If necessity is the mother of all invention, the desire to make a profit has to be the grandfather. Or at least the rich uncle. In the early 1930s, when winter sports were becoming more popular in the U.S., a head honcho at the railroad really wanted to build a destination ski resort in the West that would attract millions of Americans to travel there on (surprise!) his Union Pacific Railroad. (All aboard the money train!) But wait- before the crowds could flock to a mountain peak, the railroad exec needed a way better way to get lots of skiers quickly and safely to the top. At the time, the best idea involved cumbersome tow ropes that slowly dragged people along. (Talk about an uphill battle!) While Union Pacific scouted the West for the perfect ski resort location, employees at the Omaha headquarters tried to solve the getting-up-the-slopes riddle. That's when it hit a young Union Pacific engineer named Jim Curran like a snowball to the head. During a trip to the tropics, Curran had seen conveyors using hooks hanging from cables to load bananas onto boats. He proposed replacing those hooks with chairs. Everyone at the company thought HE was bananas, except a boss who knew better. It doesn't snow much during Nebraska's summers, so engineers had to test the chair pickup by using a guinea pig on roller skates to find the right speed. Meaning it was a person acting as a guinea pig. You know. Wearing the roller skates. You can't really put them on a guinea pig. Anyway! They found the perfect pickup, and the design worked pretty well. The team rushed to construct two chair lifts in Sun Valley, Idaho to make it operational by the winter. (Boss' orders!) The Sun Valley Resort opened just before Christmas in 1936, where skiers had the fortune of using the first-ever chair lifts (followed immediately, of course, by the first-ever skier slipping off the chair and doing a banana split).

Illuminating Moments in American History
From the accidental invention of the microwave to the love story of rubber gloves, these 68 animated video shorts (shadow puppet style!) chronicle the history of unexpected American innovation.

Produced, written, and directed by Nathan Marsh. Art and Animation by Joel West and Isaac Windham. Sound by Scott Sprague. Narration by Carol Munse.