05.04.2021

2001 A Vertikal Odyssey

Vertikal.net was officially launched at Bauma, the first week of April 2001. The first ever ‘news’ report to go live on Vertikal.net was however posted on March 30th, 2001 - it also contained the very first photograph – picture number 1 – of Ring Lift managing director Leopold Mayerhof.
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The original Vertikal.net logo

That first story was written in German and carried the headline: Der deutsche Markt ist gesättigt - or in English: ‘The German Market is saturated’. The news report went on to say: “The German market is saturated with electric scissor lifts up to 12 metres," says Leopold Mayrhofer, in an interview with Kran & Bühne editors Tim Whiteman and Rüdiger Kopf.”
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The first picture on Vertikal – Leopold Mayrhofer

It was probably more of a test article prior to the official launch of Vertikal.Net at bauma the following week and used an interview from the magazine Kran & Bühne. The saturation claim turned out to have been a very temporary issue, with tens of thousands of additional scissors having being successfully absorbed into the market since, and which is still far from saturated.

The first real ‘news’ bulletin/report was posted on Vertikal.net on the third of April, with the headline A new force in Heavy Lifting. The report went on to say: “Mammoet and Hovago Cranes have created a joint venture to purchase a Manitowoc 999 with a 149 luffing jib. The new company is called Holift and will take delivery of the keys to the new crane on Friday April 6th at the bauma exhibition in Munich.”
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bauma 2001 on Vertikal.net - photos were fewer and smaller back then due to the slow upload/download speeds of the time

As with any report posted during the past 20 years those first stories are still available to read, and you can simply click on the red headlines above to go directly to them. If you would like to see what was happening in the crane and access markets in 2001 - or any other year - click on the News tab at the top and choose the year you are interested in from the 'year buttons' at the bottom. Click here for a shortcut directly to the 2001 news.

To add some perspective to where the web was in 2001 - Twitter would not surface for another five years, Wikipedia had only just been set up that January, while Google was barely two and half years old and Amazon had not long moved from being a pure online book retailer, with the addition of music CDs and videos. 2001 was also the year that the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, while two passenger jets crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, followed by the US invasion of Afghanistan. So it was certainly, a very mixed year.

But finally, and most importantly the Vertikal Team would like to send a big Thank You to all of you for your support and help over the last 20 years.
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