JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Welcome to the push button electro-deluxe-lux world of 1913 of the marvel of electro-mechanics, the (proposed) Hotel Electro-Ferla. I read in the issue of Scientific American for 1 November 1913 (p 345) that the design is that of M. Georgia Knapp, the design of another all-electric house that appeared in the pages of the SciAm just a year earlier. (M. Knapp appears to have been a busy person in a number of different fields...) The hotel design is Electro-Luxurient--we read in the caption that a person staying at the hotel, waking on the third floor, only had to speak out loud to have the time illuminated on their ceiling; another series of vocal commands opens the shutters and window, delivers their coffee, and retrieves the paper and mail. Another command sends his breakfast up through the hotel in a dumbwaiter to a device that gets his plates right to his bed. we are told that these electric commands respond with good delivered in 10 seconds, whereas telephoning the front desk and getting everything operated and delivered by hand would take four minutes (!)...so, think of the time saved.
And of course we have the electric dining room, which is the subject of the illustration for the short article. You can see clearly in the detail that all of the service is taking place in the basement of the hotel, with each table having a tiered dumbwaiter that connects it the the kitchens down below. The diner speaks their wants, and the stuff appears, plate after plate. Evidently there is one waitstaff member per tables, though who knows how many people are wailing away at the varied kitchens in the basement.
It seems like a scary situation...particularly when you read that there are hundreds of these dumbwaiters snaking their way through the hotel in a Terry Gilliam-like ductwork maze of tunnels and tubes.
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