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Comment by Beijinger | Hacker News Reader

Easiest and fastest solution: Pater Noster lift.

Hmm... about 15 seconds per floor (judging from Wikipedia video), times 118 floors = half hour to get to the top! I guess still faster than taking the stairs...

You can run it easily 10 times the speed :-)

The classic joke is to tell people "you go upside down at the top" and watch them come back down standing on their heads (its actually a mechanism which preserves the up direction as they circuit round)

Was popular in the UK university system: there were paternosters in Leeds uni and in Napier College Edinburgh in the 70s and 80s.

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

Interesting idea but comically unsafe.

You never used one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro3Fc_yG3p0

It will come back with a vengeance: https://elevatorworld.com/article/a-paternoster-for-the-futu...

Perfectly safe. As long as you get off at the last floor of course, lest you end up in The Backrooms.

There was one at the university (in the UK) my Dad worked at that was used for years with zero incidents.

Lots of things from chain saws to hover mowers, or cars for that matter, are unsafe if not used with due regard for safety.

Essex still has theirs, in the library: https://library.essex.ac.uk/paternoster

According to that link there's only two left in the UK now.

The one I was referring to was at Durham university, but it's not showing up via Google, so I guess it's no longer there.

for 3 years i worked in a building with one. it was the best part of coming in in the morning and super fun. no accidents that i noticed in the time i was there.

Explained by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgJBD1wf-YQ

Or slightly less scary, escalators.

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