It’s a horror movie staple: people are trapped in an elevator when the steel cable snaps, plunging the hapless occupants to their deaths. In reality, that’s only sort of happened once in the history of elevators, and it was totally not the elevator’s fault.
In 1945, a B-25 bomber pilot got lost over Manhattan and made a wrong turn into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. The crash sliced the steel cables supporting two elevators, which both fell to the bottom of the shaft. One was occupied, but the woman survived her 75-story fall thanks to the elevator’s safety features and the 1,000 feet of snapped steel…
