Raymond made warehouses denser by removing the forklift counterweight

Postwar pallet warehouses still spent much of their square footage on aisles wide enough for counterbalanced forklifts. A grocery consultant told George Raymond Sr. that those aisles were costing U.S. companies millions of dollars, but narrow aisles needed a truck that could safely work inside them.

Raymond and engineer Christian Gibson solved the problem by changing the stability geometry. Their 1951 patented narrow-aisle truck could work in aisles less than seven feet wide and put pallets away two tiers high because it straddled the pallet with base legs instead of carrying a large counterweight behind the operator.

That made dense rack layouts practical. DC Velocity wrote in 2016 that high-density warehouses with narrow aisles and tall racks are now taken for granted, and that the original design evolved into Raymond's Reach-Fork truck line.

Straddle the load instead of counterweighting it

The design attacked the aisle, the hidden cost driver, rather than merely making a stronger forklift.

Base legs moved the support polygon around the load, so stability came from geometry.

A reach mechanism let the truck approach straight, extend into the rack and retreat without a wide turn.

Once the equipment existed, warehouse layouts could be designed vertically and tightly.

When the bottleneck is floor space, redesign the handling equipment around the building constraint, not the other way around.

Raymond kept extending the concept into reach and turret trucks. By 2016, DC Velocity reported that the Reach-Fork series had about 200 configurations, and Raymond offered turret trucks able to put pallets up to 60 feet high while working in aisles as narrow as five feet.