Outside the US, I am more used to a single tone for up - "ding!" and then two tones at different pitches for going down - "bing bong!" The same pitch twice feels weird
Omg the repeated tone is giving me unnecessary stress lmao. I prefer how it is in canada, where the second tone goes down. Idk how it helps the blind tho. But in some malls i remember it verbally saying 'going down' or 'going up'
@@jillwoa the sound works like the little arrow lights. a sharp crisp "bing!" for going up (so if you didn't want to go up, don't move into that elevator). the sad droopy "bong" of a machine that is overdue for a service is for down. Myself, I stare at my phone and then when I hear the sound, look around for the light to know which elevator I want (if there are several) and if it is going in the direction I want.
@@brandonbouwmeister9482 I've also never heard it until now and I'm from the US 😳 the down tone is always lower from what I've heard. Then again I dont get out much :^)
in australia, all our lifts are the kind that say "going up" or "going down" if I'm not mistaken - and I don't think I've ever seen a double-ding before, they probably all just rely on the voice. I could be mistaken but I really don't recall a single lift doing a double ding here so this was interesting
Mum's apartment building (16 floors, just outside Brisbane) doesn't have any voice prompt or double beep.. makes me wonder if there is any indication at all for blind people. I'll have to check now next time I visit.
@@Tiscando As someone who uses captions whenever (proper ones are) available, captions contain jokes more often than most people seem to think (especially on UA-cam). Tomska is my personal favorite, as he often has an "extra jokes" version separate from the main captions
I was also going to ask how frustrating it is to be a blind person on a video site in general, but then I thought about it and realized that this channel does a pretty good job of describing what's happening on screen at all times. At first I thought it was a rhetorical device but it may be an accessibility feature.
@@Koda_Grey That's great to hear. We build a video asset manager and they push back when I add accessibility since it's a "waste of time, blind people don't use video." It is frustrating. I appreciate your perspective.
Username Blind people still listen to videos like podcasts. It would be super challenging to watch something super visual like a makeup tutorial; but people still do it with assistance with apps like Be My Eyes or Aira.
I am starting to realize that there is incredible logic and engineering put into darn near everything around me, no matter what it is or how mundane it may seem.
GemCat Appreciate life in all its beauty, no matter how mundane it may be. I felt like more people would be happier simply by caring the world around them more.
this is why engineers should run countrys shit would go alot smoother engineer:what if the person who wishes to use our elevator cant see!!! politician:i want to ban all motorized vehicles from using the side walk i dont see how preventing such a thing would ever cause a issue
You mentioned in this video that you caption all of your work and I want you to know how much I appreciate it. I'm not Deaf/HoH, but I do have sensory processing issues that can make interpreting speech a little difficult at times. Captions do so much to make UA-cam more usable for me and I wish everyone was as consistent about captions as you are.
@Jan Krynicky That's probably the case, the dubbing can be widely different from the original (to match the new speech to the pictures), and the captions more accurately reflect what was orginally said and/or are more concerned with spreading the text more evenly (give enough time to read quickly-spoken sentences). Fun fact: Bud Spencer movies are significantly more popular in Germany than elsewhere, largely because most of them were translated by the same guy, who did not care in the slightest what the writers wrote and oftentimes flat-out invented lines to add to the dialogue. Usually when the actors where off-screen, but sometimes not even caring that nobody was moving their lips 😁 A couple originally serious italo-westerns are popular _only_ in Germany because here, they are comedies 😂 You would be very confused if you watched these movies with a direct translation from Italian to German as subtitles.
My hearing's a bit off so I always appreciate captions! They're also good for watching people with accents. I love a lot of British tv, but sometimes can't understand some accents if my life depended on it lol
@jankrynicky I should have read the replies before adding my own. I said much the same thing. Yes, cc can be frustrating! ...but sometimes funny, too :) I think a lot of them are done automatically, no person involved, but I may be wrong.
Industry insider here. The in-car lanterns are not just for modernization. They are sometimes used to reduce the cost of having one at every floor and extra controller outputs to select the correct one. They are also required in specifications when the architect wants to minimize the number of cutouts in the wall for fixtures. The main drawback to car-traveling lanterns is that they can only sound once the door starts to open. Hall lanterns are able to sound in advance, so you can walk to the correct door and be there when it opens. Switching topics - when it comes to mechanical bells, these are almost always wired in series with both lamps in parallel so that only one bell is needed (if you wired one bell in parallel with both lamps, then the bell wire would backfeed the lamp that isn't supposed to be on). However if the lamp is burnt out, then the bell doesn't sound either. Most electronic chimes have separate up and down inputs so they can be wired in parallel with the lamps.
Being at the door when it opens isn't always a good thing... It's really annoying when you're in an elevator and the door opens, but you can't step out because someone is standing directly in front of the door waiting to get in.
@@anindrapratama because while some buildings have the "ground" floor /main entrance at floor "1", others have floors below - such as in one particular case a hospital having several facilities, such as laundry, the hospital kitchens and a morgue below all of that, and the star is a quick way to let passengers know what floor the main entry is on
I'm pretty sure here in the UK, we don't have double chimes. I do frequently hear the voice saying which direction it's going and the floor it's on, though.
Huh? I've known this fact for yonks, every lift I've gotten in has a double ding to go down (I'm in London, but have seen them in my home of Stoke-on-Trent)
I'm functionally blind outside my home - light perception only, long white cane, etc. I've lived in lots of the US plus London and traveled throughout Europe. 1. I've almost never heard the double chime for down. Certainly not enough for it to be a noticeable pattern. The elevator in my apartment building (British: "the lift in my block of flats") does not have an arrival chime at all. However, I've only rarely been in buildings with banks of elevators, as opposed to singles; the up/down distinction is really only relevant for banks, or if it's really crowded (in which case someone inside can tell you). The door sound itself is easy to hear - though at a bank of elevators, it's often not early enough to lock on to and get to before it starts closing. Whereas there is a visual indicator of which elevator is the one arriving, the "arriving" chime is often not so easily localized. 2. Only about half of elevators have a chime to acknowledge "you have pushed the summon button". It's kinda important to know if the thing is incoming or if you're just standing there like an idiot (as opposed to being out of service, or a dodgy button, or the summon being canceled for some reason you didn't notice, etc). 3. About a quarter of elevators have completely indistinguishable (to me) outside buttons for "summon elevator" and "ring emergency alarm". You'd think this is something that one would want to tell apart, but no - same button shape, no Braille. 4. Hardly any elevators make a chime for *passed* floors, or a "which floor am I on now" signal (either an audible announce, or a tactile number on the inside face of the outside elevator door frame), so if I press the wrong button (or if someone else is also using / summoning it), I have no way of knowing I'm on the wrong floor. 5. In larger buildings (e.g. hospitals, airports, malls, etc), there's often visual signage for what is on what floor, or for that matter, what some of the weirder button labels mean (e.g. "M" or "L"). I've literally never found an accessible version of that. 6. In British & European elevators, on the inside, the ground floor button is almost always about 2-3x the height of the rest. This is very important for finding it easily. Reading Braille is slow and isn't a magic skill you get together with your cane (and especially now, I don't really like having to used an ungloved hand to touch communal surfaces). Etc. If you actually want to do videos about blind-accessible design, there's a lot I could point you to notice or experience that I'm pretty certain you'll never have noticed before. Ping me @ s.ai/contact if interested..
I also noticed the absence of any indication which floor one is on in most elevators. Some modern elevators have voice though. But at least here Germany elevator-builders mess up the ground-floor button. Its not the same level where you enter/exit the building. That's even confusing for normal sighted people like myself. Pressing the big green button will not always bring you to the exit of the building.
@@saizai to my knowledge, you have to know on which floor you came in and remember this. But there is a good rule of thumb: when the terrain is higher on one side of the building than on the other, there is a good chance that the groundfloor and the main-entrance are not on the same level. In flat areas its less likely to happen though.
@@PoisonNuke Yeah, I've been in buildings where the main entrance is the uphill floor. Have you noticed whether the "ground" floor has the raised button?
@@saizai I have to keep an eye out for it, I just noticed that I'm sometimes annoyed from the fact, that its wrong. But as I have the gift of seeing, it is easy to ignore it and therefore I cant recall the details anymore.
"That's the main reason I caption nearly all of my videos" It's greatly appreciated more often than most think. Signed, someone who isn't hearing impaired per say but has a sensory processing disorder and who's brain sometimes needs encouragement from the eyeballs.
@mind fornication If it was in fact an autocorrect error, then it was an error on the part of the person or group that entered the spelling information into the program.
Kyle Brown I’m legally blind, not completely blind. My vision is very blurry. I don’t need my eyes to type anyway. No one is supposed to actually look at their fingers. Typing is actually a basic and very common skill for any blind person that uses a computer. Blind people use keyboard shortcuts and screen readers to navigate computers. I can use a mouse, but for people with worse vision than me they might not be able to use one. That is why keyboard shortcuts are used. Typing skills are very important.
@@CharNatorn If you actually know how to properly type you shouldn't be looking at the keyboard anyways. Most people who regularly use a keyboard can type completely by touch.
i am now looking for the elevator aficionados who meet on empty supermarket parking lots on sundays, showing off their elevators pimped with train horns as door chime.
I work in a elevator maintenance company in Russia. Firstly, I never heard the double beep sound. It's always been two toned signal, either on our domestic made elevators (made in Russia or Belarus) and on imported ones (Otis, Kone, Schindler etc). Secondly, there is significant difference in behavior between the elevators mounted on residential buildings and the ones that work on malls, office complexes and other non residential buildings. When you are on the landing in residential building, you most likely want to go DOWN to 1st floor from your apartment. You almost never want to go UP. So this kind of elevators don't stop to catch you, when they go up. They only catch you downwards. Anytime the elevator stops by on your landing, its always goes down (except its empty, in this case you can press higher floor button and go up, if you want, or if someone in cabin pressed your floor button). Therefore, residential elevators don't even have distinct arrows on each landing or cabin and most of the times we hear two toned down signal. And, thirdly, just to mention. These damper bars with thick rubber or springs, on the bottom of the shaft are NOT intended to catch the elevator cab in case of falling down. They are needed to prevent cabin or counterweight to move too low in case of limit switch malfunction, taking in account, that elevator moves on NORMAL speed. Also, to mention about the limit switches. They tell about the cabin position only on top and bottom of the shaft. In other positions, controller gathers information from special magnetic or optical sensor, which triggers on certain landing level points in the shaft. In the end, I want to thank you for this small video about the elevators and I hope you ever touch this broad topic again.
Thanks for this detailed info! I never noticed that but I lived in residential apartments before and right enough, only one button and a weird double tone from a broken speaker. I also assumed the springs and rubber were to catch the elevator falling so it's good to know they are not and I'm fucked if the cable breaks! Lol
@@u0aol1 I also work for a Elevator company (One of the big 4) as a installer and the rubber/spring is called a buffer and they are there to "catch" the car if it falls(not very likely). It will not be pleasant @Strum is also right about the limit switches in a sense.
@@Rumplestiltzchen If I was an elevator company owner, I'd hire him and his fellow elevator workman here in the comments. Clearly knowledgeable and willingly sharing that knowledge in a place that others interested in the topic would learn from it. Great people.
Recently discovered it quickly became one of my favorite YT channels : tech/science spiced with such a good dose of dry/twisted yet subtle humour. I really enjoy it.
It’s 5 AM and I just came home after a Friday night out. Seeing as I am such a wild party animal, I had to watch this video. Of course, afterwards I had to go check the elevator in my building. Turns out it chimes twice when it’s going down, once when it’s going up. Just for the record, I’m in Kraków, Poland. What makes this even more interesting though, is that I am legally blind, and I’ve never noticed this.
I've always been curious about the blind. One person asked where you learn stuff for the blind, and another responded with blind school. I went to a high school that had classrooms for the blind, but I always wondered where newly blind adults went. Is there public funding for it? When you're on the internet, do you use text to speech? what does this sound like: jasdflj awlejlaj dlajfajl ? It must be really hard when someone types something with really bad grammar and spelling. I know you're legally blind, but here in the U S, that implies that you can still see. Can you see enough to read these comments? What do you do about personal business? Do you have anything to stimulate the imagination when you masturbate? I used to volunteer with elderly and disabled, and I was helping a blind lady, she folded her money a certain way so that she knows what she has. Do you do something similar. Sorry, I'm 30 years old, and I still have so many questions.
chadd990 Wow, ok. It was all regular questions non disabled ppl ask ppl w/disabilities till the masturbation one. But to answer some of your questions. Text to speech just spells letters when you type random gibberish. For the record, not everyone uses visual info to stimulate the imagination in that way, whether sighted or not.
If you're wondering about the weird hybrid mentioned at about the 40 second mark, these are roped hydraulic elevators. This arrangement allows for extended travel. For the two pistons, this arrangement is used so the hydraulic components stay above ground and avoid issues with burying the hydraulic cylinder (such as leaks going undetected in ground, etc).
not even just then Xi Chen roped hydraulic is also, or at least was until MRL traction elevators became a commonplace item, roped hydraulic was used because you could add an elevator to a building that didn't originally have one, once a building is built tradition hydro is unfeasably difficult and unless you added a machine room to the top traction was also impossible but a roped hydro could just be installed right there, simple.
I've actually seen a roped elevator with the machine room on the same floor as the elevator starts (underground). I couldn't look much into the machine room, but they use some sort of rope routing to make it possible. I know for a fact, that that elevator is a pure roped one, since it does not have a piston for any hydrolics. (It's only an elevator for an underground pathway, but still interesting)
What is the point of hydraulic lifts anyway? Is it only about space above the elevator. There is a lot more upkeep with a strong hydraulic system than with a simple counterweight over pulley.
I'm blind myself and I wasn't even aware of what the different beeps/dings meant! Thank you for teaching me something new, and thank you for caring about accessibility! 👍
In the uk all elevators say in English RP what they’re doing so you’ll hear an upper class, female English accent read out “going down... third floor”, “going up... seventh floor”. “Please select a floor” “Doors closing” “Doors opening” etc and this is so that it’s compliant with the 2010 equality act.
Gareth Griffiths I don’t remember that either, but there does tend to be a voice for accessibility but I suppose it just depends on which lifts you use. “The audible signal strength must be adjustable between 35 and 65 dB(A) for car environments. In noisy environments, sound level should be adjustable up to 80 dB(A).” www.kone.co.uk/Images/8570_Accessible-elevators-compliant-with-EN81-70-2018_hr_tcm45-86548.pdf
@@gazchap I'm sure I read somewhere that research suggests female voices to be slightly more pleasant/clearer than male voices when announcing things not that it makes males or females superior in any way :)
I like the elevator from the show _The IT Crowd_ that sounds pleasant until you get down to the gloomy, unmaintained basement where the doors seem to be prevented from opening all the way so the doors keep opening (most of the way) and closing again (most of the way), the lights are flickering, and the male voice keeps repeating, "Get out of the lift.... Get out of the lift..."
Thank you for this. My mother lost her vision when I was 14 years old. She went to a school that taught her how to navigate without sight. I never knew about the double ding. I always thought until now, that it was another elevator arriving within earshot. My mom went around to elementary schools and taught children about blindness and how to guide a blind person. She was a remarkable woman who refused to let her visual impairment get her down.
Regardless if the dings and bings are standardized worldwide or not, one thing the world can't agree on is whether the next floor (or "storey") above street level should be called the first floor or second floor! (Due to this ambiguity, the ground level floor often has a star next to it.)
@@AMD1 In parts of Asia it's pretty common for buildings to have 13th floors, but they skip 4 instead. Different cultures, different quirky superstitions.
@@andracatheduckking257 As I read that comment it was in Leslie Phillips's voice.If you're from The UK and over a certain age then you'll understand..lol
I am a professional engineer who works as an elevator consultant. I have a "jack of all trades" perspective on elevators. Some tips/comments on things your bring up in your video: - 0:40: This is a Schindler hydraulic elevator. The driving solution could be called "hydraulic twin-post telescopic inverted cylinders". Twin-post hydraulics are overwhelmingly the norm for new short ride installations because burying the cylinder is undesired for risk and maintenance reasons. Schindler's solution to this is indeed unique. First, these days nobody but them arranges the cylinders upside-down, and to do it with multi-section telescopic cylinders takes balls. The ropes are a relating solution which ensures that each section of the cylinder moves relative to the others in the proper ratio. By contrast, when Otis installs a telescopic cylinder (not upside-down, of course) they don't have a relating solution, so each section sort of just dead-ends on the next in sequence while traveling upward, and it can be felt in the cab. - 5:45: The car lantern is probably just broken or not installed properly. It would be against code for a mechanic to disable the car lantern on purpose. Report it to the building staff and then they should call it in to the maintenance provider for call back service. - 7:30: KONE produces their own arrival fixtures, and they have some of the best and under-stated arrival gong sounds. Particularly somewhere like a hotel setting, oftentimes one can hear the digital gongs ringing throughout the entire building, so I really appreciate an attempt to make it a more pleasant sound for those who are nearby. ua-cam.com/video/lcwGdpmZc-4/v-deo.html - 7:45: I love mechanical bells too, they have fallen out of use mostly because the maintenance burden is much greater than for an electronic gong. For buildings which still have arrival bells in hall lanterns it is common for half of the bells to not work. Given that ADA compliance (internationally generically called "barrier-free accessibility") is important, this risk is not acceptable. I want somebody to produce a product with a quality loudspeaker which produces the bell noise. ;-) - I think you'll like these, there are a few companies which produce fake dial floor indicators for elevators, instead of using a rope and pulley to drive it like the originals, they use a motor and digital position encoder to emulate the function, only requiring the same discrete floor position signal that those segmented floor displays need as input. www.cjanderson.com/elevatordialindicators.aspx
@Greg Pedan - First, thank you for all the additional information! While my eyes glazed over on the hydraulic description, the rest made a lot of sense, and is cool to have learned! Second, while talking about the retrofit in his apartment's elevator, he highlights the area where a dial floor indicator likely was. Why would they have taken that out when retrofitting it with the more recent fixtures? It wouldn't hurt anything to have both the dial and a lantern, so is there some functional reason they couldn't have both?
So the lift is basically just a cable-drawn elevator which is operated by hydraulic rams instead of a winch on top of the shaft? With the cables being double purchased and pushing the idler pulley instead of pushing the lift directly?
@@vileCR999 Mounting the hydraulics upside down means you'll have to run hydraulic lines that move with the cabin. It does make me think why not just use them with the cylinders on normal position but having the space for them to run from the top of the cabin, as I understand it, it would give the same travel distance but have the cylinders' hydraulic lines fixed down. Unless of course I understood the concept entirely wrong...
I'm looking forward to the elevator geek movie of that title, though be careful not to get it mixed up with a very similarly named movie set in WWII... ;-)
It's brilliant, isn't it? I still chuckle every time I step onto a Schindler escalator or elevator; and I've never even seen the movie or read the book. Brilliant marketing is brilliant :)
I live in Europe and I know quite a lot about elevators. There is another thing about the chime that you didn't notice: in a bank of several elevator, the pitch of the chime is always slightly different depending on which one arrived. Let's say you have 4 lifts working together. Lift A will have the lowest pitch of the 4 lifts, lift B will have a slightly higher pitch, lift C will have a slightly higher pitch than the B and lift D will have the highest pitch of the 4 lifts. This is not random, you should try ! And here, this same simple and double chime trick is used but only since a few years, and they don't change the chime on older lifts in general. But here, they all do the two tone variant of Schindler, because Schindler installed them since the 70's (but only two tone, regardless of the direction, they changed that during the 1990's or early 2000's) and then they all thought it was a good idea to generalise that, which is a good idea. To me, the most pleasant chime is the down chime of the newest Kone EcoDisc lifts (model KSS-140 for example), they do a ding dong with half an octave between the two notes (instead of using the note just under) and sound like some sort of "water drop-like chime" that a synthesizer would do.
Huh! I always thought that the varying pitch was just the innate tolerance of the electronics in the chime modules. (Probably is here in the US...) Today I learned!
please keep the elevator videos coming! my friend used to have a fear of elevators until i told her about some of the safety mechanisms in them and now my whole friend group talks about elevators every time someone brings up a new elevator fact
Loved the fact that you're subtitling your videos - I'm not hearing impaired, but as I'm not a native English speaker, it helps me better understand what you're saying. If you ever want your subtitles translated to (European) Portuguese, feel free to let me know - I'll gladly do it!
I love elevator chimes. Especially on a quiet night as you're sitting there in a modernist room, and the lights glow up to the chimes signalling the machinery opening its doors for you. Then you step into the sleek compartment and get transported. It's magical. I'm also an adult, and my love of little things like this is very weird to my age group.
Well then.. You must be my long lost brother! ; ) Coz I'm a sucker and a seeker for those same perfectly tranquil timed moments, that are just so balanced and in tune.. It's like everything that goes on around you, no matter how few and/or simple they may be, or perhaps the complete opposite, are sort of part of an orchestra, that is just creating a very joyful spectacle and experience, that's in tune with ones mind. A harmony of sounds and visuals. A harmony of symmetry and forces balancing each other out. And it feels like you either seamlessly.. just fit in! Or like you're not there at all.. like you're apart of the window you're looking out off.. the chair your sitting in.. or just the air in the room in general. You're part of everything and nothing.. *This is achieving mindfulness to me.* ..and I'm fortunate enough to have been able to develop this ability to a high enough degree that it almost could be considered an on and off switch at this point. Well met fellow livsnjutare, bon vivant, epicure!
In Germany elevators in public buildings need to signal that the door is opening with an acoustic signal, but not the direction. They are also required to speak the current floor, but again not necessarily the direction. After watching your video it's baffling to me why the direction the elevator is going isn't part of this requirement.
If that's a requirement, then it must be quite a new one, because I've never used an elevator, that announced the floor. Actually every elevator I've used in the past few years did not even chime or make a ping sound. Can you quote the respective DIN standard number?
It depends on the Elevator and it's size - Elevators who only has one call button dosn't signal the direction, but these with an directional call button normaly have a single chime for up and an two tone chime with one high and one low note for going down.
I'm an elevator enthusiast (yep, that's a thing) and a huge fan of your channel. Coming from a guy who has known about elevators for quite a while, I must say that you've summed up this "hidden in plain sight" thing pretty well with the elevator lanterns. It's pretty surprising how many people don't know this simple little feature and simply take elevators for granted (admittedly, myself before I started to learn about elevators). As such, I've seen plenty of examples where people may have hopped on the first elevator to arrive, regardless of direction the elevator is going (ex: person wanting to go down hopping on the first elevator, even though it's going up). Things that don't help sometimes even if the lantern is still enabled (with chimes ringing), the lantern's light can be burned out (common with older incandescent indicators). As such, a user that may have no idea about the directional chime trick may just hop on any elevator that arrives. It's also surprising how many more companies are starting to use the European styled two-tone chime. It seems like it started with Schindler (like at 4:01), and now OTIS (though theirs sounds pretty cheap) and KONE have used them. I would go on and on about this sort of thing, but that would be too long of a comment. In short, well done like your other content. If you can, it would be interesting to see other elevator related videos in the future as well. It's not everyday that you see other people that find elevators interesting.
considering your user name and hobby, Have you ever gone to Bristol, CT? Otis has a big test tower there not far from ESPN. Or well they did I dunno if they still do.
When going down, I almost always am going to the ground floor, so I honestly always thought the double ding was to indicate the lobby. The more you know
@Marcella Norman When going down, I almost always am going to the ground floor, so I honestly always thought the double ding was to indicate the lobby. The more you know
The unique onomatopoeias for each chime in the subtitles induced a spark of joy to flow through my otherwise cold and unfeeling heart. So thanks for that. :)
I am beginning to notice you're turning more and more into Andy Rooney. If you don't know who he is, look him up. And I do say this with all due respect. I loved watching him and you have a bit of a Rooney quality about your videos and your presentation. That is a good thing. After all, I watched him for over 30 years of my life.
Wow, I have to say, I'm rather amazed I've never noticed the difference in the difference in the up and down bongs. I do bicycle delivery downtown so I'm in a lot of elevators... Now I can't wait to go to work on Monday and notice lol
I do believe I hear the same pattern here in the Netherlands. Here though, it is usually done with the two-tone variant, which I believe improves on the idea of meaning, instead of the thought that it might be a glitch when hearing the same tone twice (especially in the way some of the examples provided do). I do believe that pronounced "Going up" and "Third floor" announcements are now more common than ever, maybe even required. To mark ground floor, I believe it is common practice here to outset the ground floor (or main exit) button. By having it a quarter inch out from the rest of the button (and a green stroke) it helps distinguish between floors. Maybe the green stroke has something to do with our green emergency exit lights, but that is conjecture.
By two tone do you mean a rising tone for up and a falling tone for down? My immediate thought while watching this video was that that would be more aesthetically pleasing.
@@jacobscrackers98 yeah, two tone going down on going down, one tone on going up. Sounds much better and is more intuitive.. Two tone going up on going up would've been more consistent, but some people have trouble differentiating the direction notes go, so there has to be some difference other than tone as well.
In Russia only importered lifts do chime as is not common to have lifts to have dirrectional buttons, as in most of buildings they are not really needed. Most of lifts (as elevator is named in russian - lift) priorities going up from the first landing without responding to incoming landing calls, than collecting passengers going down. This is pretty useful for resident buildings, where the most lifts are used. Btw, in metro we have male voice to indicate train going to the center of the city, and female for train going out for radiant lines and for circle ones male - clockwise and female for counterclockwise. If you are interested in mobility in public transport, part of which elevator can be considered.
I have an interesting elevator story that I'm sure you will find interesting. In San Diego the El Cortez had what was the tallest hydro elevator in the world for quite some time. (It has since been torn out and a couple of taller hydros have been built in other countries) there was a piston that went 15 floors up and therefore 15 floors into the ground for this elevator. There were 3 stops. The bottom 2 floors and the top floor where the restaurant sat. My Grandfather had this elevator on his service route back in the 50's & 60's when he was working for Elser Elevator (which later became Montgomery Elevator). He told me that at night around dinner time this elevator was used heavily and the hydraulic oil (which was in a tank the size of a small swimming pool) had a problem with overheating. This elevator generated a lot of heat as pumping heat from the 4 pumps & from the heat caused from friction at the seal/piston interface. My grandfather came up with a genius idea and suggested they run a sealed pipe through the oil tank that circulated the hotels swimming pool water through it. This cooled the hydraulic oil & heated the pool for free!
Real big mess when a hydraulic elevator cylinder leaks underground. Lots of liability. Even automotive lifts that used in-ground cylinders are pretty much extinct, that is one of the reasons.
Brian Leeper I bet that's why they removed it. It very well might have leaked. The hotel was abandoned for years. I always wondered why they didn't restore it with the rest of the hotel since it was part of what it was known for. That may very well explain it.
@@buddyclem7328 This reminds me of a video I just watched about the Dodge Demon (a performance car), where it was explained that in order to cool down the engine during performance use (such as racing), the refrigerant from the air conditioning system would be diverted instead to cool the engine. A brilliant, but simple solution that apparently works quite well, and doesn't require adding another complicated system to the car, since the system is already in place.
I will take this video to thank you for your entertaining captions, even though “brown” and many others have been very fun to read - I’m just one of those people who like captions, and yours are consistently rewarding to experience!
+Terry Was going to make that joke as well, but having said that accessibility features often make the experience of everyone better - for instance hearing your lift arrive when looking away/staring at your phone, or in the case of cars not having to walk back and physically check because the beep pattern specifies its current state (locked/unlocked).
Yeah, best captioning ever! I'm also highly admiring of the fact that you not only used the word 'onomatopoeia' correctly, but spelled it correctly as well!
Man you always make me laugh. "Going Down" "First Floor". The comedy is one of the reasons I like your videos. You teach me some some knowledge whilst making me laugh.
Thank you, I never noticed it. This is exactly why I subscribed to this channel, valuing and understanding the ingenious engineering behind little things we take for granted.
I'm in New Zealand, and I started noticing this a few years ago, although the elevator in my building then used two tones for both up and down. Bing bong for down and bong bing for up. Since then I've started paying attention to this, and one for up two for down seems to be much more common. Although down is usually a falling tone. Probably not a good omen.
Thanks for this! I'll now be actively listening to the elevator chimes. I'd also love for more in the accessibility series. Your next video should be the beeping crosswalk indicators!
I live in Japan.This video got my curious if there are any accessibility features of elevators here. And the short answer is: no.I only confirmed this on the building I live in, and 2 office buildings I go to regularly. Elevators always make a sound when the door is closing, however, there is no sound when the door opens nor is there a sound for the direction it is going. Some elevators in some buildings have announcers that will say simple things like the floor the elevator is on, and door closing, but also include other safety features like announcing when you are too close to the door when it opens or closes - but this is not normal. These types of elevators are only in newer buildings. Most of Japan does not have this.
I visited Japan recently and heard the announcement so many times that I can nearly remember how to say "doors closing" in Japanese. I also remember plenty of train stations without elevators or ramps - I already feel sorry for the Paralympians.
That thing has to do with the social stigma around the disabled in japan, being consireded as kegare by religious tradition and therefore, burakumin. There asre still communities of disabled people living togheter in Japan, almost being outcasts of society if not already.
5 років тому+1
I've never seen such an elevator in countries I've been to. I've lived in Japan but I didn't notice them have different notifications for up and down
@@NihonKaikan After watching this video I listened at two separate tall buildings in Osaka (Japan). They both had a voice notification, as well as chimes. Two tones, with the second being high pitched, signifies the elevator going up. Going down is the opposite order. To me this is more intuitive than the double chime system.
Yeah I've just realised this too; which is bizarre considering our accessibility requirements can be a bit (understandably) strict sometimes. But I have noticed that the doors have LED indicators now
That's so cool! I'm blind, and although i live in an European Union country, I don't really come across elevators with this feature... Some have braille markings on the control panel, but some very new ones started implementing touchscreen control panels, that can't be used by the blind! There are accessibility features on all smartphones these days (and they are very good), but sometimes i get a bit scared of over-enthusiastic automatizations that disregard completely the needs of the disabled! Thanks for this video, that brings into light our needs! I love your channel! And congratulations on your performance, since your channel is just about to break the 1 million subscribers mark! Humanity needs more people like you, humoristic and educative!
We definitely don't have that audible schema for lifts in Australia. Mostly just a "bing" to announce car arrival. These days most (many) lifts also use voice to announce what floor it has just arrived at and also where it's going... the ones in my work building, for instance, say "Seventh floor... going down". And my favourite is the lift to the underground carpark where you arrive at "Floor minus one". In the book "Factfulness" (Hans Rosling) there is a great story about how we in the modern world take safety for granted. Paraphrasing the story it tells of some Swedish doctors working in a hospital in India and one of the student doctors nearly lost her leg when they were rushing to catch an elevator and she stuck her leg into the closing door to open it and hold for the others... except that Indian lifts do not have the safety-switches fitted that we take for granted. They were able to free her without any lasting damage, and then the Indian people that saw it happen and helped to rescue her said "WHY DID YOU DO THAT !!!" Funny... but also very poignant. We don't realise how lucky we are living with the mandated safety measures and maintenance, instepection processes around us everyday.
I don't think it's a requirement because I've definitely encountered lifts that don't (my workplace lifts are silent) but just went and checked and my apartment building lifts would be fully compliant, with 1 ding for up and 2 for down, a somewhat more pleasant 2 tone affair than the 2 tone examples in this vid, and complemented by "going up" and "going down". Not surprising mind, given that for example Schindler's lifts were cited as an example and they're quite common here too. Why bother making 2 different controller setups when the version mandated in one country has useful extra features and costs just about nothing extra?
@@springbok4015 Same here in Spain, as in Australia and South Africa. I believe here most of the elevators just don't make any sound, some do just one chime, some the American chime system and some just a voice inside the elevator
The Australian standards are not retroactive, so lifts only have to comply to the standard in force when they were installed (or significantly modified/upgraded). Some building owners want the latest gear, others just want to not spend any money.
In Japan, at least from what I remember from the last time I was in an elevator here (Covid blues got me missing Tokyo), they usually say “going up” and “going down” in Japanese. There are a lot of cool little accessibility features here though. One of the most common is the sound that pedestrian crossings will use for which direction is red or green. Another is the yellow strip in all train stations that have bumps, grooves, and patterns on it to indicate hallways, stairs, and stopping points (for example, the train tracks). You wouldn’t think much of it, unless you ask about it.
Yeah, what is this lazy, unmelodious foolishness? Why would almost an entire country deliberately choose to curse all of its elevator-adjacent occupants and desk clerks with such a low-effort nuisance of a noise?
I figured this out for the first time waiting for the elevator in my New Orleans hotel last week. It had the two tone ding dong for down. I gave my self a pat on the back for this.
Our company also has that in German and English. "Erste Etage - First Floor" Though I really need to check the Chimes when I get back to work next week.
German here, and while i dont think all elevators do this i recall some elevators having two tones, one ascending and one descending, i guess you can SEE where im going with this :P
In my first semester of college, I travelled a lot (a lot being 5 times), which meant a lot of hotels which meant a lot of elevators. I watched this video before all of that, and I started noticing the things mentioned in this video a lot more, like the chimes. Also, I was in a hotel in Atlanta which had 47, and, after a group event, a few of us went to that elevator and rode from the ground to the top floor. Ascending 47 floors in 30 seconds is an interesting experience, especially since the center of the building is hollow and you can see all the way to the bottom floor
I think in Poland they did it better: when the elevator goes up, there's low tone and high tone, and when the elevator goes down, there's high tone and low tone.
@@Devo57 That's the problem, it's not symmetrical. After the first beep you have to wait to be sure there is not another and seeing in the video the pause can be rather long. Also noone is tone deaf that they can't recognized sound that is one or several octaves higher or lower than the previous tone, it's all about the relative difference.
"James, that guys back and hes filming all the elevators again"
DieselDucy
LOL
“Ma, that cat’s back and it looks like it’s wearing makeup”
Lol "Its the elevator guy"
Dieselducy. Google him
I noticed that here in Poland it's usually high-low for going down and low-high for going up. Which I would say is more intuitive.
Alik Świech interesting, I agree this sounds more intuitive
In Europe in general
i live in germany and while watching this video i thought "i never noticed a 2 tone, but i think the pitch goes up or down"
The two tone can be difficult for blind who may be hard of hearing. Two louder similar tones can be easier in some rare cases
Same here in the UK
Outside the US, I am more used to a single tone for up - "ding!" and then two tones at different pitches for going down - "bing bong!" The same pitch twice feels weird
I was going to say that. In canada every elevator does the 2 tone, I had never heard the 2 single tone until this video haha
Omg the repeated tone is giving me unnecessary stress lmao. I prefer how it is in canada, where the second tone goes down. Idk how it helps the blind tho. But in some malls i remember it verbally saying 'going down' or 'going up'
@@jillwoa the sound works like the little arrow lights. a sharp crisp "bing!" for going up (so if you didn't want to go up, don't move into that elevator). the sad droopy "bong" of a machine that is overdue for a service is for down.
Myself, I stare at my phone and then when I hear the sound, look around for the light to know which elevator I want (if there are several) and if it is going in the direction I want.
Are you thinking of an airplane?
@@brandonbouwmeister9482 I've also never heard it until now and I'm from the US 😳 the down tone is always lower from what I've heard. Then again I dont get out much :^)
I've never noticed the "one ding up, two dings down" thing before. Now I'm itching to visit a building with elevators and see if they do that.
same here. though I think ours doesn't do that at the hospitals here, but I could very well be wrong. Time to go a visiting...
lip synching to the elevator voice had me on the floor.
1st floor or 2nd?
on _which_ floor? ;)
You were ‘Going down’
I do with the announcements at train stations whenever I travel
Which one?
in australia, all our lifts are the kind that say "going up" or "going down" if I'm not mistaken - and I don't think I've ever seen a double-ding before, they probably all just rely on the voice. I could be mistaken but I really don't recall a single lift doing a double ding here so this was interesting
Mum's apartment building (16 floors, just outside Brisbane) doesn't have any voice prompt or double beep.. makes me wonder if there is any indication at all for blind people. I'll have to check now next time I visit.
It makes me feel so whole that DeSinc watching the same, nerdy elevator content I do 😭
Update to my Mum's building - it does actually double beep, I just never notied.
Nifty
hello bhop man
black bhop men :3
"Putting two and down together" is such a clever line.
He is a clever boy :)
@Zander Heinitz Stop Capitilizing Every Single Word In The Sentence, It's A Comment Not A Movie Title
Also clever: The video shifts down at 6:33 when he says “going down.”
Just one of those things you do when editing to entertain yourself, probably.
I was like "ups, he said that wrong" ... "wait a sec... oohh"
I was looking for this comment. If you didn’t leave it, I was going to. I got a chuckle out of it too?
"That's why I closed captions all of my videos."
Later: *"Excruciatingly smooth jazz"*
And "Synonym for ding that I haven't used yet". Gotta love him.
I immediately turned on captions and noticed almost right after that at 5:10 that he even misspelled "asks" as "aks"
[tin-
-kle!]
One of the few (or many?) times when turning on the captions is hilarious
@@Tiscando As someone who uses captions whenever (proper ones are) available, captions contain jokes more often than most people seem to think (especially on UA-cam). Tomska is my personal favorite, as he often has an "extra jokes" version separate from the main captions
From a blind person, thank you! It’s nice to hear about others caring about accessibility.
How accessible is the UA-cam interface?
I was also going to ask how frustrating it is to be a blind person on a video site in general, but then I thought about it and realized that this channel does a pretty good job of describing what's happening on screen at all times. At first I thought it was a rhetorical device but it may be an accessibility feature.
As a whole, the UA-cam interface is very accessible. I mostly listen to UA-cam on my phone and the app partners great with voice over.
@@Koda_Grey That's great to hear. We build a video asset manager and they push back when I add accessibility since it's a "waste of time, blind people don't use video." It is frustrating. I appreciate your perspective.
Username Blind people still listen to videos like podcasts. It would be super challenging to watch something super visual like a makeup tutorial; but people still do it with assistance with apps like Be My Eyes or Aira.
I am starting to realize that there is incredible logic and engineering put into darn near everything around me, no matter what it is or how mundane it may seem.
GemCat Appreciate life in all its beauty, no matter how mundane it may be. I felt like more people would be happier simply by caring the world around them more.
The more mundane the more likely this type of quality work was done into making it.
I often think about and appreciate small things in average day life that are so well engineered that you hardly notice it.
How about that. Science proves itself to be useful. (I'm a scientist and a bit biased.)
this is why engineers should run countrys shit would go alot smoother
engineer:what if the person who wishes to use our elevator cant see!!!
politician:i want to ban all motorized vehicles from using the side walk i dont see how preventing such a thing would ever cause a issue
I love learning these sorts of "secrets in plain sight" facts. Thanks!
"excruciatingly smooth jazz"
Except that the point is that it is NOT in SIGHT at all
LMacNeill - you GOT to check out the secret spinning cone on UK pedestrian crossings.
@@My1xT Ha! Very true! :-)
That's so sightist of you!
You mentioned in this video that you caption all of your work and I want you to know how much I appreciate it. I'm not Deaf/HoH, but I do have sensory processing issues that can make interpreting speech a little difficult at times. Captions do so much to make UA-cam more usable for me and I wish everyone was as consistent about captions as you are.
@Jan Krynicky That's probably the case, the dubbing can be widely different from the original (to match the new speech to the pictures), and the captions more accurately reflect what was orginally said and/or are more concerned with spreading the text more evenly (give enough time to read quickly-spoken sentences).
Fun fact: Bud Spencer movies are significantly more popular in Germany than elsewhere, largely because most of them were translated by the same guy, who did not care in the slightest what the writers wrote and oftentimes flat-out invented lines to add to the dialogue. Usually when the actors where off-screen, but sometimes not even caring that nobody was moving their lips 😁 A couple originally serious italo-westerns are popular _only_ in Germany because here, they are comedies 😂 You would be very confused if you watched these movies with a direct translation from Italian to German as subtitles.
I'm non native speaker and those captions are GODSEND
My hearing's a bit off so I always appreciate captions! They're also good for watching people with accents. I love a lot of British tv, but sometimes can't understand some accents if my life depended on it lol
@jankrynicky I should have read the replies before adding my own. I said much the same thing. Yes, cc can be frustrating! ...but sometimes funny, too :)
I think a lot of them are done automatically, no person involved, but I may be wrong.
Industry insider here. The in-car lanterns are not just for modernization. They are sometimes used to reduce the cost of having one at every floor and extra controller outputs to select the correct one. They are also required in specifications when the architect wants to minimize the number of cutouts in the wall for fixtures. The main drawback to car-traveling lanterns is that they can only sound once the door starts to open. Hall lanterns are able to sound in advance, so you can walk to the correct door and be there when it opens. Switching topics - when it comes to mechanical bells, these are almost always wired in series with both lamps in parallel so that only one bell is needed (if you wired one bell in parallel with both lamps, then the bell wire would backfeed the lamp that isn't supposed to be on). However if the lamp is burnt out, then the bell doesn't sound either. Most electronic chimes have separate up and down inputs so they can be wired in parallel with the lamps.
KBilt92 that’s some serious elevator knowledge
Being at the door when it opens isn't always a good thing... It's really annoying when you're in an elevator and the door opens, but you can't step out because someone is standing directly in front of the door waiting to get in.
I thought in-car lanterns are required by law there, also, why do elevators in The US have a star on the ground floor button?
@@anindrapratama
because while some buildings have the "ground" floor /main entrance at floor "1", others have floors below - such as in one particular case a hospital having several facilities, such as laundry, the hospital kitchens and a morgue below all of that, and the star is a quick way to let passengers know what floor the main entry is on
Oooh we have an INSIDER! A MOLE! A snitch! How exciting.
I love the captions on this video. [bwang] [doop] [ding-dong] [tink-kle] [fing] [clang]
5:55 [synonym for ding I haven't used yet]
'BWANG" was my favorite, lol
[DOOT] [DOOT]
Don Martin would be proud.
haha, i also love the captions of this video
I'm pretty sure here in the UK, we don't have double chimes. I do frequently hear the voice saying which direction it's going and the floor it's on, though.
pokédude583 it’s just a smarter idea right?
It's possibl the chimes were used before technology either existed or was cst effective enough for them to use the voice.
In the UK they sometimes chime, but they always go "life going up/down" and announce the floor it's on as the doors open.
@@AuroraStarstorm "Life going down" XD
*Sad trombone*
Huh? I've known this fact for yonks, every lift I've gotten in has a double ding to go down (I'm in London, but have seen them in my home of Stoke-on-Trent)
I'm functionally blind outside my home - light perception only, long white cane, etc. I've lived in lots of the US plus London and traveled throughout Europe.
1. I've almost never heard the double chime for down. Certainly not enough for it to be a noticeable pattern. The elevator in my apartment building (British: "the lift in my block of flats") does not have an arrival chime at all. However, I've only rarely been in buildings with banks of elevators, as opposed to singles; the up/down distinction is really only relevant for banks, or if it's really crowded (in which case someone inside can tell you). The door sound itself is easy to hear - though at a bank of elevators, it's often not early enough to lock on to and get to before it starts closing. Whereas there is a visual indicator of which elevator is the one arriving, the "arriving" chime is often not so easily localized.
2. Only about half of elevators have a chime to acknowledge "you have pushed the summon button". It's kinda important to know if the thing is incoming or if you're just standing there like an idiot (as opposed to being out of service, or a dodgy button, or the summon being canceled for some reason you didn't notice, etc).
3. About a quarter of elevators have completely indistinguishable (to me) outside buttons for "summon elevator" and "ring emergency alarm". You'd think this is something that one would want to tell apart, but no - same button shape, no Braille.
4. Hardly any elevators make a chime for *passed* floors, or a "which floor am I on now" signal (either an audible announce, or a tactile number on the inside face of the outside elevator door frame), so if I press the wrong button (or if someone else is also using / summoning it), I have no way of knowing I'm on the wrong floor.
5. In larger buildings (e.g. hospitals, airports, malls, etc), there's often visual signage for what is on what floor, or for that matter, what some of the weirder button labels mean (e.g. "M" or "L"). I've literally never found an accessible version of that.
6. In British & European elevators, on the inside, the ground floor button is almost always about 2-3x the height of the rest. This is very important for finding it easily. Reading Braille is slow and isn't a magic skill you get together with your cane (and especially now, I don't really like having to used an ungloved hand to touch communal surfaces).
Etc.
If you actually want to do videos about blind-accessible design, there's a lot I could point you to notice or experience that I'm pretty certain you'll never have noticed before. Ping me @ s.ai/contact if interested..
I also noticed the absence of any indication which floor one is on in most elevators. Some modern elevators have voice though. But at least here Germany elevator-builders mess up the ground-floor button. Its not the same level where you enter/exit the building. That's even confusing for normal sighted people like myself. Pressing the big green button will not always bring you to the exit of the building.
@@PoisonNuke oof. Can you tell me what they're labeled as in braille?
@@saizai to my knowledge, you have to know on which floor you came in and remember this.
But there is a good rule of thumb: when the terrain is higher on one side of the building than on the other, there is a good chance that the groundfloor and the main-entrance are not on the same level. In flat areas its less likely to happen though.
@@PoisonNuke Yeah, I've been in buildings where the main entrance is the uphill floor.
Have you noticed whether the "ground" floor has the raised button?
@@saizai I have to keep an eye out for it, I just noticed that I'm sometimes annoyed from the fact, that its wrong. But as I have the gift of seeing, it is easy to ignore it and therefore I cant recall the details anymore.
"That's the main reason I caption nearly all of my videos"
It's greatly appreciated more often than most think.
Signed, someone who isn't hearing impaired per say but has a sensory processing disorder and who's brain sometimes needs encouragement from the eyeballs.
It's spelled "per se". Latin.
@mind fornication If it was in fact an autocorrect error, then it was an error on the part of the person or group that entered the spelling information into the program.
Heh, I also found captioning useful as an EFL speaker.
@mind fornication 🙄
Okay, if you insist. English as foreign language.
@@7636kei We usually say ESL, English as a Second Language
It’s hilarious that I’m legally blind and never noticed the meaning of the chimes. I guess it’s subconscious for me.
If you are blind, how did you type
Kyle Brown I’m legally blind, not completely blind. My vision is very blurry. I don’t need my eyes to type anyway. No one is supposed to actually look at their fingers. Typing is actually a basic and very common skill for any blind person that uses a computer. Blind people use keyboard shortcuts and screen readers to navigate computers. I can use a mouse, but for people with worse vision than me they might not be able to use one. That is why keyboard shortcuts are used. Typing skills are very important.
One of my best friends is actually a program coder and he’s blind as well. Completely blind though, quite amazing what the handicapped can do
@@CharNatorn If you actually know how to properly type you shouldn't be looking at the keyboard anyways. Most people who regularly use a keyboard can type completely by touch.
Can i be illegally blind
[doot doot]
“This one wants to be extra sure you got the signal”
*[DOOT]*
*[DOOT]*
Blind person:zzzzzzzzz
Elevator : wake up sir
Blind person :zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Elevator :(slaps person) WAKE UP YOU IDIOT!
i am now looking for the elevator aficionados who meet on empty supermarket parking lots on sundays, showing off their elevators pimped with train horns as door chime.
It’s more like **BING BONG**
There's some great onomatopoeia in this video's captions.
Doot doot
“The smarmiest voice imaginable *Going Down*”
Captions on this video are spot-on
God I really gotta remember to put subtitles on for all of his videos.
4:20
Bwang Bwang Doot Doot
They always are
Thank you so much for your comment, the subtitles cracked me up and I would not have had them on without ya
.."schindler's lifts" You are a master of subtlety.
Schindler's lifts is a major brand of lifts
Absolutely, I use one every day.
I heard Shitler instead of Schindler. lol
Terry Weaver The brand is simply "Schindler" not "Schindler's lifts".
it may be, but in the US normally the term "Elevator" is used instead of "Lift", so he probably said that specifically for the pun.
I work in a elevator maintenance company in Russia.
Firstly, I never heard the double beep sound. It's always been two toned signal, either on our domestic made elevators (made in Russia or Belarus) and on imported ones (Otis, Kone, Schindler etc).
Secondly, there is significant difference in behavior between the elevators mounted on residential buildings and the ones that work on malls, office complexes and other non residential buildings. When you are on the landing in residential building, you most likely want to go DOWN to 1st floor from your apartment. You almost never want to go UP. So this kind of elevators don't stop to catch you, when they go up. They only catch you downwards. Anytime the elevator stops by on your landing, its always goes down (except its empty, in this case you can press higher floor button and go up, if you want, or if someone in cabin pressed your floor button). Therefore, residential elevators don't even have distinct arrows on each landing or cabin and most of the times we hear two toned down signal.
And, thirdly, just to mention. These damper bars with thick rubber or springs, on the bottom of the shaft are NOT intended to catch the elevator cab in case of falling down. They are needed to prevent cabin or counterweight to move too low in case of limit switch malfunction, taking in account, that elevator moves on NORMAL speed. Also, to mention about the limit switches. They tell about the cabin position only on top and bottom of the shaft. In other positions, controller gathers information from special magnetic or optical sensor, which triggers on certain landing level points in the shaft.
In the end, I want to thank you for this small video about the elevators and I hope you ever touch this broad topic again.
Thanks for this detailed info! I never noticed that but I lived in residential apartments before and right enough, only one button and a weird double tone from a broken speaker.
I also assumed the springs and rubber were to catch the elevator falling so it's good to know they are not and I'm fucked if the cable breaks! Lol
@@u0aol1 I also work for a Elevator company (One of the big 4) as a installer and the rubber/spring is called a buffer and they are there to "catch" the car if it falls(not very likely). It will not be pleasant @Strum is also right about the limit switches in a sense.
@@tonmi2049 I thought falling in an elevator would be very pleasant experience! :P
Bruh you wrote an entire essay
@@Rumplestiltzchen If I was an elevator company owner, I'd hire him and his fellow elevator workman here in the comments. Clearly knowledgeable and willingly sharing that knowledge in a place that others interested in the topic would learn from it. Great people.
" ♫ excruciatingly smooth jazz ♫ "
These captions are superb.
Recently discovered it quickly became one of my favorite YT channels : tech/science spiced with such a good dose of dry/twisted yet subtle humour. I really enjoy it.
It’s 5 AM and I just came home after a Friday night out. Seeing as I am such a wild party animal, I had to watch this video. Of course, afterwards I had to go check the elevator in my building. Turns out it chimes twice when it’s going down, once when it’s going up. Just for the record, I’m in Kraków, Poland. What makes this even more interesting though, is that I am legally blind, and I’ve never noticed this.
I wonder if there's a place you can go to lean all the stuff like this
osco4311 Blind school. Duh 🙄
Maxon Mendel same place where NFL refs go to learn as well
I've always been curious about the blind.
One person asked where you learn stuff for the blind, and another responded with blind school.
I went to a high school that had classrooms for the blind, but I always wondered where newly blind adults went. Is there public funding for it?
When you're on the internet, do you use text to speech? what does this sound like: jasdflj awlejlaj dlajfajl ?
It must be really hard when someone types something with really bad grammar and spelling.
I know you're legally blind, but here in the U S, that implies that you can still see. Can you see enough to read these comments? What do you do about personal business? Do you have anything to stimulate the imagination when you masturbate?
I used to volunteer with elderly and disabled, and I was helping a blind lady, she folded her money a certain way so that she knows what she has. Do you do something similar.
Sorry, I'm 30 years old, and I still have so many questions.
chadd990
Wow, ok. It was all regular questions non disabled ppl ask ppl w/disabilities till the masturbation one.
But to answer some of your questions.
Text to speech just spells letters when you type random gibberish.
For the record, not everyone uses visual info to stimulate the imagination in that way, whether sighted or not.
If you're wondering about the weird hybrid mentioned at about the 40 second mark, these are roped hydraulic elevators. This arrangement allows for extended travel. For the two pistons, this arrangement is used so the hydraulic components stay above ground and avoid issues with burying the hydraulic cylinder (such as leaks going undetected in ground, etc).
You hit the nail on the head, you're exactly right.
not even just then Xi Chen roped hydraulic is also, or at least was until MRL traction elevators became a commonplace item, roped hydraulic was used because you could add an elevator to a building that didn't originally have one, once a building is built tradition hydro is unfeasably difficult and unless you added a machine room to the top traction was also impossible but a roped hydro could just be installed right there, simple.
I've actually seen a roped elevator with the machine room on the same floor as the elevator starts (underground). I couldn't look much into the machine room, but they use some sort of rope routing to make it possible. I know for a fact, that that elevator is a pure roped one, since it does not have a piston for any hydrolics. (It's only an elevator for an underground pathway, but still interesting)
Chickenbread Designs those are basement traction elevators and their roping arrangement is different from overhead types.
What is the point of hydraulic lifts anyway? Is it only about space above the elevator. There is a lot more upkeep with a strong hydraulic system than with a simple counterweight over pulley.
I will say for a non elevator enthusiast u sure know a lot about elevators
LOL, DieselDucy! I'm glad you saw this.
Hi, I'm another lift enthusiast.
DieselDucy HI ANDREW!!
reuploadify both of us
@@EASsirenVids01 So are you into elevators as well?
I'm blind myself and I wasn't even aware of what the different beeps/dings meant!
Thank you for teaching me something new, and thank you for caring about accessibility! 👍
This sounds like something people watching movies to find errors would freak out about
Good point. We must all immediately start adding to the "goofs" section of the IMDb for every movie which gets this wrong from now on!
Y'mean like an upcoming companion video to "Obviously dubbed telephone ring" piece from a while back? I'd watch that!
In the uk all elevators say in English RP what they’re doing so you’ll hear an upper class, female English accent read out “going down... third floor”, “going up... seventh floor”. “Please select a floor” “Doors closing” “Doors opening” etc and this is so that it’s compliant with the 2010 equality act.
Many in the US (Denver Colorado to be precise) also have that same British accented woman announcing the floors and such.
Gareth Griffiths I don’t remember that either, but there does tend to be a voice for accessibility but I suppose it just depends on which lifts you use. “The audible signal strength must be adjustable between 35 and 65 dB(A) for car environments. In noisy environments, sound level should be adjustable up to 80 dB(A).” www.kone.co.uk/Images/8570_Accessible-elevators-compliant-with-EN81-70-2018_hr_tcm45-86548.pdf
@@gazchap I'm sure I read somewhere that research suggests female voices to be slightly more pleasant/clearer than male voices when announcing things
not that it makes males or females superior in any way :)
I like the elevator from the show _The IT Crowd_ that sounds pleasant until you get down to the gloomy, unmaintained basement where the doors seem to be prevented from opening all the way so the doors keep opening (most of the way) and closing again (most of the way), the lights are flickering, and the male voice keeps repeating, "Get out of the lift.... Get out of the lift..."
Thomas Connolly in the uae to
I love telling jokes about elevators, they work on so many levels!
Larry Bundy Jr that’s some next level humour
It has its ups and downs.
I'm glad you got a rise out of it!
42'nd thumbs up :)
STOP
Thank you for this. My mother lost her vision when I was 14 years old. She went to a school that taught her how to navigate without sight. I never knew about the double ding. I always thought until now, that it was another elevator arriving within earshot. My mom went around to elementary schools and taught children about blindness and how to guide a blind person. She was a remarkable woman who refused to let her visual impairment get her down.
Her _blindness_ *
Regardless if the dings and bings are standardized worldwide or not, one thing the world can't agree on is whether the next floor (or "storey") above street level should be called the first floor or second floor! (Due to this ambiguity, the ground level floor often has a star next to it.)
In the UK the street level is called ground floor and next one up first floor most often.
There are also buildings where the land around them slopes so they have two levels that are at ground level on different sides of the building.
13th floors, too.
Hey! I love your videos :)
@@AMD1 In parts of Asia it's pretty common for buildings to have 13th floors, but they skip 4 instead. Different cultures, different quirky superstitions.
The closed captioning on this video for the elevator sounds is 10/10
Also “excruciatingly smooth jazz” 11/10
The CC is Genius.
7/5 would go deaf.
doot
[Going down] (in the smarmiest voice imaginable)
@@andracatheduckking257 As I read that comment it was in Leslie Phillips's voice.If you're from The UK and over a certain age then you'll understand..lol
I am a professional engineer who works as an elevator consultant. I have a "jack of all trades" perspective on elevators. Some tips/comments on things your bring up in your video:
- 0:40: This is a Schindler hydraulic elevator. The driving solution could be called "hydraulic twin-post telescopic inverted cylinders". Twin-post hydraulics are overwhelmingly the norm for new short ride installations because burying the cylinder is undesired for risk and maintenance reasons. Schindler's solution to this is indeed unique. First, these days nobody but them arranges the cylinders upside-down, and to do it with multi-section telescopic cylinders takes balls. The ropes are a relating solution which ensures that each section of the cylinder moves relative to the others in the proper ratio. By contrast, when Otis installs a telescopic cylinder (not upside-down, of course) they don't have a relating solution, so each section sort of just dead-ends on the next in sequence while traveling upward, and it can be felt in the cab.
- 5:45: The car lantern is probably just broken or not installed properly. It would be against code for a mechanic to disable the car lantern on purpose. Report it to the building staff and then they should call it in to the maintenance provider for call back service.
- 7:30: KONE produces their own arrival fixtures, and they have some of the best and under-stated arrival gong sounds. Particularly somewhere like a hotel setting, oftentimes one can hear the digital gongs ringing throughout the entire building, so I really appreciate an attempt to make it a more pleasant sound for those who are nearby. ua-cam.com/video/lcwGdpmZc-4/v-deo.html
- 7:45: I love mechanical bells too, they have fallen out of use mostly because the maintenance burden is much greater than for an electronic gong. For buildings which still have arrival bells in hall lanterns it is common for half of the bells to not work. Given that ADA compliance (internationally generically called "barrier-free accessibility") is important, this risk is not acceptable. I want somebody to produce a product with a quality loudspeaker which produces the bell noise. ;-)
- I think you'll like these, there are a few companies which produce fake dial floor indicators for elevators, instead of using a rope and pulley to drive it like the originals, they use a motor and digital position encoder to emulate the function, only requiring the same discrete floor position signal that those segmented floor displays need as input. www.cjanderson.com/elevatordialindicators.aspx
@Greg Pedan - First, thank you for all the additional information! While my eyes glazed over on the hydraulic description, the rest made a lot of sense, and is cool to have learned!
Second, while talking about the retrofit in his apartment's elevator, he highlights the area where a dial floor indicator likely was. Why would they have taken that out when retrofitting it with the more recent fixtures? It wouldn't hurt anything to have both the dial and a lantern, so is there some functional reason they couldn't have both?
So the lift is basically just a cable-drawn elevator which is operated by hydraulic rams instead of a winch on top of the shaft? With the cables being double purchased and pushing the idler pulley instead of pushing the lift directly?
Greg Peden Hi! I like to pursue a career and become an elavator mechanic. Any ideas or tips on where to begin ? I'd appreciated. Thanks.
@@vileCR999 Mounting the hydraulics upside down means you'll have to run hydraulic lines that move with the cabin. It does make me think why not just use them with the cylinders on normal position but having the space for them to run from the top of the cabin, as I understand it, it would give the same travel distance but have the cylinders' hydraulic lines fixed down.
Unless of course I understood the concept entirely wrong...
Elevator consultant's daughter joke:
Daughter: _"Dad, would you give me a lift please!"_
“UL, which I think stands for unsightly lever”
This man is a comedian and an educator at the same time.
I feel awful for this but I couldn't stop laughing at Schindler's Lifts
I'm looking forward to the elevator geek movie of that title, though be careful not to get it mixed up with a very similarly named movie set in WWII... ;-)
*VIOLIN SOLO INTENSIFIES!*
3:52 Me too. I appreciate the subtile humor in those videos. He's a great artist. This pun was not accidental.
It's brilliant, isn't it? I still chuckle every time I step onto a Schindler escalator or elevator; and I've never even seen the movie or read the book. Brilliant marketing is brilliant :)
Schindler lifts - Jesus saves ✝
And I can't thank you enough for taking the time to caption your videos. Seriously, a legend.
Because he like accessibility devices
I live in Europe and I know quite a lot about elevators. There is another thing about the chime that you didn't notice: in a bank of several elevator, the pitch of the chime is always slightly different depending on which one arrived. Let's say you have 4 lifts working together. Lift A will have the lowest pitch of the 4 lifts, lift B will have a slightly higher pitch, lift C will have a slightly higher pitch than the B and lift D will have the highest pitch of the 4 lifts. This is not random, you should try ! And here, this same simple and double chime trick is used but only since a few years, and they don't change the chime on older lifts in general. But here, they all do the two tone variant of Schindler, because Schindler installed them since the 70's (but only two tone, regardless of the direction, they changed that during the 1990's or early 2000's) and then they all thought it was a good idea to generalise that, which is a good idea. To me, the most pleasant chime is the down chime of the newest Kone EcoDisc lifts (model KSS-140 for example), they do a ding dong with half an octave between the two notes (instead of using the note just under) and sound like some sort of "water drop-like chime" that a synthesizer would do.
is there an example to hear that sound?
Huh!
I always thought that the varying pitch was just the innate tolerance of the electronics in the chime modules.
(Probably is here in the US...)
Today I learned!
please keep the elevator videos coming! my friend used to have a fear of elevators until i told her about some of the safety mechanisms in them and now my whole friend group talks about elevators every time someone brings up a new elevator fact
Around 04:00 - I thought you'd said _"inside Schindler's LIST..."_ !!!
It's the same Schindler, isn't it?
Schindler's lift, the best lift ever
@@maighstir3003 Yes, it is the same Schindler guy that gave the name to the company and to the movie.
@@frankstrawnation Nope, wrong Schindler. It's an extremely common name.
@@lordofthecats6397 Almost got it mixed up with Schneider (Electric)
Loved the fact that you're subtitling your videos - I'm not hearing impaired, but as I'm not a native English speaker, it helps me better understand what you're saying. If you ever want your subtitles translated to (European) Portuguese, feel free to let me know - I'll gladly do it!
And if you ever want your subtitles translation translated to (brazilian) Portuguese, I can give you a hand.
I'm not exactly sure how it works, but he enabled community captions for his videos, so I think you can just start captioning.
I love elevator chimes. Especially on a quiet night as you're sitting there in a modernist room, and the lights glow up to the chimes signalling the machinery opening its doors for you. Then you step into the sleek compartment and get transported. It's magical.
I'm also an adult, and my love of little things like this is very weird to my age group.
Abandoned Void all of that beautifully picturesque scene is shattered by the addition of a random person in there with you
This made me laugh for being weirdly relatable
Well then.. You must be my long lost brother! ; ) Coz I'm a sucker and a seeker for those same perfectly tranquil timed moments, that are just so balanced and in tune.. It's like everything that goes on around you, no matter how few and/or simple they may be, or perhaps the complete opposite, are sort of part of an orchestra, that is just creating a very joyful spectacle and experience, that's in tune with ones mind. A harmony of sounds and visuals. A harmony of symmetry and forces balancing each other out. And it feels like you either seamlessly.. just fit in! Or like you're not there at all.. like you're apart of the window you're looking out off.. the chair your sitting in.. or just the air in the room in general. You're part of everything and nothing.. *This is achieving mindfulness to me.*
..and I'm fortunate enough to have been able to develop this ability to a high enough degree that it almost could be considered an on and off switch at this point. Well met fellow livsnjutare, bon vivant, epicure!
As long as you ignore the overwhelming smell of piss?..... Or maybe that's just where I live🤣
Your curiosity about the world is inspiring. I've not been as curious as I used to be...your videos are like a spark plug for my brain
"Ask not for whom the elevator chimes, as it chimes for thee".
No lift serves a bungalow unto itself…
Under appreciated!
In Germany elevators in public buildings need to signal that the door is opening with an acoustic signal, but not the direction. They are also required to speak the current floor, but again not necessarily the direction. After watching your video it's baffling to me why the direction the elevator is going isn't part of this requirement.
Really? I think the doors opening sound might be a good thing to have in the U.S.
I would prefer a two tone signal. That's not that annoying.
If that's a requirement, then it must be quite a new one, because I've never used an elevator, that announced the floor. Actually every elevator I've used in the past few years did not even chime or make a ping sound. Can you quote the respective DIN standard number?
It depends on the Elevator and it's size - Elevators who only has one call button dosn't signal the direction, but these with an directional call button normaly have a single chime for up and an two tone chime with one high and one low note for going down.
Why do you need a signal to tell you what floor you're on? Shouldn't you know which floor you're already on? /sarcasm
You are the Doug Demuro of communal vertical transport.
D Can elevators apparently have several quirks and features
This..... is..... a 1970 Otis
Alec the type of guy to buy a broken laserdisc player just so he can repair it
No. That would be diesel ducy. Look him up
I'm glad there's someone else out there that makes the "Schindler's Lifts" joke lol
Good grief, why doesn't every single comment for this video acknowledge that comedy gold!
Yes! My favorite dad joke that noone likes!
I'm an elevator enthusiast (yep, that's a thing) and a huge fan of your channel. Coming from a guy who has known about elevators for quite a while, I must say that you've summed up this "hidden in plain sight" thing pretty well with the elevator lanterns. It's pretty surprising how many people don't know this simple little feature and simply take elevators for granted (admittedly, myself before I started to learn about elevators). As such, I've seen plenty of examples where people may have hopped on the first elevator to arrive, regardless of direction the elevator is going (ex: person wanting to go down hopping on the first elevator, even though it's going up). Things that don't help sometimes even if the lantern is still enabled (with chimes ringing), the lantern's light can be burned out (common with older incandescent indicators). As such, a user that may have no idea about the directional chime trick may just hop on any elevator that arrives.
It's also surprising how many more companies are starting to use the European styled two-tone chime. It seems like it started with Schindler (like at 4:01), and now OTIS (though theirs sounds pretty cheap) and KONE have used them.
I would go on and on about this sort of thing, but that would be too long of a comment. In short, well done like your other content. If you can, it would be interesting to see other elevator related videos in the future as well. It's not everyday that you see other people that find elevators interesting.
considering your user name and hobby, Have you ever gone to Bristol, CT? Otis has a big test tower there not far from ESPN. Or well they did I dunno if they still do.
I never noticed this. Now I will never not notice.
This channel is great at telling you stuff you can never un-know/un-see/un-hear.
Basically this entire channel
When going down, I almost always am going to the ground floor, so I honestly always thought the double ding was to indicate the lobby. The more you know
@Marcella Norman When going down, I almost always am going to the ground floor, so I honestly always thought the double ding was to indicate the lobby. The more you know
The unique onomatopoeias for each chime in the subtitles induced a spark of joy to flow through my otherwise cold and unfeeling heart. So thanks for that. :)
My spouse, who is blind, did not know about this, and neither did I
. Very subtle but potentially very useful.
I am beginning to notice you're turning more and more into Andy Rooney. If you don't know who he is, look him up. And I do say this with all due respect. I loved watching him and you have a bit of a Rooney quality about your videos and your presentation. That is a good thing. After all, I watched him for over 30 years of my life.
"Ya ever wonder why?"
Ha ha ha, that is a funny observation! But I don't think Alec is, or will ever be, nearly as curmudgeonly as Mr Rooney was.
@ no, he had his own segment on 60 minutes
Hmmmmm. Now that you mention it. 🤔 😅
Good heavens, you're right! Give him 30 more years and....
Everytime I watch his videos I feel like I'm watching one of those 90's internet videos
andrew, dont interrupt
Wow, I have to say, I'm rather amazed I've never noticed the difference in the difference in the up and down bongs. I do bicycle delivery downtown so I'm in a lot of elevators... Now I can't wait to go to work on Monday and notice lol
I always thought the down sound was a glitch with the playback elevator's sound until now
I'm based in the UK and I've never noticed a double audio queue for going down - but I will definitely keep an ear out for it now and report back!
I'm also from the UK and have never noticed distinct down/up chimes. I'm going to pay attention now though!
Never heard thid in the UK but most elevators here have voice signals
Lots of lifts in UK have no audio chime at all. Sometimes there's a single tone, really new ones might have a "going up/down" voice.
Many UK lifts has this obnoxious female voice telling you "doors opening, going down, doors closing" ;)
Almost all of the ones I use say "4th Floor", "Doors Closing" and so on. I've never heard a double chime in my life, as far as I can recall.
I do believe I hear the same pattern here in the Netherlands. Here though, it is usually done with the two-tone variant, which I believe improves on the idea of meaning, instead of the thought that it might be a glitch when hearing the same tone twice (especially in the way some of the examples provided do). I do believe that pronounced "Going up" and "Third floor" announcements are now more common than ever, maybe even required.
To mark ground floor, I believe it is common practice here to outset the ground floor (or main exit) button. By having it a quarter inch out from the rest of the button (and a green stroke) it helps distinguish between floors. Maybe the green stroke has something to do with our green emergency exit lights, but that is conjecture.
J. V. Here in England, at least in my school, the ground floor button is also outset like this.
By two tone do you mean a rising tone for up and a falling tone for down? My immediate thought while watching this video was that that would be more aesthetically pleasing.
I believe this is a standard EU regulation, so it should be practive in everywhere of the EU.
@@jacobscrackers98 yeah, two tone going down on going down, one tone on going up.
Sounds much better and is more intuitive..
Two tone going up on going up would've been more consistent, but some people have trouble differentiating the direction notes go, so there has to be some difference other than tone as well.
Hey I caught that random reference to The Postman Always Rings Twice, I know it's 2 years later and all but just FYI I see you.
2:25 That sound came out of my left earphones and l looked to my left to see what it was. You have succeeded, sir.
In Russia only importered lifts do chime as is not common to have lifts to have dirrectional buttons, as in most of buildings they are not really needed. Most of lifts (as elevator is named in russian - lift) priorities going up from the first landing without responding to incoming landing calls, than collecting passengers going down. This is pretty useful for resident buildings, where the most lifts are used.
Btw, in metro we have male voice to indicate train going to the center of the city, and female for train going out for radiant lines and for circle ones male - clockwise and female for counterclockwise. If you are interested in mobility in public transport, part of which elevator can be considered.
That's interesting about the metro voices.Thank you.
I have an interesting elevator story that I'm sure you will find interesting. In San Diego the El Cortez had what was the tallest hydro elevator in the world for quite some time. (It has since been torn out and a couple of taller hydros have been built in other countries) there was a piston that went 15 floors up and therefore 15 floors into the ground for this elevator. There were 3 stops. The bottom 2 floors and the top floor where the restaurant sat. My Grandfather had this elevator on his service route back in the 50's & 60's when he was working for Elser Elevator (which later became Montgomery Elevator). He told me that at night around dinner time this elevator was used heavily and the hydraulic oil (which was in a tank the size of a small swimming pool) had a problem with overheating. This elevator generated a lot of heat as pumping heat from the 4 pumps & from the heat caused from friction at the seal/piston interface. My grandfather came up with a genius idea and suggested they run a sealed pipe through the oil tank that circulated the hotels swimming pool water through it. This cooled the hydraulic oil & heated the pool for free!
Real big mess when a hydraulic elevator cylinder leaks underground. Lots of liability. Even automotive lifts that used in-ground cylinders are pretty much extinct, that is one of the reasons.
Brian Leeper I bet that's why they removed it. It very well might have leaked. The hotel was abandoned for years. I always wondered why they didn't restore it with the rest of the hotel since it was part of what it was known for. That may very well explain it.
@@mute8s That is exactly what great engineers do, solving the hardest problems with the simplest solutions!
@@buddyclem7328 This reminds me of a video I just watched about the Dodge Demon (a performance car), where it was explained that in order to cool down the engine during performance use (such as racing), the refrigerant from the air conditioning system would be diverted instead to cool the engine. A brilliant, but simple solution that apparently works quite well, and doesn't require adding another complicated system to the car, since the system is already in place.
@@goopah thats interesting. What do they do about the water that usually slowly expels from the car? Most strips dont let you turn AC on ive heard...
I will take this video to thank you for your entertaining captions, even though “brown” and many others have been very fun to read - I’m just one of those people who like captions, and yours are consistently rewarding to experience!
By the way, many car manufacturers follow a similar convention: one beep for "lock" (one syllable), two beeps for "unlock" (two syllables).
I noticed this with my car yesterday! It flashes the blinkers once or twice like you said
I never noticed that! Cool!
Cool that way blind people can know they locked their car.
+Terry Was going to make that joke as well, but having said that accessibility features often make the experience of everyone better - for instance hearing your lift arrive when looking away/staring at your phone, or in the case of cars not having to walk back and physically check because the beep pattern specifies its current state (locked/unlocked).
Oh, so *that's* the root of that!
I like how in the captioning for this video, each elevator sound/tone is represented by a different onomatopoeia.
😂
Yeah, best captioning ever! I'm also highly admiring of the fact that you not only used the word 'onomatopoeia' correctly, but spelled it correctly as well!
this comment and crediting Hey Arnold.....
this person deserves some prizes,
or at the very least some cake
lol I had to rewatch it. "bwawnng" is my favourite.
@@redsquirrelftw Same here 😂
Thank you for captioning your videos. It helps me as I'm not an English native speaker and I have hearing impairment.
Man you always make me laugh. "Going Down" "First Floor". The comedy is one of the reasons I like your videos. You teach me some some knowledge whilst making me laugh.
The majority of England's elevators just state "going down."
and in ramps the: prepare - to push - the trolly - off the conveyer belt
Fixed it, thanks
Even when they’re going up? Damn it, England.
Ăᶋᶒᶍ same at Aulani in Hawaii
In Wales we have "Going up - Mynd i fyny" as well as the frustrating "Doors closing - Drysau yn cau". Bilingual lifts,
subtitles: [bwang] [bwang]
[doot] [doot]
Thanks, now i had to rewatch nearly the whole thing with captions on xD
5:55 the "[synonym of ding I haven't used yet]" is my favorite by far !
Also the "DOOT DOOT" kinda reminded me of "NOOT NOOT".
3:29
PIUR pingu!!
My favorite is 3:40 [bwawnng] [bwawnng]
6:33 “going down” camera goes up
Oh my god. That's awesome.
tim rattenbury But the image/him on screen went down
@@cat1554 no look at the table
@@deepakk1347 bruh
Thanks a lot to this channel for not only ones audibly impaired, also ones who finds super helpful in learning English using the captions as well.
Thank you, I never noticed it. This is exactly why I subscribed to this channel, valuing and understanding the ingenious engineering behind little things we take for granted.
I'm in New Zealand, and I started noticing this a few years ago, although the elevator in my building then used two tones for both up and down. Bing bong for down and bong bing for up. Since then I've started paying attention to this, and one for up two for down seems to be much more common. Although down is usually a falling tone. Probably not a good omen.
You had a lot of fun with the closed captions, didn't you?
It may have occupied a little too much of my time, yes..
[bong]
[bong]
fuck now i need to rewatch with the captions on
Great. Now I have to go back and watch it again with the captions on. And puns. Groan!
6:22 - Good one
Thanks for this! I'll now be actively listening to the elevator chimes. I'd also love for more in the accessibility series. Your next video should be the beeping crosswalk indicators!
I live in Japan.This video got my curious if there are any accessibility features of elevators here. And the short answer is: no.I only confirmed this on the building I live in, and 2 office buildings I go to regularly. Elevators always make a sound when the door is closing, however, there is no sound when the door opens nor is there a sound for the direction it is going. Some elevators in some buildings have announcers that will say simple things like the floor the elevator is on, and door closing, but also include other safety features like announcing when you are too close to the door when it opens or closes - but this is not normal. These types of elevators are only in newer buildings. Most of Japan does not have this.
I visited Japan recently and heard the announcement so many times that I can nearly remember how to say "doors closing" in Japanese.
I also remember plenty of train stations without elevators or ramps - I already feel sorry for the Paralympians.
That thing has to do with the social stigma around the disabled in japan, being consireded as kegare by religious tradition and therefore, burakumin. There asre still communities of disabled people living togheter in Japan, almost being outcasts of society if not already.
I've never seen such an elevator in countries I've been to. I've lived in Japan but I didn't notice them have different notifications for up and down
Michael Kochalka Good disabled people are lesser.
@@NihonKaikan After watching this video I listened at two separate tall buildings in Osaka (Japan). They both had a voice notification, as well as chimes. Two tones, with the second being high pitched, signifies the elevator going up. Going down is the opposite order. To me this is more intuitive than the double chime system.
This doesn't seem very common in Australia, though almost all lifts announce going up/down and the current floor.
Yeah I've just realised this too; which is bizarre considering our accessibility requirements can be a bit (understandably) strict sometimes. But I have noticed that the doors have LED indicators now
“Schindler’s Lifts”
Johnathan Sams i know 😂😂😂
that is a real company. Those were Schindler HT
That's so cool! I'm blind, and although i live in an European Union country, I don't really come across elevators with this feature... Some have braille markings on the control panel, but some very new ones started implementing touchscreen control panels, that can't be used by the blind! There are accessibility features on all smartphones these days (and they are very good), but sometimes i get a bit scared of over-enthusiastic automatizations that disregard completely the needs of the disabled!
Thanks for this video, that brings into light our needs! I love your channel! And congratulations on your performance, since your channel is just about to break the 1 million subscribers mark! Humanity needs more people like you, humoristic and educative!
We definitely don't have that audible schema for lifts in Australia. Mostly just a "bing" to announce car arrival. These days most (many) lifts also use voice to announce what floor it has just arrived at and also where it's going... the ones in my work building, for instance, say "Seventh floor... going down". And my favourite is the lift to the underground carpark where you arrive at "Floor minus one".
In the book "Factfulness" (Hans Rosling) there is a great story about how we in the modern world take safety for granted. Paraphrasing the story it tells of some Swedish doctors working in a hospital in India and one of the student doctors nearly lost her leg when they were rushing to catch an elevator and she stuck her leg into the closing door to open it and hold for the others... except that Indian lifts do not have the safety-switches fitted that we take for granted. They were able to free her without any lasting damage, and then the Indian people that saw it happen and helped to rescue her said "WHY DID YOU DO THAT !!!" Funny... but also very poignant. We don't realise how lucky we are living with the mandated safety measures and maintenance, instepection processes around us everyday.
There is a lift near here that announces "Minus 1 floor" which always annoys me - "Floor minus 1" would be so much better
I don't think it's a requirement because I've definitely encountered lifts that don't (my workplace lifts are silent) but just went and checked and my apartment building lifts would be fully compliant, with 1 ding for up and 2 for down, a somewhat more pleasant 2 tone affair than the 2 tone examples in this vid, and complemented by "going up" and "going down". Not surprising mind, given that for example Schindler's lifts were cited as an example and they're quite common here too. Why bother making 2 different controller setups when the version mandated in one country has useful extra features and costs just about nothing extra?
Tim Johns same in South Africa. Although there are some lifts, most of them OTIS that make the subtle chime.
@@springbok4015 Same here in Spain, as in Australia and South Africa. I believe here most of the elevators just don't make any sound, some do just one chime, some the American chime system and some just a voice inside the elevator
The Australian standards are not retroactive, so lifts only have to comply to the standard in force when they were installed (or significantly modified/upgraded).
Some building owners want the latest gear, others just want to not spend any money.
In Japan, at least from what I remember from the last time I was in an elevator here (Covid blues got me missing Tokyo), they usually say “going up” and “going down” in Japanese. There are a lot of cool little accessibility features here though. One of the most common is the sound that pedestrian crossings will use for which direction is red or green. Another is the yellow strip in all train stations that have bumps, grooves, and patterns on it to indicate hallways, stairs, and stopping points (for example, the train tracks). You wouldn’t think much of it, unless you ask about it.
I'm in Canada, and the two-toned type is most common in my experience.
Yeah, what is this lazy, unmelodious foolishness? Why would almost an entire country deliberately choose to curse all of its elevator-adjacent occupants and desk clerks with such a low-effort nuisance of a noise?
Yes this is common in Canada
Two tone chimes are very common in Canada (i know cause i live in Canada)
Here in Switzerland some elevator call buttons make a sound, the note of which goes up or down if you press and hold.
I live in a country where zero elevators beep twice. We're so exposed to American culture, but this is the first time I've even heard of this.
Bruh, there's a lift in my area which doesn't make any sound at all
@@ValerianSantosaSame
Ask not for whom the elevator chimes, it chimes for thee.
hypergrip -- The postman always chimes twice.
I choked on my coffee when you dubbed in the "going down". Another great video... and I learned something. Cheers.
"Schindler's lifts" LMAO 😆
Schindler is a company making lifts.. so
Schindler's list
@@wx4sno Which is not by accident.
I figured this out for the first time waiting for the elevator in my New Orleans hotel last week. It had the two tone ding dong for down. I gave my self a pat on the back for this.
As someone who is legally blind, this is a lifesaver. The next frontier is mandating in-cab floor announcements.
We have that where I work - in Norway. It only speaks Norwegian though.
Our company also has that in German and English. "Erste Etage - First Floor"
Though I really need to check the Chimes when I get back to work next week.
@@rGunti and? Do elevators in Germany have the chime?
@@Jehty_ ours don't - just dingdong in both directions
German here, and while i dont think all elevators do this i recall some elevators having two tones, one ascending and one descending, i guess you can SEE where im going with this :P
Great video as always! Love that transition from the elevator circle to the channel icon @7:45
Alec, THANK YOU for captioning your videos. As a non native speaker, this is insanely helpful
I've never personally heard the double ding, but when you showed off the two-toned ring I registered it immediately. Interesting to know!
"excruciatingly smooth jazz"
Indeed it is.
You should do a series of sort on elevators, they are an interesting invention that we take for granted every day.
A UK series from the late 1980's to early 1990's called The Secret Life of Machines has a episode on elevators.
And while we're at it, include escalators too.
oh man though he might drive that hotel staff crazy with all the footage he'd need to get lol
In my first semester of college, I travelled a lot (a lot being 5 times), which meant a lot of hotels which meant a lot of elevators. I watched this video before all of that, and I started noticing the things mentioned in this video a lot more, like the chimes. Also, I was in a hotel in Atlanta which had 47, and, after a group event, a few of us went to that elevator and rode from the ground to the top floor. Ascending 47 floors in 30 seconds is an interesting experience, especially since the center of the building is hollow and you can see all the way to the bottom floor
I think in Poland they did it better: when the elevator goes up, there's low tone and high tone, and when the elevator goes down, there's high tone and low tone.
Leave it to us yanks to come up with an arbitrary, unintuitive standard when there's a painfully obvious alternative.
@@bryansullo9798 Doesn't really work too well if you're tone deaf though. Unfortunately.
No, I think the US’ is simpler. Only requires 3 total sounds, Poland’s requires 4 total sounds.
@@Devo57 That's the problem, it's not symmetrical. After the first beep you have to wait to be sure there is not another and seeing in the video the pause can be rather long. Also noone is tone deaf that they can't recognized sound that is one or several octaves higher or lower than the previous tone, it's all about the relative difference.
@@floof_floof that's not a thing !
As a legally blind person, I didn't know this until now. Thank you.
4:26 the "Going Down" lady sounds so disappointed.
Just like my ex wife.
she's yelling timber
She's disappointed by your inability to go down successfully.
Because you're going down to hell
She wanna go up.
As someone in a wheelchair, I also find elevators helpful and fascinating! 😅