At 11 p.m. on Friday, October 15, 1999, without watch or cell phone, Nick White stepped out of his midtown Manhattan office for a cigarette. A return trip to White’s office by elevator should have taken less than a minute – instead, the ascending elevator lurched to a stop, and left White TRAPPED IN AN ELEVATOR for 41 hours. Narrated by John Lithgow this one-hour special, premiering Sun., August 14 at 9 p.m. ET/11:00 p.m. PT on Discovery Science, takes a fascinating journey through the history of elevators. Trace the evolution of high rises and elevators, and find out how safe this vertical mode of transportation really is.
There are ten billion elevator journeys a week – more than the world’s population – and most of those journeys are inconsequential. But every once in a while, there’s an elevator story that shakes our confidence in this convenient device. See why these claustrophobic capsules are at the root of so many urban legends and horror stories, and discover – when something goes wrong – whether human error or mechanical breakdown is to blame.