German company develops magnet-based elevator system

Is only going up in the elevator getting you down? Not for much longer: ThyssenKrupp, the German steel and engineering company, has announced that it’s building the next generation of elevators that will use magnetic levitation to travel up, down and side-to-side at speed in the buildings of the future. Maglev technology, used by some high-speed trains, uses large magnetic fields to keep the moving object from touching the tracks along which it runs. The result is reduced friction and high speeds, even with a relatively small driving force applied.