Industrial Vehicle Technology International magazine was launched in 1993 – and was an instant hit right across the industry. Before it came into existence, there was no regular magazine anywhere in the world aimed at industrial vehicle engineers and designers.
The first edition focused primarily on the lift-truck and material handling industries, but there was also significant interest from readers in news of off highway industrial vehicles. Accordingly, when the time came to publish a second edition the following year, the decision was made to create not one title, but two: the Lift-truck and Materials Handling edition ’94 and the Off-Highway edition ’94. Both annuals are still published today, the former now taking the title Advanced Lift-truck Technology International.
By 1998 interest had grown to such an extent that the decision was made to launch a quarterly edition – iVT. A decade later, iVT China followed. And so the stable was complete.
Looking back at the first issue is a fascinating exercise. It is a window on a bygone, almost completely pre-digital, era. Just as the magazine pages themselves were put together without much help from desktop publishing software, so the vehicle concepts within are drawn and built by hand. It’s particularly striking to see how a concept model for one lift-truck was made with cardboard, balsa wood, glue, tape and marker pens.
Other entries are more familiar. The prediction in a feature on AGVs that autonomous vehicles could be finding their way into all industries ‘by the year 2000’ is amusing to read now, 25 years later, but will our continued optimism about such systems seem equally unfounded in another 25 years? Only time will tell.
In this, our 25th year, we promise to bring you more snapshots from the past and glimpses into the future – but more than that, some of the best standalone content this magazine has ever seen. The party is only just getting started…
