as the dumbwaiter. For thousands of years, people have used dumbwaiters in their day to day lives to make lifting objects between floors much easier.
The dumbwaiter can be traced back to the early Roman Empire and was probably used before this. Often of the course of history, these devices would simply consist of a rope and a pulley, but there have also been many much more complicated designs that relied upon gears and screws.
Today, most find that an electric dumbwaiter is the best choice for their needs. These allow items to be instantly transported around the home or business, with only the push of a button. For the home, most support around a hundred pounds, but this can vary by model and most available on the market today can also be upgraded to support more weight.
The first electric dumbwaiter was developed during the 1800's, which is also when the commercial dumbwaiter began to be extremely popular. Early electric dumbwaiters were usually only found in larger businesses. Often large department stores would use them to link their show room and their inventory. A central station would be in charge of telling the dumbwaiter where to go. When someone pushed a call button, a light would begin to blink in the central station and it would be the attendants? job to prioritize the travel of the dumbwaiter.
Electric dumbwaiters were not the only kind used commercially, but steam and hydraulic lifts were also used. In all likelihood, the hydraulic and steam lifts were probably more common until the twentieth century.
In the home and residential settings, most people used manual dumbwaiters up until relatively recently. These relied on the effort of the owner to raise and lower the car between floors. By the end of the eighteen-hundreds, some featured a special locking mechanism, which made it was possible to let go of the rope, without the car falling. Otherwise, if you let go of the rope while the lift was being raised, it would come crashing down.
The dumbwaiter was very common in homes and apartment buildings during the twentieth century. Often apartment buildings in larger cities could span many floors and so lugging groceries up the stairs was unpractical. As a result, virtually all apartment buildings in cities like New York and Chicago had a built in dumbwaiter.
Having a communal dumbwaiter did result in a few problems. Perhaps the biggest problem was other people stealing groceries as the dumbwaiter moved between floors. To address this most apartment buildings began using doors on the dumbwaiter car. This way, you could load up the dumbwaiter, shut the doors, and send it upstairs, without worrying about someone stealing the milk.
Today, most dumbwaiters have auto-locking doors, but this is not so much to prevent theft, but is actually to improve safety. Auto-locking doors are used at each shaftway opening, which ensures that you can not be exposed to the shaft, which in a home can be over twenty feet deep, unless the car is present at the opening.