How Does a Dumbwaiter Work?
Saving a Trip Two-story restaurants with no upstairs kitchen can sometimes have difficulty transporting meals between floors, and waiters can find themselves trying to manage flights of stairs while carrying multiple trays of food. One restaurant contraption, the dumbwaiter, helps alleviate those problems. Dumbwaiters have a long history dating back hundreds of years. There is evidence that dumbwaiters were used in medieval castles to transport goods from floor to floor. In more modern times, dumbwaiters were extensively used in American restaurants in the early twentieth century. Manual Versus Electric Manual dumbwaiters use pulleys and tracks to move the dumbwaiter up and down. Aluminum tracks are installed along the corners of the shaft, which extends from the bottom floor to at least halfway up the next. There is a rope or cable that pulls the cart from the bottom floor to the intended floor. Some dumbwaiters can extend another floor down to the basement. When the cart reaches the
