Austral Otis

Austral Otis was a Melbourne engineering works established in 1887, on site of former Langlands foundry in Grant Street South Melbourne. It was one of the largest manufacturers of elevators in Australia, and continued as the Otis Elevator Company.

The company was initially formed in 1878 as Hughes, Pye & Rigby manufacturing mining plant, steam engines, elevators, wool & other hydraulic presses. It was incorporated as a public company in 1887 as The Austral Otis Engineering and Elevator Company Limited and in October 1893 changed its name to The Austral Otis Engineering Co Ltd. The company epitomised the boom era. It was founded with just £600 in capital, but by the end of the 1880s it employed 300 workers, producing pumping engines, mining machinery, hydraulic lifts and huge steam engines for the city's cable trams and first electric power stations.

Austral Otis tendered the Victorian Government to produce two steam traction engines after starting up in 1880 as a general engineering business, and in the late 1880s it set up a well equipped works for heavy engineering, which covered about four acres. It had important agencies for machinery including Worthington pumps and the Otis Bros & Co. elevators. The company undertook many major contracts, for mining and other machinery equipment and it was awarded prizes for its steam engines and hoisting equipment at the Centennial Exhibition in 1888, at Melbourne.; It also built steam rollers, but only two examples of these are known in the world.

Herbert Brookes came to Melbourne to improve the management of Austral Otis. He was highly successful and by 1912 was a director of the firm.

With the development of multi-storeyed iron and steel framed buildings during the skyscraper boom in the 1880s, there was created a demand for fast and reliable passenger lifts such as those of the Otis Elevator Company in the US and Waygood of Britain. With these came the establishment in 1889 of a reticulated hydraulic power system, one of very few in the world at that time. Austral Otis had a substantial part of this market. The company also made steam engines for the Melbourne cable tramway system, for gold mines and sluicing plant, and the Ballarat Woollen Mills. The Melbourne City Building was originally served internally by an early Otis hydraulic lift, while the 1932 Manchester Unity Building has a rare surviving original Otis-Waygood escalator between the ground floor lobby and mezzanine. This was the first building in Victoria to have escalators installed.

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