Running a lift for passengers

The machine could drive a lift long before 1950, so what changed was not capability but trust: passengers refused to ride alone, and the industry spent years adding recorded voices, emergency buttons and reassuring signage. The 1945 strike of New York building service workers, which shut lifts across the commercial district and kept office workers out of their own buildings, showed how much of a city rested on the person at the handle and made the case for removing him. What was ceded is the driving, the levelling of the car and the calling of floors. What was never a machine task is the rest of the job: watching who comes in, greeting, knowing which tenant is expecting whom. That part survives, renamed, in a few hotels and guarded buildings.