Caesars Palace Spiral Escalators

All Las Vegas casinos compete for your attention, but Caesars Palace stands out with its unique spiral escalators—one of only three such installations in the United States.

If you think about it, escalators of this type are quite complicated, prompting all sorts of questions to come to mind. How do the steps move around a curve and then straighten out? How does the escalator deal with the fact that one side moves faster than the other? How does it prevent problems with torque if people stand more on one side than the other? Unfortunately, the answers are mostly kept secret by Mitsubishi Electric—the world’s only company that creates these kind of escalators. From what we do know, they use complicated gears to account for the differential rotation, and are driven from the center, which is unusual for normal escalators.

As you might imagine, installing a spiral escalator is no easy task. Where normal escalators can be put together in a matter of hours, the spiral ones require days of specialized labor, where all the custom parts are installed carefully. For what price does one get such a marvel? Around 1 million dollars, about four times the price of a normal one.