Early ski lift

Richard Needham.  Ski.  Fifty Years in North America.  Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987.

Above, an example of experiments with the moving chair lift made by Jim Curran, an engineer with the Union Pacific shops in Omaha, Nebraska.  Union Pacific owned the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho. Curran had previously worked for a company that made banana conveyor systems for loading bananas on boats, and he adapted these ideas to moving people.  So obviously, sometimes "going bananas" can be a good thing.  This ultimately led to his "people scooper" (below):