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In many countries outside Japan, Hitachi is best known as a maker of TVs, PCs, and other consumer electronics. However, the company is actually involved in a wide variety of electrical and mechanical engineering endeavors, including manufacturing and installing elevators.
Considering that elevators have been a standard feature of high-rises for generations, elevator design might not seem like the most difficult test of scientific minds, but Hitachi isn’t making just recycling old schematics. Instead, it’s working on ways to make elevators faster and safer than ever before, and in the process it’s set a new speed record.
A Hitachi-made elevator was recently clocked rising at a speed of 1,260 meters per minute, or 75.6 kilometers per hour (4,134 feet per minute, or 47 miles per hour). In terms of vertical ascension, that would get to the top of New York’s Empire State Building in just 18 seconds, and all the way to the top of Mt Fuji in just three minutes.
Conservationists, however, will be happy to know that Hitachi has no plans to install an elevator at Mt Fuji. Instead, the speedy lift will be operating in the Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre in China, which stretches 530 meters into the sky. The original target was for the elevator to reach a top speed of 1,200 meters per minute, but by exceeding that mark Hitachi’s elevator manages to edge out the 1,230-meter-per-minute elevator from Japanese rival Mitsubishi that’s in use in the Shanghai Tower, making Hitachi’s the fastest in the world.
Source: Nihon Keizai Shimbun via Jin
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© SoraNews24
14 Comments
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jcapan
... at this time
Aly Rustom
I don't know if I want to ride an elevator that goes that fast...
gelendestrasse
I think I left my stomach at the bottom of mt. Fuji
Citizen2012
Yes but you end in what condition ? Useless, any company in that field could put a rocket engine on an elevator and claim "we broke a new record" and so what ? They should rather focus on technology that can be applied.
John Brown
What's next? A space elevator?
zones2surf
My ears are popping just thinking about it!
Strangerland
Yes actually: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176625-60000-miles-up-geostationary-space-elevator-could-be-built-by-2035-says-new-study
Kaerimashita
What a useless piece of information. how can anyone imagine what that translates to in the context of an elevator in a building?
WealthBuilderBiz
BREAKING NEWS: Japan's application for fastest elevator into the Guiness World Records!
Robert Dykes
"In many countries outside Japan, Hitachi is best known as a maker of TVs, PCs, and other consumer electronics."
Not in the USA, not for the last decade. Walk into a Best Buy and you wont see a single Hitachi, Sharp, or Toshiba product on the shelves. Their once well known CONSUMER products have all but disappeared from the world and they are barely making it in Japan. Most they only sell products in Japan and few east Asian countries or they sell non-consumer products like IC chips, cell phone screens, or the super successful nuclear power facilities like Westinghouse.
sangetsu03
"In many countries outside Japan, Hitachi is best known as a maker of TVs, PCs, and other consumer electronics."
True. Hitachi is no longer a well-known name in America. They have been primarily a maker of tools and equipment, much of which are produced in Taiwan and China.
smithinjapan
Citizen2012: "They should rather focus on technology that can be applied."
It is being applied; it's being put into a high-rise in China.
Nobody balks at high-speed vehicles when applied to the horizontal, and I'm sure people had their doubts about bullet trains, but while it may sound ear-popping I'm sure they are taking safety features into consideration. It'll soon be as common place as anything else, so long as there are high-rises, and may be applied to space-elevators in the future as well.
John-San
Hitachi are also well ahead in un man mining equipment with satellite guidance, diagnoses, and autonomy. Their machinery can recognise problems and organises with the Mobile plant for maintenance time.
mmwkdw
Sure, they can go fast, but if you install just 1 very expensive elevator within a 100 floor building, it doesn't seem really fast at all (though maybe I'd have to peel my sandwiches off the ceiling every floor stop...)