I have some serious problems with the technical nature of
your description - besides the translation, LashL.
Where were the mashinery to the local elevators located if
the shafts were uninterrupted? Also on top of the building,
right?
On various floors; some around 46 which controlled the bank of express elevators that ran from the 44th floor sky lobby to the ground; others on 81 as set out above; some on other floors throughout the building; some at the top to control the elevators that serviced the top floors.
How is it possible to stack the elevators? I still have these
old style elevators in my mind: Mashinery on top (or level) and
the wires connected to the cabins/cars - nothing between,
no stacking at all.
Actually, the drawings above show the "stacking" that I'm talking about. I.e. several elevator cars sharing a single hoistway but individual elevator cars only stopping on certain floors while other elevator cars above or below service other floors.
You said: "It is ludicrous to suggest that there was only "
one elevator shaft" that ran the length of the building."
and:
"remember that the entire diagram above is of the CORE, not
the building, and remember that the rest of the space within
the core where the elevators are located is just empty space"
Sorry, i missed something between these two arguments.
The first description says, that there was no "one elevator
shaft" but your second description seems to say the opposite -
that the whole core was empty space with the elevators within
this empty space?
I´m really sorry to have difficulties to draw this picture
in my mind but for some, i think linguistic reasons, i can´t
puzzle it together.
If I knew how to use photoshop, I could explain it better as I could add to the drawings provided above, and try to make it clearer. You have no need to apologize - it is difficult to explain the layout of the elevators based on the drawings without being able to point to the various areas as I'm explaining it, and I probably just didn't explain it clearly enough for you to understand. If we were sitting in a restaurant having coffee, it would all be clear within 2 minutes, but such are the limitations of the internet (well, that and my non-ability with digital manipulation software).
And, yes, I can see why you had some difficulty trying to reconcile my statement that there was not only one shaft with my statement about the empty space in the core - I did not articulate it very well. I will try to explain it more clearly below.
Most people think of an elevator "shaft" as an enclosed space that houses only one elevator, and think that every elevator is enclosed within its own "shaft" completely separate from other elevator cars. While that is often the case in older and smaller buildings, it is not the case in modern highrise buildings and it wasn't the case in the WTC towers with its ~100 elevator cars per tower and its banks of elevators servicing different floors, but my response was referring to the misnomer about the "shafts" in the way that most people think of them. I should have said that it is ludicrous to suggest that jet fuel could only travel down the path of a single elevator car that happened to run express from top to bottom because there is so much empty space from top to bottom throughout the core that the fuel would not be confined to a single "shaft" in the sense that the term is so often misconstrued.
If you've been in a modern skyscraper, you probably know that from the lobby, you have to choose among the banks of elevators to get to the floor that you wish to reach, and that only the elevators in a particular bank of elevators service certain floors. I.e. here's a hypothetical: if you want to get to the 54th floor, you have to use the bank of elevators that stop only on floors 48-58, for instance. You can't get there by using the bank of the elevators that stop only on floors 18-28, nor can you get there by using the bank of elevators that run express from the ground to, say, the 78th floor.
In each elevator bank, there will be several elevators side by side, and although from the inside of any given elevator car, there is the illusion that it is entirely encapsulated and travelling in its own separate enclosed shaft, that is not the case in buildings like these. In any given bank of elevators, let's say 6 in a row as was typical in the twin towers, (x2 for opposite sides of the landing for a total of 12 per bank with 6 on each side of the landing) the elevator cars were not actually operating in sealed shafts separate from each other.
I am led to believe that only some of the express elevators, (that is to say, only some of the approximately 26-28 in each tower that ran from 0-44, 0-78 and 0-107, including freight elevators) were individually and separately enclosed in separate shafts (although I have not been able to confirm the numbers yet) and that the majority of the ~100 elevators in each tower did not have individually enclosed shafts.
Anyway, I am going to try to tackle Photoshop in order to explain it better than I have so far. Hopefully, it will make more sense then. Plus, as noted above, I am waiting for confirmation on some details about the separation of the elevators etc. (My source is a FDNY fire commander with a specialty in high rise fires and high rise fire safety which he also studies and lectures on but he's been away this past week and will be very busy this weekend, needless to say, so I'm not sure when to expect his response).
If I can't figure out the software over the weekend, I will copy and print the drawings, make my additions/explanations, scan them and post them instead.
EDIT TO ADD: Oh, I see now that some of the questions have already been answered - sorry, I didn't read through the whole thread before beginning to formulate my response. Please ignore whatever is redundant.
