案例库 · 工程与运营 · 技术决策 · 1958–1962
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
Demag stacked Bertelsmann's books 20 metres high and sent a machine up to fetch them.
To store 7 million books without a huge floor, Demag built a stacker crane in a tall rack that climbs and fetches.
Bertelsmann · Demag
那一手
Before automation, a warehouse was mostly floor space: goods racked on the ground and fetched by workers who walked, climbed and carried. When Bertelsmann's book club outgrew its storage in the early 1960s, the answer was not a bigger building but a taller one.
Demag, a predecessor of Dematic, built a high-bay storage and retrieval system at a Bertelsmann book-club warehouse in Gütersloh, Germany. It stored about 7 million books on pallets at heights of up to 20 metres, stacking stock in the air rather than across the floor.
The first storage and retrieval machine went into operation in 1962. It was controlled from a cabin on the mast, and it already offered a degree of automation, including punch-card control, so the machine could go to a shelf and bring the right pallet down.
The design turned the warehouse into a tall, dense warehouse served by a single travelling machine. It is recognised as the first automated storage and retrieval system in commercial use, and the pattern it set still underlies modern high-bay warehouses.
为什么管用
- Storing vertically packs many more items into the same ground area, cutting land and building cost.
- A machine travels a fixed aisle and lifts a chosen pallet, removing the walking and climbing that made picking slow.
- One crane serves many shelf positions, so the capital cost is spread across a large inventory.
可以搬走什么
When space is the constraint, convert the cost of square footage into the cost of a machine that can reach upward.
后来呢
The 1962 installation became the ancestor of modern automated storage and retrieval systems. Dematic and others refined the stacker crane, and today automated high-bay warehouses store goods up to roughly 45 metres high. The idea of trading floor space for a machine that reaches upward became a core tool of warehouse design, from book clubs to e-commerce fulfilment centres.
资料来源
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