"Curran revolutionized... skiing by designing an easy... method for skiers to ascend the mountain."
Press release from the Ski Hall of Fame
The idea of using ropes to climb mountains is almost as old as rope itself, and evidence can be found from the 1600s for people using ropes to cross chasms or valleys suspended below a rope bridge (although some consider rope to have been used as far back as 15,000 B.C.E.). Where this practice first began to be adapted to aid the sport of skiing (saving the time and tedium of having to climb the mountain before skiing back down) is somewhat uncertain, and also depends on your definition of "ski lift."
Broadly, ski lifts fall into a number of categories. The first of which is where skiers appropriate an existing lift system. A good example of this was on Gold Mountain (later named Eureka Peak) in the 1850s, when skiers used an existing network of gravity- powered, ore-mining buckets to climb the mountain to ski. A different type of lift, more appropriately called the ski-tow, was famously erected in 1934 in Vermont. Consisting of a long length of rope attached to a Model T Ford engine, the rope ran through pulleys, and skiers could hold on to be pulled along the slope up to the top of the hill.
The first purpose-built ski lift, where skiers were propelled along in chairs suspended from an aerial rope-way, was designed by Jim Curran and built for the Sun Valley resort in 1936. The idea, adapted from a system to load bunches of bananas onto boats, consisted of chairs suspended from a single rope that propelled skiers up the slope at 4-5 miles per hour (6-8 kph). Initially, there were reservations about safety, but when it was opened, the promise of the new system was obvious and was soon widely copied.
