Elevators

Elevators (GRAIN) is the name given, especially in the United States, to erections for the transhipment of grain, and in which it is often stored for months, being weighed both when received and when sent out. There are elevators capable of storing 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 bushels of corn within their walls of wood. The largest are erected at Chicago and Buffalo. The grain on being received at the elevator is examined and graded, all of the same quality being kept together. The farmer or merchant who brings it receives an acknowledgment for so much grain of such a quality; and the grain which is delivered from the elevator on his account is grain of that quality, and not the same as he brought. In New York, floating elevators are frequently employed to transfer the grain from barges to sea-going vessels direct. Fixed elevators are generally built so as to be approachable by vessels on one or two sides, and have tramways running in on the level of the street; the chain of buckets which raises the grain moves, as the case may be, in an inclined plane passing through the wall to a vessel outside, or in a vertical plane into pits into which the grain has been shot from railway-trucks. The chain receives its motion from an endless band passing over one or two horizontal shafts in the upper part of the structure, the engine and boiler being located in a building outside the elevator itself.—Elevators in hotels, &c. are in Britain generally called Lifts (q.v.).