Excerpted from the New England Ski Museum’s Winter 2002 Newsletter

Testing the new chairlift design in the Omaha, Nebraska shops of the Union Pacific Railroad. Designer and engineer James Curran needed to know how fast the lift could run and still allow skiers to load from a stationary position, so a chair was hung from a truck-mounted frame and driven at various speeds to scoop the tester, John E.P. Morgan, on roller skates. Curran’s first lift opened at Sun Valley in 1936.