Roth Elevator Safety Co. - Delaware 1911

Beautiful certificate from the Roth Elevator Safety Co. issued in 1911. This historic document was printed by the Lowenthal Wolf Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical woman holding up a lit lightbulb on top of a generator with a working factory and trolley beside her. This item has the signatures of the Company’s V. President, A. A. Roth and Secretary, R. H. Stoltz and is over 98 years old.


Certificate Vignette



Journal of the Engineers Society of Pennsylvania By Engineers' Society of Pennsylvania 1913

An elevator safety device that saves, is what the manufacturers of this device, the Roth Elevator-Safety-Device Company, of Baltimore, call their elevator safety machine. Although it has been on the market for only a few years, in that time it has been placed in a number of the more modern buildings and has proved a successful and worth-while factor. The safety machine consists of a hinge-yielding section let into the floor of the elevator car at the entrance, extending the full width of the entrance and back into the car from five to ten inches, according to requirements. A similar hinged-yielding section is fitted into the top of the car directly over the entrance. This attachment in itself makes crushing between the elevator car and the floor absolutely impossible. But in addition to this simple safeguard there is an automatic emergency valve or magnet controller, which immediately stops the elevator.

That you may quickly appreciate the extraordinary nature of this newest Roth development, it may be well to state that the objects of it are to maintain an ever-ready action for emergency in running the elevator, and to produce that safety with the least possible delay in operating the car. This means that the machine must be made to work completely, yielding its full safety, and that the safety thus provided must be conveyed to points of danger, whether the car is ascending or descending, with no loss of time and with absolute certainty. In other words, complete protection plus perfect operation. The Roth Safety is an emergency device, and brought into action only in case of emergency.

Elevators equipped with this safety are not delayed in any way in the general operation. That is to say that the Roth Safety in no way interferes with the ordinary starting and stopping of the elevator, there being no delay whatever, the elevator makes the same number of trips as before. With the Roth Safety it does not mean that you cannot start the car until the door is closed nor, if the door is out of commission, that you cannot run the elevator, or that, should you run the car, you take the chances of killing someone just at a point where a worn-out part will leave you without any safety at all,' but the Roth Safety provides for each and even' emergency.

It is said to be a real safety; automatic to prevent crushing, electric to creat a positive stop. Combine the two and you have the long-wanted safety for ingress and egress while the cars are in motion in any part of the shaft. It provides immediate means for escape in the event of the car becoming stalled between floors. What the Roth elevator safety machine does may be summed up in this brief statement. It saves you before you are aware that you were in danger. To this may be added, so the makers say, that accident is impossible—positively so—on an elevator, freight or passenger, fitted with the Roth elevator safety. It has all the advantages without any disadvantages, and it has several distinct and basic improvements found in no other safety. Whether it be applied to an electric or water pressure elevator—no matter what kind of an elevator you have—it is equally efficient with either and makes a system which is the very last word on perfect safety.