The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 1949-1960s
The steel pallet rack turned a warehouse floor into a vertical grid
Frazier's selective rack let a warehouse store upward and pull any one pallet out without moving the pile it sat in.
Frazier Industrial Company
the move
Before forklifts and steel racking, a warehouse stored goods on its floor and stacked them on top of each other. That used only the ground area, and it made the pile last-in-first-out: to reach a pallet near the bottom, everything above it had to be moved first. Heavy storage meant slow, risky work.
Forklift technology in the 1920s and 1930s made it possible to lift and place a pallet as a unit, and the selective pallet rack turned that into a system. Don Frazier founded Frazier Industrial Company in the summer of 1949 and in the same year began producing his first selective pallet racks, built from pipe and fittings. Each rack held a row of pallets, each in its own supported slot, open from the front.
Selective racking became his cornerstone product and then the standard of the industry. Its design evolved into the H-series and eventually the Sentinel selective rack, and a 1950 drive-in rack variant pushed density further by letting a forklift drive inside to reach deep-held pallets.
The lasting idea is that a rack is a way to rent the air above a warehouse floor. Because every slot gets one pallet and the forklift can reach each from the front, the stock is both denser and randomly accessible; the warehouse stops being a pile and starts being a grid.
why it works
- Floor stacks used only the footprint and made buried loads hard to reach
- Forklifts let a pallet be lifted as a unit, so it could be set in a slot
- Selective racks put each pallet in its own front-accessible position
- Racking climbed upward, giving density without losing random access
what transfers
When inventory is buried in stacks, the cheapest way to make every unit reachable is to give each its own vertical slot rather than to keep stacking the pile.
what came after
Selective pallet racking became the bedrock of modern warehousing and arguably the most widely used storage system. The drive-in and push-back variants added density at the cost of selectivity, and automated storage and retrieval later extended the same grid idea to robotics. The rack is now a standard part of every distribution centre, with its vertical grid still the simplest way to make unit loads dense and reachable.
references
- History of Pallet Racking Innovation
- The Evolution of Pallet Racking: From Traditional to Modern Systems
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.