For an invention so essential to modern cities—imagine skyscrapers or even seven-story apartment buildings without them—the elevator seems impervious to serious improvement. The humble elevator history museum can't even stay open, perhaps because it feels that we're not really looking back all that far.

German elevator maker Thyssenkrupp might have something to perk you up, though. Wired points out the company is getting closer yet to bringing its Twin elevator system to the United States—Georgia Tech plans to use it in a building set to open in 2018. The conceit here is elegantly obvious: cars that work in pairs, rather than having single cars make inefficient trips up and down a multi-hundred-foot shaft. Splitting the trips makes intra-building travel quicker, saves energy on trips, and allows for fewer total elevator shafts, leaving more space for tenants.

Exactly how this works would depend upon the layout of the building and the elevator system. But say you had 20 people in a lobby who wanted to go up to 12 different floors. The system could bring down both cars, fill the top car with people going to upper floors and then bring up the bottom car to fill it with people going to the lower floors.

Thyssenkrupp keeps pushing elevators into the realm of the gee-whiz. Still over the horizon somewhere is the Multi system it has been developing for for years. The no-cable magnetic system wants to populate non-linear shafts with cars that can change directions and, it forecasts, open up modern architecture to skyscraper shapes beyond vertical rectangles.

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The Twin, though, is the future happening in real time. It's already operating in buildings around the world, with the exception of the Americas. Scope its spec sheet if you want to geek out on the tag-team duos that will be shuttling you up and down the skyscrapers of tomorrow.

Source: Wired

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