The chairlift was developed by James Curran of Union Pacific's engineering department in Omaha during the summer of 1936. Prior to working for Union Pacific, Curran worked for Paxton and Vierling Steel, also in Omaha, which engineered banana conveyor systems to load cargo ships in the tropics.
In general, ski lifts are divided into several categories. For the first of these, places where skiers use an existing lift system can be shown.
The first purpose-built ski lift, in which skiers propel themselves in suspended suspended chairs, was designed by Jim Curran and built for the Sun Valley resort in 1936. Inspired by a mechanism for loading bananas onto boats, this system could carry skiers at 4-5 miles (6-8 km) per hour. Initially there were reservations about safety, but when it opened, the promise of the new system was evident and was soon copied by many ski resorts.
James Michael Curran was born as the sixth of seven children of Irish immigrant parents in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was sheriff of Doge County, Nebraska and his grandfather was an engineer in Ireland. After graduating from High school, Curran worked for Omaha’s Paxton and Vierling Ironworks as an ironworker and then as a draftsman. While working there, he attended night school and was one of the few engineers to pass the state examination for licensing as a professional engineer with no formal college training. As any engineer will tell you, this is no small feat. One of the jobs he worked on was designing an aerial conveyor system for hauling and loading a continuous flow of bananas from the loading docks of United Fruit to the fruit-boat holds in Honduras.
Thanks to Jim Curran’s innate abilities, inherently knowing how to apply science and math to solve problems without a college degree, he had revolutionized the sport of skiing. He invented the first chairlift by applying industrial technology to recreation. Hundreds of millions of skiers have enjoyed chairlifts throughout the world, invented first in America by a young, non-skiing, night school educated, Nebraska engineer…whose name nobody recognizes.
https://journal.alpsandmeters.com/journal/2020/3/2/sun-valley-idaho-the-first-chairlift