Escalator 33


Escalator 33 :

Etymology: (1) Name Development and Original Intentions: Charles Seeberger created the word "escalator" in 1900, to coincide with his device’s debut at the Exposition Universelle. According to his own account, in 1895, his legal counsel advised him to name his new invention, and he then set out to devise a title for it on his own. As evidenced in Seeberger's own handwritten documents, archived at the Otis Elevator Company headquarters in Farmington, Connecticut, the inventor consulted "a Latin lexicon" and "adopted as the root of the new word, 'Scala'; as a prefix, 'E' and as a suffix, 'Tor'". His own rough translation of the word thus created was "means of traversing from", and he intended for the word to be pronounced, "esʹkælətər" (es-CAL-a-tor)". Escalator" was not a combination of other French or Greek words, and was never a derivative of "elevator" in the original sense, which means "one who raises up, a deliverer" in Latin. Similarly, the root word "scala" does not mean "a flight of steps", but is defined by Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary as the singular form of the plural noun "scalae", which denotes any of the following: "a flight of steps or stairs, a staircase; a ladder, or a scaling-ladder". The alleged intended capitalization of "escalator" is likewise a topic of debate. Seeberger’s trademark application lists the word not only with the "E" but also with all of the letters capitalized (in two different instances), and he specifies that, "any other form and character of type may be employed. . . without altering in any essential manner the character of the trade-mark". That his initial specifications are ostensibly inconsistent, and since Otis Elevator Co. advertisements so frequently capitalized all of the letters in the word, suppositions about the "capital ‘e’" are difficult to formulate 

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