Ten thing you never knew about… lifts

1. According to a Thyssenkrupp Elevators study, 66 per cent of people would rather not talk in lifts.

2. The study also reported that Beyoncé is the favourite celebrity to be stuck in a lift with while Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump are the worst.

3. In London, Gareth Southgate was the favourite lift companion while Donald Trump still came last.

4. In 2010, workers in New York spent the equivalent of 16.6 years waiting for lifts.

5. There are 12 million lifts in the world today.

6. Every day, a billion people travel in lifts, making a total of seven billion journeys.

7. And 17 per cent of people say they would not get into a lift if someone they didn’t like was in it.

8. The earliest record of a primitive lift was invented by Archimedes in the 3rd century BC. The Colosseum in ancient Rome had 24 lifts manually operated by more than 200 slaves.

9. In 1743, King Louis XV of France had a lift installed at Versailles to carry him from his first-floor room to his mistress on the second floor.

10. The first lift in a London hotel was called the “ascending room” at the Grosvenor in 1860.