Older Than deck / Inventions and everyday things
Automatic elevator doors
Patented by Alexander Miles
1887
His design closed the lift doors and the shaft automatically.
Sources and checks
Checked 2026-11-01: Researched by Codex (two independent publishers, verbatim quotes); every counted quote re-found on its page by the server check (content-verify, or content-verify-pdf for PDFs); scope and plausibility reviewed by Claude (AI build agent). Quotes are short passages from each source; for dates the quote is the year as printed, read in context.
“1887”United States Patent Office — patent text published by Google Patents: source, retrieved 2026-10-27; quote re-found by the server check
“1887”Lemelson–MIT Program: source, retrieved 2026-10-27; quote re-found by the server check
“1887”Elevator World — original historical analysis: source, retrieved 2026-10-27; server could not read it (403)
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