The first chairlift began as a hoist for loading bananas
When the railway magnate William Averell Harriman needed a way to get skiers up the slopes at Sun Valley, Idaho, a Union Pacific bridge designer named James Curran remembered a cable hoist he had built for loading bananas in Honduras. Adapted for people, it became the first chairlift in 1936.
Pulling loads by rope is ancient. Pictures from South China show aerial ropeways around 250 BC, and the Venetian Fausto Veranzio sketched a two-cable passenger ropeway in 1616. Credit for the first working system usually goes to the Dutchman Adam Wybe in 1644. Alpine communities kept refining the idea, and wire rope and electric motors eventually turned it into serious engineering.
Early cable railways often ran on gravity alone. On an incline, two tracks share a single rope looped around a braked drum, so full wagons rolling downhill drag the empty ones back up. The Llandegai Tramway near Bangor in North Wales, opened in 1798, was among the first to do this on iron rails. Lyon opened the first funicular in 1862.
San Francisco made the cable car famous. Andrew Hallidie, a Scottish emigrant who manufactured steel cable, opened the Clay Street Hill Railroad on 2 August 1873, with a grip worked by hand that could start and stop each car safely on a constantly moving rope. Many independent cars could share one line, and the idea spread across the city. By 1890 American cities had laid more than 500 miles of cable track, but that same year electric trams overtook them in mileage, efficiency and speed.
Skiing gave cables a second life. Robert Winterhalder built the first surface lift in the Black Forest, opening it on 14 February 1908. The Swiss engineer Ernst Constam invented the modern T-bar in 1934 and installed the first one at Davos. In 2018 Zermatt inaugurated the highest 3S cable car, carrying passengers up the Klein Matterhorn to 3,883 metres.
Source: Cable transport
