"Yes," said Mr. Hall, "this is the first elevator of its kind. Our people for thirty-eight years have been doing this work, and have constructed thousands of elevators vertically, and many on an incline, but never one to strike a radius of 160 feet for a distance of over 50 feet. It has required a great amount of preparatory study and we have worked on it for three years." "That was before you got the contract?" "Quite so, but we knew that, although the French authorities were very reluctant to give away this piece of work, they would be bound to come to us, and so we were preparing for them." Such supreme confidence must have rapidly evaporated as events progressed. Despite the invaluable advertising to be derived from an installation of such distinction, the Otises would probably have defaulted had they foreseen the difficulties which preceded completion of the work. [Illustration: Figure 24.--General arrangement of Otis elevator system in Eiffel Tower. (From _The Engineer_ (London), July 19, 1889, vol. 68, p. 58.)] The proposed system (fig. 24) was based fundamentally upon Otis' standard hydraulic elevator, but it was recognizable only in basic operating principle (fig. 25). Tracks of regular rail section replaced the guides because of the incline, and the double-decked cabin (fig. 29) ran on small flanged wheels. This much of the apparatus was really not unlike that of an ordinary inclined railway. Motive power was provided by the customary hydraulic cylinder (fig. 26), set on an angle roughly equal to the incline of the lower section of run. Balancing the cabin's dead weight was a counterpoise carriage (fig. 27) loaded with pig iron that traveled on a second set of rails beneath the main track. Like the driving system, the counterweight was rope-geared, 3 to 1, so that its travel was about 125 feet to the cabin's 377 feet. [Illustration: Figure 25.--Schematic diagram of the rigging of the Otis system. (Adapted from Gustave Eiffel, _La Tour de Trois Cents Mètres_, Paris, 1900, p. 127.)] Everything about the system was on a scale far heavier than found in the normal elevator of the type. The cylinder, of 38-inch bore, was 36 feet long. Rather than a simple nest of pulleys, the piston rods pulled a large guided carriage or "chariot" bearing six movable sheaves (fig. 28). Corresponding were five stationary sheaves, the whole reeved to form an immense 12-purchase tackle. The car, attached to the free ends of the cables, was hauled up as the piston drew the two sheave assemblies apart.