On March 9, 1916, the newsreel Mutual Weekly began showing in movie theatres across the United States, a beaming Charlie Chaplin signing his famous $ 670,000 contract with Mutual Film Corporation, to the great joy of its president John R. Frauler. Two months later, on May 15^th, The Floorwalker was released in those same cinemas, the first of twelve two-reel comedies Chaplin made in just under a year. To facilitate is filmmaking, Mutual provided Chaplin with the Lone Star Studios (located at 1025 Lillian Way, where Buster Keaton would subsequently produce his most famous works). It was home to one of the largest film stages in Hollywood at the time, and offering space to build his highly distinguishable sets (the department store, the health spa, the skating rink and the fire station), with the right environment to trigger slapstick-oriented gags while providing a more complex narrative structure. In The Floorwalker an escalator is at the center of the action: “I built my sets without having a specific thing in mind”, said Chaplin, “but once they were up, the ideas came by themselves”. Diaries discovered by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill confirm this, revealing the rehearsals, tests, the faster speeds, the changes of direction and the occasional gust of wind… reminding us how, at the time, a light muslin canvas was all that separated the action from atmospheric conditions. “Why the hell didn’t we think of an escalator?” was Mack Sennett’s lament, taken up by all the press.