onsideration by the Commission. The bidding time was extended,
and many attempts were made to attract a native design but none was
forthcoming.
As time grew short, it became imperative to resolve the matter, and the
Commission, in desperation, awarded the contract to Otis in July 1887 for
the amount of $22,500.[10] A curious footnote to the affair appeared much
later in the form of a published interview[11] with W. Frank Hall, Otis'
Paris representative:
"Yes," said Mr. Hall, "this is the first elevator of its kind. Our
people for thirty-eight years have been doing this work, and have
constructed thousands of elevators vertically, and many on an
incline, but never one to strike a radius of 160 feet for a distance
of over 50 feet. It has required a great amount of preparatory study
and we have worked on it for three years."
"That was before you got the contract?"
"Quite so, but we knew that, although the French authorities were
very reluctant to give away this piece of work, they would be bound
to come to us, and so we were preparing for them."
Such supreme confidence must have rapidly evaporated as events progressed.
Despite the invaluable advertising to be derived from an installation of
such distinction, the Otises would probably have defaulted had they
foreseen the difficulties which preceded completion of the work.
[Illustration: Figure 24.--General arrangement of Otis elevator system in
Eiffel Tower. (From _The Engineer_ (London), July 19, 1889, vol. 68, p.
58.)]
The proposed system (fig. 24) was based fundamentally upon Otis' standard
hydraulic elevator, but it was recognizable only in basic operating
principle (fig. 25). Tracks of regular rail section replaced the guides
because of the incline, and the double-decked cabin (fig. 29) ran on small
flanged wheels. This much of the apparatus was really not unlike that of
an ordinary inclined railway. Motive power was provided by the customary
hydraulic cylinder (fig. 26), set on an angle roughly equal to the incline
of the lower section of run. Balancing the cabin's dead weight was a
counterpoise carriage (fig. 27) loaded with pig iron that traveled on a
second set of rails beneath the main track. Like the driving system, the
counterweight was rope-geared, 3 to 1, so that its travel was about 125
feet to the cabin's 377 feet.
[Illustration: Figure 25.--Schematic diagram of the rigging of the Otis
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