Our modern lifts are such marvels of engineering and innovation that it’s easy to wonder how we ever managed to transport skiers in a more primitive fashion in the past. We think we’re doing the coolest, newest stuff—detachables, setting liftlines that turn corners—but miners were doing all this by the late 1880s. And it’s been happening with passenger lifts since the 1930s. Often, the ropeway pioneers of the 19th and 20th centuries constructed multi-section ropeways, and they turned corners, and did all kinds of unusual things.

Looking back, it’s the old-timers who were doing the amazing things, not us moderns—as this brief and highly selective review shows.

Ropeways have been in use for thousands of years. There are images of ropeways in use dating to 1200. But ropeways really took off during the Industrial Revolution and kicked into gear in the late 1800s. Coal powered the industry revolution at the time, and mining trams were a practical use for getting coal out of the mountain mines.

And, for mining, detachable grips made great sense. Miners could load the trams and send them up the cable when they were full. Hundreds of trams were used, primarily in Pennsylvania. And, they were also used in gold mining, including mines around Silverton. The tram, c. 1900, shown on the next page (Fig. 1) is from Silverton. You can see the detachable grip on the ore car and the big toggle arm used to operate the grip.

These were first used on cargo cars, to haul timber and material up and down to the mines. But, the next thing you know, miners were riding on them to get to work. That’s something they liked to do, and they’d take pictures with lots of guys hanging on them. This was not exactly safe, of course—we’ve come a long way in that regard. (Can you imagine how OSHA would view this sort of thing?) So, not only was mining the beginning of our modern tramways, miners were some of the first tramway passengers.

The early miners invented lots of different types of machines, and many different kinds of grips. Many of the earliest grips used gravity to activate the grip jaws. The hanger pulls down, and there’s a wedge or cam action and that moves the grip jaw. Very simple. The Wico grip (Fig. 2) became the most popular. You can see that it has a large spring in it. Some of these are still being used in mines; this one’s from the early 1900s.

One thing that was very different was that almost all of the terminal conveyance was done with manpower. Once a tram was unhooked from the rope (Fig. 3), it was guided by hand along rails and such. There was someone who grabbed the car and slowed it down, and, when it was attached to the rope, there was someone who guided it and got it up to rope speed. When you see how the ropes are reeved through the terminals, you wonder how on earth those guys stayed alive. There were cars and cables and tracks going in every direction. The mining tramway operators were among the most highly paid, often more than the miners, because the work was so hazardous.


People Movers
Some of the first detachable passenger lifts were two-person gondolas installed in Europe in the 1930s (Fig. 4). At about this time, there was a shift from bi-cable ropeways (which used separate ropes for support and hauling) to monocable, where lifts use one rope to do both tasks—as is now all familiar. Both systems are still used today.

This gondola used a Carlevaro spring grip, a big spring grip. In the photos (Figs. 5-7) you can see how the grip closed and opened. It’s got a large toggle arm with a cam that pushes on the spring. It’s very simple, and there were many of these out there.

But there were lots of other detachable grip types in use at the time, too. Screw grips were common; they simply use a big threaded rod, and the cam arm turned the grip open and closed (Fig. 8). Again, it was pretty simple.

The Reussner hook grip (Figs. 9 and 10) is one of the most amazing concepts ever put into use. The grip arm, or hanger, is permanently attached to the cable, and the portion with the hook is attached to the carrier. You can see where it attaches. Here’s how it worked: the arm would come along, fixed to the rope, and then a mechanically synchronized gate in the terminal conveyance would release the carrier, sending it towards the hanger. The cabin would catch up with the hanger arm, and the cabin hook would hook onto the hanger and lock on. But look closely at the hook and you’ll see some serious metal displacement—it’s pretty beat up. You can imagine what might happen if it missed; frankly, that’s just nuts. In fact, there was a rail that returned cabins that missed the hanger, apparently a fairly common happening. Just goes to show that not all innovation is successful.

The Mueller spring grip (Figs. 11, 12 and 20) is one of my favorites. It uses big star gears, as you can see in the photos. The gears mate with gear racks in the terminals, and as the carrier comes in or goes out, the star gears turn. If the rack were located above the grip it would tighten, if the rack were on the bottom of the grip it would loosen. There’s a big screw in each star gear, and as the star gears turn, they screw the grip jaws open or shut, as appropriate. It’s a very clever and elegant solution.

There were a number of other variations on the detachable grip. There were many people figuring out how to accomplish the same basic idea. Today, we’re getting to the point where there’s basically one style of grip. But in the 1930s and ’40s, people were doing all kinds of different things.

The next big invention was the detachable chairlift. Breck installed the first high-speed detachable in the U.S. in 1980, but there had been many other detachables before then. The first one in the world was installed at Grindelwald, Switzerland, in 1947 (Fig. 13)—just a decade after the first fixed-grip chair went up in the U.S., at Sun Valley in 1936. At Grindelwald, passengers rode facing sideways, since the lift was used for both sightseeing (that’s the Matterhorn in the photo) and skiing. From what we can figure out, the grip appears to be a Von Roll.

Then there’s the Giovanola, one of the big innovators in this business. His grip (Figs. 14 and 15) was innovative. The arms you see in the photo and diagram were locks. This grip uses gravity, the weight of the carrier, for gripping force. As it comes into the terminal, the wheels lift the hanger up and open the grip. To attach, the process is reversed. You can see that there’s a wedge that moves the jaw. Some of these grips are still in operation today.

On the 4-passenger Giovanola, you can see the launching mechanism (Fig. 16): there’s a gravity ramp, and gravity gets the carrier up to the approximate speed of the rope. At the arrival terminal, the ramp carries the weight and the grip jaws open. The guys in the photo are the terminal conveyors; they just push the carriers around the track by hand. I don’t know if the package in the lower left is grease or beer, but I’m certain that both helped make the lift run smoothly.

Gravity launches are not around much anymore. One of the principal reasons is that the launch mechanism doesn’t have a stop, and, in the event of a stop, the cabin would go out and hit the stationary rope, causing all sorts of problems. Maximum rope speeds were around 600 fpm because of this.

There were many lifts that used this sort of system. Many of the Von Roll systems, developed in the ’40s, are still in operation. The aerial trams at the Bronx Zoo and San Diego Zoo use this style of grip and have operated safely for many, many operating hours.

In the ’40s and ’50s in Europe, there was a lot of nationalism at play. You couldn’t sell a French grip in Germany, or a German grip in Italy. So a company like Girak would buy a grip from another manufacturer and sell it under the Girak name. For example, the grip in Fig. 19 is labelled Girak, but it’s actually a Mueller spring grip like those in Figs. 11, 12 and 20. This practice is not unlike what some auto manufacturers do today, though the reasons for it are different now.

That brings us nearly to the modern age, when detachable technology began to coalesce around a more standard approach. We’ll look at that in our next issue.