‘Beep,’ Says the Bellhop
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
(A dumbwaiter is a tiny smaller than person sized elevator in a room which reaches down into a kitchen/office area. Bigger than the pneumatic tubes that move cash at legacy brick and mortar physical stores and bank branches. I don't think they're terribly popular anymore and are best seen in black and white movies. I have the carpentry skills to build one into my house for the sheet WTFness of the artifact, but not the motivation to research any fire related building codes or just simple motivation at all.)
There's a whole industry built around selling trash chutes and "soiled linen" hardware for hotels and skyscrapers in even the most authoritarian nanny states. So everything sold is NYC skyscraper firecode rated and NFPA certified or whatever even if its going in a 2-floor residential in a civilized area where its not even regulated. You can get a kit of the self closing doors for the top and a fusible link gadget that closes a door at the bottom for about the cost of a Really good video card, at least for a small linen chute. Its cheaper but probably less safe to have the fusible link thing, although you can put an automatic closing fireproof door in the basement end too. This is all standard COTS stuff nothing weird or custom.
Trying to do the safety stuff by myself would likely be super aggravating and end up being more expensive than just buying the doors and tube COTS. I'll have enough carpentry agony installing and trimming it out to make it look good, anyway.
Its apparently a lot of work to fireblock the tube where it goes thru the floor and ceilings and also trimming it out so it looks nice is non-trivial. If the hole were big enough for an elevator you'd just jump in, but if its barely big enough for a shoebox, how you do that work with out ripping away all the drywall is non-trivial. And that leads to lots of work.
The hack for a dumbwaiter is building all of it inside the tube. Any hole in the tube or a hole in the doors, even just to mount stuff, and I guess its not technically fireproof anymore. Adhesives would probably be OK? So there's some serious hacking potential involved here. You end up doing the "ship in a bottle" thing with a truss inside the tube at the top and bottom and the usual array of pulleys and ropes.
Another problem with dumb waiters is the price of the fireproof doors and tube is really cheap for "laundry chute size" but if you want to carry an entire laundry basket inside a dumb waiter inside the chute, it starts getting expensive, and a fireproof door the size of a dorm fridge approached 4 figures when I last looked into this.
Still, it would be pretty awesome, in my infinite spare time...
That part we can be sure of. It seems there's always some hype and speculation in an article like this, but elimination of low-level jobs seems certain. Why? It's the basic economic rationale for developing this kind of technology.
This is a trend that (some claim) started with the invention of the Jacquard loom in the early 19th century, which eliminated many low-level textile jobs and resulted in what's now called the Luddite rebellion -- acts of protest and equipment destruction by people whose jobs were eliminated by automated mechanical methods.