For their 21st birthday, we took out twins to Las Vegas for their first trip and stayed at Excalibur. When we went next door to Luxor, our son, who's studying to be an engineer, was fascinated by the elevators running up the side of the pyramid at an angle. He said he'd research it, but it got my husband and me curious about it too. Can you explain it?
The Luxor elevators are called "inclinators." We get this question every so often; here's the answer we've cobbled together from admittedly scant resources.
Inclinators have been around for quite a while. An inclined elevator or inclined lift is a form of a cable railway system that can travel up a steep gradient; the railroads made early use of the concept to provide accessibility to steep hillsides and inclines at minimal effort.
Luxor's inclinators work on the same principle, though the technology is more similar to conventional elevators than true inclinators.
Luxor's Otis inclinators were the first of their kind in terms of speed (700 feet per minute) and people movement. "Previous installations were typically on the side of a hill, low speed and small cabs," Bill Evans, vice president of sales and marketing for Otis Escalator System told Building Design and Construction magazine.
In our research, we found that standard elevator equipment can be adapted for systems with inclines up 10 degrees from vertical, though inclines of more than 20 degrees from vertical require some additional considerations. "New elevator technology was applied for Luxor's inclined system," said Bill Evans.
But other than the well-known fact that Luxor's inclinators travel at a 39-degree angle up the four sides of the pyramid, we could come up with only one other detail about the tech: The Luxor inclinators incorporate a microwave-transmission control system, which eliminates the trailing control and power cable normally attached to elevator cabs, which would slacken when it nears the bottom.
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