A good elevator is one you don't think about at all. You get in, press a button, get out, and that's it. But precisely because they are so invisible in everyday life, it's easy to forget what an impressive piece of engineering hides behind those automatic doors.
The elevators we've gathered here are the complete opposite of the elevator you don't notice. They are too tall, too transparent, too beautiful or simply too strange to ignore. Let's go for a ride.
The elevator inside the aquarium
For years, the lobby of a Berlin hotel was home to something that sounds like the idea of a six-year-old given an unlimited budget: a cylindrical aquarium as tall as an eight-story building, filled with a million liters of water and more than 1,500 fish, and inside it, right in the middle, a transparent elevator that took guests on a ride among the fish. It was the largest cylindrical aquarium in the world, and riding in it was like diving without getting wet.
The ending, sadly, was dramatic. In December 2022 the aquarium burst all at once, flooding the lobby with a million liters of water and shards of glass and forcing thousands of people to evacuate in the middle of the Berlin winter. Most of the fish, unfortunately, did not survive. After two years of restoration the place reopened, this time with a green vertical garden instead of the water. A very different concept, but definitely still worth a visit.
The elevator that looks like a small Eiffel Tower
Lisbon is built on steep hills, and more than a hundred years ago someone decided there was no reason to sweat on the way up. The solution was a magnificent 45-meter iron tower connecting the lower city to the neighborhood above it. If it reminds you of something, that's no coincidence: the engineer who designed it, Raoul Mesnier du Ponsard, studied under none other than Gustave Eiffel, and brought home the same love of exposed iron and Gothic arches.
Opening day, July 10, 1902, was almost comical: on the very day chosen for the celebration, Lisbon was hit by a thunderstorm and pouring rain. It didn't deter anyone. More than 3,000 tickets were sold on that first day alone, and by the end of the first year more than half a million people had ridden the lift. The truly amazing detail: the electric motor installed in 1907 still drives the lift today, more than a hundred and twenty years later, which makes it older than the oldest person in the world.
The elevator that climbs a cliff
If you saw the movie "Avatar" and thought the floating mountains were Hollywood's wild imagination, you're in for a surprise: they exist, in Zhangjiajie National Park in China. And to bring visitors to the top of these cliffs, instead of a grueling two-to-three-hour hike, someone simply decided to attach a giant glass elevator to the side of a 326-meter sandstone cliff.
The result: an elevator that holds the Guinness World Record for the tallest outdoor elevator in the world, and the ride itself, almost 100 floors in under a minute and a half, unrolls a view before your eyes that looks computer-generated. Not everyone was thrilled, by the way: the park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and building this glass monster sparked quite a few environmental arguments. But the record, like the view, has stayed put.
The elevator that lifts entire boats
Until now we've talked about elevators that lift people. The Falkirk Wheel lifts something else entirely: boats. It is a huge rotating steel structure shaped like a wheel, whose job is to connect two Scottish canals with a height difference of 24 meters. Instead of a flight of locks that would take a full hour, the wheel simply scoops up a boat together with the water around it, turns elegantly, and sets it down at the new level.
The most beautiful part is the physics: because a floating body displaces a weight of water equal to its own weight, the two sides of the wheel are always in balance, whether they hold a big boat, a small one or none at all. The result is that turning it uses almost no energy. The wheel, opened in 2002 by Queen Elizabeth II, is the only one of its kind in the world, and it's easy to see why.
The fastest elevator in the world
The 111-story, 530-meter tower in Guangzhou houses the fastest elevators in the world. They travel at a dizzying 75.6 km/h, which is 21 meters every second, and take you from the lobby to the 95th floor in only about 45 seconds. That's roughly the time it took you to read this paragraph, and almost 3 times faster than the rate at which a regular passenger plane climbs after takeoff.
At speeds like these, engineering challenges arise that are hard to anticipate, such as what happens to your ears and stomach when air pressure changes so quickly. So the elevators are equipped with a system that balances the air pressure in the car, just like on a plane, so your ears don't get blocked. For comparison: the elevators in the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, reach only 36 km/h, less than half the speed. It turns out that record height doesn't always go hand in hand with record speed.
So what is the tallest elevator in the world?
If you've ever wondered what the tallest elevator in the world is and thought of the Burj Khalifa or some other gleaming skyscraper, we have a surprise for you: the real answer is actually under the ground. The tallest elevator in the world, meaning the one that travels the longest vertical distance, is in the Mponeng gold mine in South Africa, and it plunges 2,283 meters in a single continuous descent, in just three minutes. That's more than four and a half times the elevators of the Burj Khalifa.
And that's not even the end: a second elevator in the mine continues further down, to a depth of almost 3,600 meters. Every day the system takes about 4,000 miners down into the belly of the earth, 120 per trip, packed into a three-level steel cage that travels at up to 65 km/h. Imagine a morning traffic jam, only vertical, and in the dark.
And so as not to shortchange the skyscrapers: if you limit the question to thetallest elevator inside a building, the record belongs to Shanghai Tower in China, with an elevator that travels 578 meters over 124 floors. And if you ask about the longest continuous travel distance in a building, this is where the Burj Khalifa does come back into the picture, with a single run of 504 meters. So it turns out the innocent question "what is the tallest elevator in the world" has three different answers, depending on exactly how you ask.
All these amazing elevators start from the same simple idea that's also in your building: moving people up and down safely, day after day. The only difference is how far you take it.
Your elevator doesn't need to break records, it just needs to always work
At Korsia we have been installing, maintaining and renovating elevators throughout central Israel since 2000. No aquariums and no cliffs, just elevators that run smoothly, every day and on every floor.