They're older than you might think.

https://packagingrevolution.net/history-of-the-fork-truck/
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Ken Adams
Covid Variants may come and go but I choose to still live mostly in splendid Shelter In Place solitude
Location: About half way up Walnut Creek
Owner PlasticFreightCarBuilders@groups.io

Ahem, when I worked at railcar builder Alstom, I was corrected to always call them 'fork trucks', not 'forklifts'.

Todd Sullivan
ex-shop floor inspector and logistics person for Alstom Transportation, Hornell, NY

On Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 04:31 PM, Todd Sullivan wrote:

I was corrected to always call them 'fork trucks', not 'forklifts'.

Fork truck, fork lift truck, forklift, lift truck - all are commonly used terms for pretty much the same thing. If Alstom had safety rules referring to "fork trucks", that might be a good reason to insist that that term be used. Otherwise it seems pretty much tomato/tomahto.
FWIW, OSHA refers to "powered industrial trucks", a more generic term, but the required training-certification seems to be universally known as "forklift certification" in industry.

Jack Mullen, who operated them before certification was a thing.

Exactly. One could argue there have been computers since the 19th century, but they weren’t visible in society until after WWII and not commonly visible until 1970s or 1980s.

1000 industrial lift trucks of all types in 1926 across the hundreds of thousands of stations/depots according to the naval history paper in the link. Less than 1 in a hundred railroad depots IF they were randomly distributed. The military or merchant marine might have them at docks and forts. They would also be located

The Great Depression would slow down adoption due to less capital and so many laborers available looking for work. Those who like unique items might model them but I would expect them to be regularly visible during or after WWII.

Dave
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David Bott, modeling the A&Y in '34

On Sun, Aug 28, 2022 at 08:55 AM, A&Y Dave in MD wrote:

I would expect them to be regularly visible during or after WWII

I would say instead that "they became more visible during or after WWII".  

What would need to be looked at (and is beyond the scope of this group - more appropriate for the Ry-Ops-IndustrialSIG group) would be when did specific industries shift to using pallets.  I doubt it was an overnight event that impacted every industry, instead was probably spread over the decade (and maybe even into the 60s).  As one of the other articles related to the link in the OP states, pallets were originally used more for internal shipments, as shippers weren't always aware if the consignees could handle pallets, and also the desire of getting the pallets sipped back to them for reuse.

As an example, fresh produce was still being shipped in ice bunker reefers, which generally had 4 1/2 foot wide doors, and were loaded/unloaded manually with hand carts. So a forklift a packing house would be out of place.

However, frozen foods, which took off during the 50s was shipped in mechanical reefers with wider doors (and some ice bunker reefers built with heavier insulation and wider sliding plug doors) was shipped using pallets (same can be said of canned and other preprocessed foods that would use bunkerless reefers or insulated boxcars).

As an aside, the other thing that happened during this period was the shift away from crates to cardboard boxes as the primary way of packing goods.
 
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Bill Parks
Cumming, GA
Modelling the Seaboard Airline in Central Florida

On Sun, Aug 28, 2022 at 07:55 AM, A&Y Dave in MD wrote:

1000 industrial lift trucks of all types in 1926 across the hundreds of thousands of stations/depots according to the naval history paper in the link. Less than 1 in a hundred railroad depots IF they were randomly distributed. The military or merchant marine might have them at docks and forts.

Got to be careful with the terminology. If that figure included "powered industrial trucks" of all types, it also includes the tractors designed to tow trains of carts as used by the post office and express companies. One common brand of fork lift trucks during the fifties was Tow Motor, which should give some hint as to the origins of the product line.

Dennis Storzek

I have read that the real enlargement of palletizing freight was in World War II, where it turned out to be a great way to prepare overseas military cargo, and after the war became far more widely adopted. But I’m no expert on this topic.

Tony Thompson
tony@...

Actually if you look at the following article on pallets in Packaging Revolution website, it details the change to pallets for military supplies during WW 2 as the impetus for industry to adopt this method of shipping. Also during WW 2 and after there was a shortage of civilian labor, particularly low cost labor,  to manually load and unload box cars and refrigerator cars (house cars) which drove a lot of changes in materials handling. I the depression era unskilled manual labor was cheap and very plentiful. But by the late 1930's labor costs were rising as the US began to emerge from the depression. 

On a modeling note I have a pair of Accurail plug door reefers awaiting modification to early 1950's PFE R-40-26's following Jason Hill's blogs on his conversions.  But they will be for static depictions of overhead traffic on my tiny layout with no customers who load or unload reefers. 
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Ken Adams
Covid Variants may come and go but I choose to still live mostly in splendid Shelter In Place solitude
Location: About half way up Walnut Creek
Owner PlasticFreightCarBuilders@groups.io

On 08/28/2022 11:15 AM CDT Dennis Storzek wrote:

Got to be careful with the terminology. If that figure included "powered industrial trucks" of all types, it also includes the tractors designed to tow trains of carts as used by the post office and express companies. One common brand of fork lift trucks during the fifties was Tow Motor, which should give some hint as to the origins of the product line.