It turns out that maintenance technicians have to manually operate the emergency brake in order to bring it to a stop. That’s because the emergency brake is there for, well, emergencies. If it were easy to randomly stop the elevator, people could do it all the time and cause many problems.

You might have seen it in movies or TV shows: someone randomly hits the emergency stop button on an elevator and it comes to an abrupt halt. But in real life, that’s not how it works.

Hollywood is lying to you. This is most likely. Elevators ever fall like you see in the movies. In fact, nobody has died from a snapped cable in a modern passenger elevator, so what makes them so safe is that it turns out elevators have a life-saving feature that most of us have forgotten about.

Heights and lack of control in an elevator falling are all of those. So the electric release clamp has to be locked for the outside elevator doors to open for the inside elevator doors to open for example maintenance workers were believed to have turned off the safety chain to do maintenance and then forgotten to turn them back on resulting in catastrophe but this is only a handful of cases out of the millions of elevator rides every day elevators are safer than almost every other form of transportation despite what Hollywood may want you to believe you have nothing to worry about.

Instead, most elevators are equipped with a device called an automatic leveling system. This system ensures that the elevator stops at the correct level, regardless of what button is pressed. The only way to override this system is by maintenance staff, who have a special key. So if you’re ever stuck in an elevator, don’t bother hitting the emergency stop button – it won’t do anything! Instead, wait patiently for an operator to manually operate the brake.