Why do elevators have mirrors?
Mirrors were added because complaints about slow elevators dropped sharply when people had something to look at, which was far cheaper than making the elevators faster.
Simple intuition
The plain reason, in everyday words
Waiting with nothing to do feels much longer than waiting with something to do. Thirty seconds staring at a blank wall drags. Thirty seconds glancing at your reflection, checking your hair, or discreetly looking at other people goes by almost unnoticed. When building owners got complaints that their elevators were too slow, they had two options. Making an elevator genuinely faster means replacing motors, cables, and control systems, which is enormously expensive and sometimes physically impossible in an old shaft. Putting a mirror on the wall costs almost nothing. The complaints dropped. The elevator was exactly as slow as before — the wait had simply stopped feeling like waiting.
Mirrors are there to help wheelchair users see behind them when reversing out.
This is a genuine benefit and appears in some accessibility guidance, but it postdates the practice by decades and does not explain why mirrors appeared in buildings with no such requirement.
Mirrors make the elevator feel faster.
They make the wait feel shorter, which is a different claim. Nobody reports the car moving more quickly; they simply stop noticing the journey.
It is a security measure so you can see who is behind you.
Retrofitted mirrors predate that rationale, and a mirror is a poor security device — but this has become a real secondary reason for keeping them.
It is the cheapest possible demonstration that the experience of a system and the measured performance of a system are different variables, and that you can sometimes move the one that matters without touching the other. Almost every progress bar, estimated arrival time, and skeleton loading screen you have ever seen descends from the same insight.
Who worked it out
The practice is usually traced to mid-twentieth-century office buildings in the United States, though the widely repeated specific origin story is anecdotal rather than documented.
What problem forced it
Post-war skyscrapers put far more people through far taller shafts than earlier buildings, and complaints about waiting became a real commercial problem for landlords.
How it changed since
The idea generalised well beyond lifts. Maister formalised it in 1985, and the digital era inherited it wholesale: loading animations, optimistic UI updates, and the deliberate slowing of instant results so they feel considered rather than careless.
Why progress bars often lie
The same trade-off between measured and perceived duration, moved into software.
How queueing systems are designed
The mathematics of the wait that the mirror is disguising.
Written for Curio rather than collected from a forum — it is part of the curated corpus that ships with the platform. The references it draws on are listed under Sources.