![]() ![]() We now know that he was a pipe smoker and enjoyed a highly coveted window view from his desk. Hymans is seen in a rare photo in his Otis office in Figure 7. These pictures and accompanying narratives have been excerpted from the Otis Bulletin, December 1947. ![]() But, the senior and highly valuable engineers of that era, like Hymans, and possibly some or all of the others shown, were classified as consultants and, therefore, not impeded from continuing to contribute their expertise to Otis beyond the normal, age-65 retirement. In 1947, Otis’ mandatory retirement age for its employees was 65 years, the traditional age used throughout the U.S. The article profiled Anderson, Crabbe, Lautrup, Hymans and Norton as “The Men Who Made the Modern Elevator.” These five gentlemen were the technical giants within the Otis Engineering Division, located at 260 11th Avenue, NYC.Īt the time of Hymans’ retirement, he was 72 years young! An interesting footnote is in order. Reference is made to an archival Otis Bulletin article from December 1947 (Figures 3 and 4). The one thing they, with the exception of Lindquist, had in common was their collective retirement from the Otis Engineering Division at the end of 1947. ĭuring Lindquist’s era of technological leadership as chief engineer of Otis, several other technical giants reported to him, including Anderson, Crabbe, Lautrup, Hymans and Norton. Following an outstanding career of 43 years at Otis, Lindquist retired in 1944 at the age of 70. He was a “founding father” at the A17 committees, participating in the development of the 1921 and several subsequent editions of the A17 code. Lindquist, Otis chief engineer (Figure 2), is credited with masterminding Otis’ technological progress through the first half of the 20th century. Crabbe, George Lautrup and Clifford Norton. Hymans was a contemporary of several notable engineers of his time. Can any other information be found to highlight the human dimensions of the man? Beyond their technical writings, patents and publications, the technical giants of yesteryear left little footprint other than the folklore tales of their accomplishments, which were handed down to successive generations of engineers. Hymans is a legend within the worldwide elevator (lift) industry. Prior to his retirement, Hymans authored an in-depth analysis of centrifugal governors, which readers might find informative. It’s a variation on Newton’s Second Law of Motion but offers a convenient analytical methodology. In it, Hymans introduced the “Equivalent Dynamic System,” which he used throughout his years at Otis. ![]() This paper, shown in Figure 1, is a cornerstone technical treatise about the emergency mechanical stops of high-speed elevators. Notably, Hymans presented a technical paper at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in December 1926, in New York City (NYC). Over the many decades of ASME A17 Mechanical Design Committee discussions, countless references to Hymans have been made in relation to his expertise in mechanics of motions, rope traction, analysis and design of safeties, machines, structures and buffers, just to name a few. As stated in Part One of this article (ELEVATOR WORLD, February 2017), Hymans’ theory has become the gold standard for rope traction over the last century. It can also be argued that his theory and practice of rope traction has withstood the test of time, especially since numerous test programs over the century have shown the theory and practice was made to a reasonable degree of engineering accuracy. ![]() In an era when instrumentation technology was primitive by contemporary standards (and decades before the emergence of computers), it can be argued that Hymans made reasonable assumptions to set up the mathematical model and develop a meaningful solution. The relative hardness of the wires and sheave groove must be considered. Over the approximate century since Frederick “Fred” Hymans developed the theory of rope traction in 1920, there have been a few minor challenges to a couple of the assumptions posited by Hymans - specifically, the hoist rope maintaining its cylindrical shape and the radial compressibility of the rope cross-section as wires cross each other and as the rope profile seats itself in the rigid groove. ![]()
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