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By David Zax | 09-30-2010 | 9:29 AM
An engineer named Jack Levy recently revealed designs for a curving escalator he dubs the Levytator. Some have claimed that it's the first innovation to escalators in 113 years, but as this slideshow reveals, innovation has long been a part of moving people upward.
The Levytator is being billed as the world's first "free-form" curved escalator.
Credit for first conceiving the escalator goes to Nathan Ames, who patented his idea for "revolving stairs" in 1859.
Sometimes innovations set you back at the same time as they move you forward. The Penrose staircase, an impossible object that both ascends and descends, was recently made famous in the movie Inception.
Though the "Levytator" enables new forms, it was not the first curved escalator by far. Here, a specimen from Hong Kong.
A set of curved escalators can be found at a shopping center in San Francisco.
And the spiraling staircase may have found its most decadent formulation at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.
The innovation in Hong Kong's mid-levels escalators, the longest covered escalator system in the world, was to treat an escalator as an integral part of infrastructure, like the subway. The New York Times called it "a stairway to urban heaven" in 2001.
Escalators climbed to new heights with Osaka's Umeda Sky Building, which connects its two skyscrapers with a set of fortified escalators.
As another angle on the Umeda Sky Building makes vivid, the escalators, which span 550 feet of open space, are the highest in the world.
City University LondonUnited States Patent Office Web siteWikipedia user SakuramboMary Jane Watson via FlickrRoxanne Ready via FlickrJ. Aaron Farr via Flickrantjeverena via FlickrAleksander Dragnes via Flickr
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