I know, 2 days into my fake Wikipedia blogging habit, and I'm already falling behind. This is worse than trying to start flossing.

Anyway, yesterday's article was about the IG Farben Building in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It's a fairly interesting building, being as it was the largest office building in Europe from its completion in 1930 all the way until the 1950s - it's pretty big. It's also notable as being the building in which the Nazis developed Zyklon B gas, used to kill a lot of Jews in concentration camps (When the building was returned to Germany after ownership by the U.S. Army and restored in 2001, they put a plaque on the building in memoriam of those who died.) That's all well and good, but the part that really caught me about the building was that, to this day, it uses Paternoster elevators. In case you don't know what these are, they're basically a bunch of phone booths on a bicycle chain which move vertically up and down elevator shafts. There are no doors, so as you're standing on a floor, a series of elevator cars just keep passing you by, never stopping. This sounded pretty neat to me, and way more efficient than standard elevators - until I thought about it.

You know how sometimes you'll step onto an escalator, and one of your feet will be on one step and the other on the one below? You know how disorienting that is? Well your feet can never be more than about six inches apart in that scenario. If you don't fully commit to your elevator car on a paternoster when you get on, you could potentially perform some very uncomfortable acrobatics, before possibly being squished in the mechanism. So, there's clearly drawbacks. The redemption comes in finding out that it is indeed possible to stay in a car while it goes on a complete circuit, up and around the top and back down again, past the top floor of the building. While apparently not a good idea, just the possibility makes it all worthwhile.

It's a shame that it's basically illegal to install them anymore.