Introduction

This story is my story and will be told in a narrative style in the first person as I was and am still there. Rather than run a time line, I will tell this story based on the people that made it, as evidenced by material in the public domain and by personal contact. There will be material in the archives of lift manufacturers and elsewhere that is missing from this story (unknown-knowns). Most people mentioned are still alive today, some I know personally, others only by reputation. Inevitably there will be people and events left out of this story. An example of this is that during the writing of this story a colleague reminded me of a citation in an article to a paper Dos Santos and I published in 1974¹.

My first encounter with the lift industry was in January 1968, when Michael Godwin (Adrian Godwin's father) came to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), where I was a Lecturer, seeking help with the stopping and levelling of WardLeonard drives. This was a technical problem. David Closs, a student at UMIST, was looking for an MSc project. He resolved this technical problem in September 1968. His work pump primed my interest and my near 50 years work in lift traffic analysis, design and control.

Subsequently I was fortunate to work with many clever people as you will see, who sometimes had eureka moments and were gone, but some have become equally enthused for lift traffic analysis, design and control. The work at UMIST continued to 1993, when I retired and since then I have carried on the work independently.