Escalate and Escalator

When looking at these two words, one would imagine that the word escalator means a thing which escalates. In fact, however, the origin of the words is the other way around. Escalator was originally a trademark, with no known etymology (according to the AHD), though presumably the -or suffix was used to mean "thing which," and the word contains the root of "scale." Escalate was reverse engineered from escalator, and has now entered our vocabulary to mean "to increase, enlarge or intensify" when transitive and "to increase in intensity or extent" when intransitive.