Escalator Are A Great Invention,

allowing people to effortlessly travel between floors in places where elevators would be impractical,

but one with just five steps? I guess it was a good idea at the time, still it does win the Guinness record for the world’s smallest escalator. Known as the ‘Petitcalator’ or ‘Puchicalator’, this unusual contraption is located in the basement of More’s Department Store in the city of Kawasaki, Japan, it happened like this, Kawasaki’s More opened in 1989, its designers wanted to connect its underground level to that of the adjacent Azalea underground shopping centre, but they weren’t perfectly aligned, so even though the difference in levels wasn’t that great, they decided to implement a set of conventional stairs and a small escalator,

 while deciding how to implement the escalator, designers realized that there was a huge concrete beam where the motor was supposed to go, but instead of scrapping the escalator idea entirely, they just decided to go with a smaller one that ended up becoming the smallest in the world, a title it has managed to hold on to for over three decades now, and just for a change 8 years ago it was switched from a downward escalator to an upward escalator, meaning you can actually use it to climb 83.4 centimetres to the next level, looking at the photograph it begs the question, is there a wheelchair ramp?