OLDEN LIFE
What was the paternoster, asks Andrew Gimson
THE PATERNOSTER is one of the strangest forms of travel ever invented. It is a kind of lift without doors, which travels without stopping, so that one steps into it with a slight feeling of trepidation until one has got used to it.
The first one seems to have been built in Liverpool in 1868, but this English invention has almost died out here. You are far more likely to come across one in Germany, which still has about 250 paternosters in perfect working order. Germany is in most ways more oldfashioned than the UK, and the unglamorous robustness of the paternoster speaks to something in the German character. Why change a piece of machinery which works so well? But the other day, a cloud of doubt was thrown over the future of these devices. The German government introduced safety regulations, so that only people who had received training could use paternosters.
A chorus of complaint went up, for the danger is illusory. People who had been using them for decades without injury faced the prospect of being made to get a qualification before they could continue to do so. It may feel slightly daring to enter a moving cabin, but there are handles to hold on to, and defenders of paternosters insist there is no evidence of anyone being hurt while entering or leaving one of these modest, two-person compartments. My friend Moritz Hagenmeyer, a lawyer in Hamburg, used to love being taken as a child to ride on one of the paternosters in the city. His father always asked him to take care it was not one of those where you would come back upside down.
For that is one of the apparent risks. One imagines that when its continuous series of cabins reaches the top of the building, they might run over a large wheel and come back down the wrong way up. But that does not occur, for an ingenious method was devised of suspending them from the belt which drives them, so they continue to hang the right way up. The name comes from their resemblance to the beads on a rosary, which a believer might touch while reciting the Our Father, or Pater Noster.
The nearest English equivalent to the paternoster is perhaps the old Routemaster bus. There too one could board or descend from a moving platform, and feel mildly adventurous for doing so. Everyday life was infused with a kind of lumbering grace. Paternosters are most often found in office buildings of a few storeys, where to get to another floor it is quicker to step on to an already moving platform than to wait for a lift. No doors close on one, as they would in a lift, and there is no disagreeable feeling of acceleration. The fastest a paternoster goes is about eighteen inches a second, but many only travel at about twelve inches a second. They are unsuitable for use in skyscrapers, where lifts are indispensable, but in buildings of more modest height, they are the most efficient way to move large numbers of people up or down.
I suppose another comparison is with the escalator, which likewise moves continuously, and which most of us remember treating with a degree of wariness when first encountered in childhood. But the escalator user soon becomes blasé and ceases to notice how strange the moving staircase really is.
The only paternoster I have travelled in is in the old air ministry in Berlin: a fine, neoclassical building from 1935–6, for not everything built by the terrible regime at that time was bad. It is now the finance ministry. I loved going up and down in the paternoster, and congratulate the Germans who forced their government to back down and abandon plans to regulate this innocent pleasure out of existence. But Germany is not the only place where this wonderful contraption survives. There are three left in England, at the universities of Sheffield, Leicester and Essex.