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Comment by badpun | Hacker News Reader

People desired flat roads before cars. There was a huge effort in XIX century to develop better roads for the horse-drawn buggies and stagecoaches.

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I believe the better road movement was started by cyclists.

I believe the better road movement was started by Rome, long before cycles were even a dream.

Different movement. I actually meant the „good roads“ movement from the 1880s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

The "movement" was of course a continuous effort, hard to say when it started. In England, a major improvement effort was done around 1810-1830 by a rich nobleman, who was irritated by having to use very bad country roads to go to his local nobility political meetings (can't recall his name at the moment), and he was going there by horse. He had a scientific mind and devoted last decades of his life to studying road construction techniques and writing up the results. Since he had money and political clout, his ideas were adopted, and later spread across Great Britain, leading it to having by far the best roads in the world at the time.

I think, like with almost all of these, the scale of our modern success is out of the scope of any of their beliefs.

Yes. In 1899, they hadn’t even invented the lift, necessary for skyscrapers. Imagine showing them, not Dubai, but a mundane success story like Bangkok.

Edit: The Eiffel Towers had some, earlier than that. See comments ;) Sorry.

Sorry, but that's incorrect; the guy who invented that had already been dead for over 3 decades in 1899:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis

The flatiron was finished in 1903.

In 1899, the Eiffel Tower was 10 years old. Not only did it have lifts, it famously, notoriously had lifts. French futurist artists could hardly be more aware of the concept.

Ok I thought they were created around 1920 when skyscrapers started in NYC. Maybe that is wrong too. My apologies.

The Colloseum had approximately 25 elevators. Build year 80 AD.

I remember reading about an early hotel or some such. Passenger elevators weren't a thing but they knew they were coming so they designed in round elevator shafts. Which later they needed to make a custom elevator for. Because round.

Google comes through for once.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/04/the-elevator-shaft-tha...

tl;dr: Cooper Union's Foundation Building built 1853. Otis demonstrated his invention at the Crystal Palace in 1854, first installed Haughwout Building in 1857

Also freight elevators existed for a long time before but were unsafe for passengers.

Tom Scott did a video about it: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL4xc5bsSUU>

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