Lift truck ancestry: for your summer reading enjoyment
I’m going on vacation this week. Before I leave I wanted to recommend a book to you that I’m taking with me. It’s called The Industrial Revolutionaries, the Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914, by Gavin Weightman.
I read a review of it in the Wall Street Journal a couple months ago and thought it might have some good historical fodder I could use for this blog. Alas, not a mention of the words “forklift” or “lift truck” in the book. However, one chapter—called “Horsepower”—will give you a good appreciation for what the pioneers of the internal combustion engine had to go through to get acceptance for their innovations.
In fact, as I read this chapter I realized there are correlations between the innovators who drove millions of horses out of a job at the dawn of the 20th century and the forklift innovators of today who want to replace batteries with fuel cells. Just as at that time the IC engine’s fathers were talking about freeing up a vast amount of the labor and space devoted to feeding and sheltering those four-legged pooping machines, today’s fuel-cell-fathers want to free up the vast amount of space devoted to charging and changing out those lead-acid counterweights the operators sit on.
There’s another correlation I noticed. Just as today’s lift truck OEMs rely on input from their customers’ operators to help them improve their products, so did the pioneers of horseless carriages depend on early adopters to put them on the road to gridlock. Karl Benz, who in 1880s Germany designed his two-cycle engine into a three-wheeled vehicle called a “trio-car,” couldn’t sell horse-loving Germans of his day into one of them. Then, a Mr. Kugler, the postmaster in the Rhineland town of Speyer, gave Benz some practical input that would make his motor vehicle more suitable for handling and delivering mail (try reading the following with a German accent, for added effect):
“Could you not put under the driver’s seat, or in the rear, two closeable compartments, a large one and a small one, where letters and money for postal transfers could be safely kept?”
Even better:
“Why are there no controls for going backwards? The fact you cannot go backwards is really something to puzzle at.”
One more:
“Should you not employ a more powerful engine so that swampy sections of the road and deep snow could easily be traversed?”
The critical postmaster concluded:
“If you are able to include these improvements in your car, indispensable for a safe and sure road performance, then I am positive your ingenious and most practical invention will be crowned with a great success.”
Today’s lift truck OEMs live on such feedback. Without it, the practical forked vehicles you use today would be less productive—and a lot less comfortable.
I’m looking forward to finishing The Industrial Revolutionaries. There’s a chapter toward the end called “The Terror of the Torpedo.” Maybe there’s another lift truck correlation I can make—attachments?
Tom Andel
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