Ads Past: Roebling’s Ski Lifts

Seventy-five years ago, in 1951, John A. Roebling’s Sons Co. ran this ad in the American Ski Annual and Skiing Journal. At that point, North America had just begun a frenzy of lift construction. Encouraged by government agencies, ski clubs and private companies scrambled to sell skiing to the emerging recreational market powered by the post-war economic boom. 

John A. Roebling was a German-educated engineer who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1830. By the 1840s, he was busy building suspension bridges for canal companies and railroads in the mid-Atlantic states. In 1848 he built an industrial base in Trenton, New Jersey, making steel bridge components, including wire rope.

Roebling died in 1869 while designing the Brooklyn Bridge, but his son, Washington, carried on with construction. In 1940 Swiss engineer Ernst Constam arrived in Denver to sell his inventions, the J-bar and T-bar lifts, to North American skiers. In 1941 he licensed Roebling to sell and build Constam T-bars in the eastern half of the continent, and the company promptly built lifts for Mont Tremblant and Pico Peak.

Constam built the Cooper Hill T-bar for the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division before business halted for the war years. In 1947, he wrote the booklet “A Lift for Every Slope,” which Roebling used as a sales brochure. The company’s main business remained bridge building, but it went on to install a couple of dozen T-bars and chairlifts as far west as Colorado, ending with Mount Sunapee’s Ducking Double in 1963 in New Hampshire. 

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