History of the Forklift

Forklifts began to be designed and put into use around the turn of the century in the United States.  Clark is the first accepted supplier of forklifts beginning commercially around 1918.  These first forklifts looked a lot like slow tractors with pallet fork attachments.  Forklift designed evolve from just a auxillary tractor attachment to a separate integrated machine for the purpose of moving large warehouse pallets and items.  As the utlility of forklifts became widely accepted, other producers such as Yale Baker introduced their own machines. Other companies such as Hyster introduced Battery Powered forklifts.

During the second World War, movement of goods was standardized with the wooden pallet and thus the forklift became ubiquitous.

In The 1950’s post -war the advancement of the narrow aisle forklift was introduced by the Raymond Corporation. Pallet truck manufacturers also entered this field, eg Crown.

During the 1960’s and 70’s many refinements were added to forklifts, these included better hydraulics and electronics for more precise control. Hyster and Linde also made acquisitions.

Toyata Nissan and daewoo also started maunfacturing Forklifts in the 1980’s. Hyster and yale merged companies in 1989 due to this increasing competition from the new forklift manufacturers.

Today’s forklifts are truly integrated materials handling machines.

The CLARK forklift GEX video

Vintage Construction & Highway Film: Open Road (1930s) $9.99 Open Road, focuses on how steel is utilized in highway construction. Discussing everything from engineering highway bridges to earth moving equipment to the end users the films gives a comprehensive look at early road construction. The film also shows how heavy machinery allows man to shape the earth to lay new roads instead of building roads around the contours of the land….

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An Illustrated History of Forklift Trucks …

Forklifts: Webster’s Timeline History, 1905 – 2007 $28.95 Webster’s bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on “Forklifts,” including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Forklifts in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of time…